This is the fourth beguiling release culled from Honest Jon's plunge deep into the EMI Hayes archive of forgotten 78s. Like Sprigs of Time, Living Is Hard, and Give Me Love before it, this is a singular and expertly curated exploration of some seriously obscure music. Unlike those albums, however, Open Strings also features the curious (and possibly misguided) addition of a companion album of modern artists that mine similar territory.
Two new shows just for you. We have squeezed out two extended release episodes for this weekend to get you through this week. They contain mostly new songs but there's also new issues from the vaults. The first show features music from Rider/Horse, Mint Field, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Anastasia Coope, ISAN, Stone Music, La Securite, Bark Psychosis, Jon Rose, Master Wilburn Burchette, Umberto, Wand, Tim Koh, Sun An, and Memory Drawings. The second episode has music by Laibach, Melt-Banana, Chuck Johnson, X, K. Yoshimatsu, Dorothy Carter, Pavel Milyakov, Violence Gratuite, Mark Templeton, Dummy, Endon, body / negative, Midwife, Alberto Boccardi, Divine. Cow in Maui from Veronika in Vienna. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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8-Bit artists and circuit benders active in today’s vibrant scene have met their match—and their aesthetic ancestors—in the League of Automatic Music Composers. Regarded as being the worlds first computer band, their unique foray into electronic sound worlds began in tandem with the budding world of microcomputers, which in the mid-1970s were just then newly available on the commercial market.
In 1969, Mississippi Fred McDowell plugged in an electric guitar, and like Bob Dylan just a few years earlier, alienated many purists who could not fathom such radical change. So as not to encourage any ambiguity or doubt, McDowell's first electric record was titled I Do Not Play No Rock 'n' Roll. Whether or not Jack Rose is trying to cure ambiguities of his own with this record is unclear, but it is obvious that he's ready to move into new territory.
Fabrique documents many of the performers included in Lawrence English's long-running experimental music series. The focus is largely on laptop-based ambient glitchery, but several artists contribute strong-based tracks that depart from this aesthetic (usually by incorporating human or organic elements). Notably, the lesser-known artists (such as Tujiko Noriko) often steal the show from more established folks like Scanner or KK Null.
Soundtrack music has always held its own odd space in the music world. Living in constant relation to the images it is meant to accompany, soundtrack music can (and has) made movies as well as destroyed them, as any Ennio Morricone fan can attest to. Yet the best soundtrack music has always been able to positively shape a film while still standing on its own as strictly a musical work removed from its image-based companion. It is, it seems, this trait alone that separates the comparatively schlocky Hollywood mood-manipulations of a John Williams score from the intrinsic depth and subtlety of form found in an Anton Karas, Carl Stalling, Nino Rota, or Bernard Hermann piece. JG Thirlwell (most know him as the man behind Foetus, Wiseblood, Steroid Maximus, etc.) proves himself more than an adept contributor to the genre.
Montreal's trio of talented multi-instrumentalists hit pay dirt on this album. Revolving around a core of keyboards, drums and French horn, the group has carved out a pleasant niche for themselves inside the well traveled corridors of cinematic psychedelia, employing numerous other devices and useful effects along the way.
For An Outbreak of Twangin', the follow-up to 2008's Phantom Guitars, The Bevis Frond's Nick Saloman has again assembled a couple dozen incredibly obscure and kitschy surf guitar gems. I am pleased to report that the influence of legendary paranoid reverb-monger/occultist/murderer Joe Meek looms large here.
This split album between Ohio’s Emeralds and Japan’s Pain Jerk was initially made to accompany their co-headline tour of the UK but thankfully it has made its way into the wider world. Both groups have done the decent thing in including top quality tracks when any old tosh would do. On paper, the idea of pairing these artists seems bizarre and with over half an hour of bliss from Emeralds and a truck load of sonic hell from Pain Jerk, the word “split” has never felt so apt.
After three years since their demise, the final album by Khanate has finally seen the dark of night. After a lot of speculation as to whether it would actually emerge or not, my expectations were high and unfortunately they were not quite met. The improvised music was recorded during the sessions for Capture & Release with the vocals added much later. This approach has lead to a hit or miss album that is awesome when on form but a touch disappointing when not.
"Free-folk" is a term that gets thrown around a lot, and to some extent it has come to represent a certain strain of quirky indie cuteness far removed from its more primitive punk precursors. Both elder statesmen of the style, Dredd Foole and Ed Yazijian have been playing together for years to little public acknowledgement. But in an increasingly open musical climate they have at last reconvened for an album of loose extrapolations within the form, proving their collective voice to be as stylistically prophetic and effective as one could hope from these two luminaries.
