Following the release of their (so far) only album Chaos Is My Name a couple of years ago, this trio consisting of Khanate’s James Plotkin and Tim Wyskida and Thorr’s Hammer’s Runhild Gammelsæter played exactly one gig and seemed to have left it at that. Luckily the show was recorded on a couple of cameras and has made its way onto this DVD. As great as the album was, the video presented here shows that the studio fails to capture the full intensity of the group’s performance.
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There are the usual features that Masami Akita employs in his work: mastering at a face-melting volume, piercing high pitched noises, sand-blasting roars of sound, and, particularly in recent years, the obligatory Save the *insert animal here* artwork. On this last point Akita is normally very heavy handed and just slaps a picture of the animal on the cover or some less than subtle point about vivisection (but then is there anything subtle about a man who has spent his life trying to deafen the world) but on Dolphin Sonar he has made a far more concerted effort at a protest album. All of the sound here can be described as manmade violence or Akita's representation of marine life as envisaged by the dolphin; his anger is directed at where the two ideas meet.
There has been no shortage of metal-tinged instrumental bands these last few years but few can pull it off like Boston's heaviest band. The Touch Records style cover can be quite deceptive: what lurks inside is equal part rock monster and rock ogre; it starts with a bang and finishes with a louder bang.
With Mathew Sweet's third release for Kranky, he secures himself as the arch-mage of death soaked acoustica. Again employing mostly his guitar and breathy vocal, while momentarily reaching for further instrumentation, this album is less hidden-away sounding than previous Boduf Songs recordings. It is, however, still imbued with inimitable sense of intimateness, darkness, and magic.
Eschewing any species of frills or frippery, the simple card and paper-fastener packaging encasing this latest entry from Machinefabriek in Staalplaat's Mort Aux Vaches series resolutely reflects the aesthetic of Dutch musician Rutger Zuydervelt. Although sparse is the operative word here, Zuydervelt's lean compositions and quiet tiny sounds, carefully sculpted around deep spaces, are nevertheless harmonically and richly complex, ranging from fragile gossamer tones to deeply sweeping friezes. Moreover, the music is warmly inviting and enticing, indeed inviting and enticing one to explore a strange and slightly surreal world.
Apparently they do make them like this anymore. A mere 38 years after it was begun; Fotheringay's second album is released. Another chance to hear the voice of Sandy Denny, famously described as like 'a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes.'
It’s refreshing to hear an album of sonic abstraction that falls into neither of the following categories: minimalist drone, harsh noise, or crossover into other electronic realms. Not that there is anything wrong with those at all, I enjoy many works that fall into those aforementioned categories. But works like this collaboration between the Illusion of Safety member and long time sound artist and master for hire Dimuzio are fascinating in that they are focused only on the nuanced textures of sound.
From the band's name, I was expecting something more along the lines of pretentious 1970s prog rock, but this most definitely is not the case. While a rather short album, the three expansive tracks that comprise it encompass a vast variety of sounds and styles that create an ethnographic, soundtrack experience unlike many others.
It angers me that Some Bizzare Stevø has treated one of the best releases of the 1980s with such utter negligence, issuing versions like this with embarassing mistakes on tracklisting, indexing errors, chintzy packaging, and dreadful artwork recreation. I encourage nobody to buy this shitty reissue and I hearby challenge Stevø to recall these copies at once and put out a fucking proper release of this classic once and for all.
Sublime Frequencies presents a CD reissue of a limited edition vinyl by this Tuareg rock group featuring the enigmatic guitar hero Bibi Ahmed. The group brings to its hybrid of roots rock, Afrobeat and plugged-in fuzz rock a political urgency, the music having its origin as a political weapon used to communicate from Libyan refugee camps within the Republic of Niger in the 1980s and '90s.
