Norwegians crossing surf guitar with Bulgarian folk traditions to poke fun at failed Marxist ideology could make for compelling cross-cultural musical commentary but instead comes across like one long-winded joke that simply isn't funny. While there are a few good songs, the majority of them are blandly similar and unexceptional.
We made it to 700 episodes. While it's not a special episode per se—commemorating this milestone—you can pretty much assume that every episode is special. This one features Mark Spybey & Graham Lewis, Brian Gibson, Sote, Scanner and Neil Leonard, Susumu Yokota, Eleven Pond, Frédéric D. Oberland / Grégory Dargent / Tony Elieh / Wassim Halal, Yellow Swans, Dental waste in Saigon photo by Krisztian. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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The third album from The Drones continues from where their last album left off. There’s no shock change of style, Gala Mill is made up of the same dirty, gritty rock that seems to be the standard for bands coming from Melbourne. The album is another sturdy release from the four-piece; they falter occasionally but keep it together in fine style for the most part.
Recorded over three performances, this double album “best of” twentieth century music paired with orchestral versions of some of the better parts of the Warp catalogue is a treat. The interpretations of Aphex Twin and Squarepusher aren’t as exciting as expected but the interpretations of Cage, Reich, Ligeti, Stockhausen and Varese are better than I imagined.
From Wesley Willis and Daniel Johnston to Jacques Brodier, Martha Grunenwaldt, Oscar Haus, and Dr. Konstantin Raudive, this compilation offers a variety of music by disparate artists on the fringes of society, whose only link is their idiosyncratic artistic vision. Lacking both a formal music education and pretentiousness, these artists' creations contain enough inventiveness and passion to make accepted conventions of musicality irrelevant.
On her new album, Carla Bozulich uses her voice, strings, guitars, and well-contained distorted elements to create a rich recording full of dark lyrical imagery that haunts well after its flashes of tenderness have faded.
Despite being one of the most compelling entities to emerge from England’s fertile ‘80s post-industrial scene, Zoviet France remain a largely unheard and somewhat mythical band. Obviously, the main reason for their relative marginalization is that their albums (aside from a few late period ambient works) have historically been quite hard to track down. I suspect that was true even during their prime, as I am certain that I would have bought an album packaged in a canvas sack or between roofing shingles if it had appeared in one of the record stores I frequented as a teen (regardless of who it was by). Thankfully, the magic of the Internet has rescued this lost classic from the cruel fate of vanishing without ever being properly appreciated.
For Nigel Ayers the systematic derangement of the senses has never been enough. From the beginning of his career he has sought nothing less than the total disarrangement of reality. Using slowed down voices, sludgy bass, noisy analog synthesizers, guitar and weird effects, these unorthodox statements from his first band sound as if they were made in an atmosphere of cerebral discord. Conventions of musicality are thwarted in favor of shoestring arrangements gelled together by intuition rather than adherence to preconceived formulas. Traversing terrains that range from the psychotropic to psychotic, the collected works of The Pump make for an artifact that is not easily pigeon holed, not now, and probably not in the late 1970s when the group first formed with his brother Daniel Ayers and the late Caroline K.
High Place’s second proper full-length album is a gutsy and daring surprise, as Mary Pearson and Rob Barber have cast aside much of the childlike innocence and fragility that characterized their earlier releases in favor of a darker, more muscular new direction. While I still prefer the quirky, blurred pop from their past, the shift towards a sharper-focused, more visceral sound works far better than I expected.
Although many of these songs were made available previously on an identically named and highly limited edition album from 2004, this is not technically a reissue as the material has been reworked and the album has been quite expanded compared to the original. The quiet white light at the core of the music has been refracted and split into a rainbow of strings and woodwind, all arranged by Maxim Moston (best known for his work with Antony and the Johnsons and Rufus Wainwright). The sweetness of the songs become even more pronounced with its small orchestral backing, although Moston does not over-clutter Dee’s songs and allows her singing and piano to take center stage.
