Masaki Batoh, guitarist and leader of the Japanese psych-rock collective Ghost, is a man of many pursuits: music, acupuncture, science and spirituality. His first solo recording since the mid '90s is a result of years of research into bioelectric functions of the human brain, and the national tragedy that struck his home country while working on the album in Tokyo, Japan.
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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With two brilliant albums recently released (
It has been looking less and less likely that Dirty Three would record any new material. Warren Ellis and Jim White left Mick Turner to his own devices in Australia in order to follow their own paths (Ellis’ ending in Paris and White’s journey is on-going through numerous collaborations with other artists). Even though they were touring over the last few years, no new music made its way into their sets. However, the fates have smiled upon us mere mortals as the group finally entered the studio and have returned with another monster of an album.
Talvihorros is Ben Chatwin, a London-based guitarist that has been quietly releasing some fairly good albums in the abstract soundscape/drone vein over the last few years.  Then he released a truly great one (this one) and it went woefully under-appreciated and overlooked.  If the world were a fair place, Descent Into Delta would have been all over "Best of 2011" lists.
In theory, I should love this project, as it contains members of most of my favorite Bay Area bands (Myrmyr, Barn Owl, Tarentel, etc.).  The reality, however, is a bit complicated: distinctiveness, personality, and ego were all surrendered for the greater glory of these very pure and minimal drones.  This album has some impressive moments, but the participants and their individual talents are almost entirely irrelevant.
The Book of Sounds was composed between 1979-82, when Hans Otte was reflecting on his previous artistic output, by distilling hundreds of pages of improvisations he had written down, and looking ahead to a future dealing with his cancer diagnosis. The work was originally released in 1984 and consists of 12 solo piano pieces which blend older and newer traditions: the intimacy and poetic style of Chopin and the pantheistic eulogies of Debussy as against the Eastern rhythms and pointillist pulses familiar to Reich and Glass. Yet these influences are subsumed beneath an artistic vision: music stripped to the bone and laid open to deep listening and personal reflection. There is neither great variation nor exact repetition in these 12 tracks. Instead there is a deep exploration of sound, the sound of an acoustic piano, with great emphasis on harmony.
This first studio album from the formidable duo of Peter Brötzmann and Heather Leigh took me an unexpectedly long time to warm to, as it was not at all what I was expecting (skwonking and rapturous free-form flame-throwing). Instead, Sparrow Nights is something considerably more stark, novel, and challenging, unfolding as a uniquely surreal fantasia of alternately gnarled and lyrical saxophone passages over a disorientingly woozy and shifting bed of blurred pedal steel. That said, there are a few comparatively volcanic eruptions of catharsis to found as well, yet the true genius of this album lies primarily in its sprawling and immersive strangeness. As a cumulative and complete work, Sparrow Nights achieves the transcendent indulgence of prime My Cat is an Alien, leaving me feeling weirdly drugged, disoriented, and transformed by the time the last notes fade. That is not a particularly lucrative or instantly gratifying niche, obviously, but Sparrow Nights is more of a legitimate event than it is a mere album.
Ten years ago, Analog Africa released the landmark African Scream Contest, an album that instantly established the fledgling label as one of the most intriguing and distinctive imprints in the global crate-digging milieu. It was not exactly a perfect album, but it was certainly a perfect and resounding statement of intent, plunging deep into an eclectic vein of forgotten African funk outside the celebrated regions documented by Soundway, Strut, and Ethiopiques. To celebrate that auspicious anniversary, Samy Ben Redjeb has released one hell of a sequel. Sadly, it will not make quite the same impact as its predecessor, as a new label can only burst onto the scene once, but African Scream Contest 2 is actually the superior album in many ways. Admittedly, some people will be disappointed that a bit of the weirdness and rough edges have been sanded away, which is a category that I would normally expect myself to fall into. Redjeb has gotten significantly better at his job over the last decade though and that definitely shows here, as this latest installment is pared down to a wall-to-wall feast of tight grooves and great hooks that never overstays its welcome.
Phill Niblock is an artist that, despite his penchant of expansive, subtle and nuanced recordings, always seems to make every release an epic one. His fifth album for the label (hence the title) is yet again another double disc one that holds only five compositions. Although it takes a conceptually similar approach to those albums, namely Niblock's use of layered instrument drones with microtonal adjustments to pitch, it still has a different feel when placed alongside his other releases.
