With this long player, Nigel Ayers has produced the musical equivalent of a sexual fever. Unbidden, while listening I became aroused by its somnambulatory exhortations and caressed by rhythmic undulations that continuosly excite.
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Masami Akita sounds his most creative, dynamic, and colorful when he works with other accomplished musicians. Merzbow's collaboration with French pioneer Richard Pinhas features some of his best music and gleefully amplifies the psychedelic tendencies of both composers.
All the best love songs are about heartache and Windy & Carl have seized on that. The latest addition to their canon was recorded at the same time as Windy Weber’s solo album I Hate People (released earlier this year) and unlike the sentiments of Weber’s solo album, this is an album about love. Although this is the idea of love that Lord Tennyson famously wrote: “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
Micah's third studio record seems a big departure from the old-time rag country blues styling of his jaunty debut. This time he has produced a series of dark ballads around the themes of faith, misfortune, trickery and wisdom.
The second release by Peter Christopherson under the Threshold HouseBoys Choir name is a collection of rough soundtrack works. These have been made in anticipation of a new film project he is working on about tattooing. Although the mixing and the mastering of these discs are less than stellar (they sound very much like the works in progress that they are touted as), the music is loaded with that magic that Christopherson always brings to whatever project he is involved in. The direction he is taking his solo music had been hinted on with the posthumous Coil releases and with the first Threshold HouseBoys Choir album yet here it is beginning to form fully.
Brian Foote, Honey Owens, and Paul Dickow's persistent evolution is unstoppable. Infinity Padlock documents another stage in Nudge's unending transformation; this time around the group flirts with rock 'n' roll balladry and noise jams quite unlike anything else in their discography.
All the luxuriant and sensuous curves that went missing on 2005's Geisterfaust have returned for Bohren's newest record. More than that, the band have sharpened their approach to "doom jazz" and solidified the power of their slow, crushing attack in the process.
It’s an odd combination, Soccer Committee’s delicate folk recordings handled by electronic composer Machinefabriek’s digital treatments would usually make for a questionable work, but instead the electronic elements are subtle, and rather than detracting from the fragile vocals and guitar instead give it a different, unnatural edge.
On his debut, this one-man electronic project from Norway seems to be wearing his influences on his sleeve and I would say he's coming from a similar background as me. Throughout this release there are a lot of elements pretty consistent with mid to late 1980s industrial, along with some more techno and electronic inspired rhythms. Rather than feeling overly nostalgic or dated though, these tracks filter the classic elements through a more modernized lens.
His third full length release this year, this disc compliments the odd electronic elements of Koryak Mistress Stakes Golden Sky and the Tibetan chanting of Samadhi by focing more on the stringed instruments and less on the effects or electronic stuff, though it is still there. It is a bit of a scatter-shot approach, but here it works, mixing a variety of elements, electronic and acoustic, into an absurdly brilliant mix of styles.
