The reigning king of the breakcore scene is either going soft, or all of these splintered beats are starting to sound less abrasive over time because the newest VSnares record actually comes close to resembling a pop album.
Hotter than July. This week's episode has plenty of fresh new music by Marie Davidson, Kim Gordon, Mabe Fratti, Guided By Voices, Holy Tongue meets Shackleton, Softcult, Terence Fixmer, Alan Licht, pigbaby, and Eiko Ishibashi, plus some vault goodies from Bombay S Jayashri and Pete Namlook & Richie Hawtin. Solstice moon in West Midlands, UK photo by James. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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The latest album by Bardo Pond is a corker. Many of the pieces on Ticket Crystals combine floaty and sparse playing with heavy concrete dirges. Mostly this formula pays off in spades and only rarely does the album lapse into mediocrity. Some great songs on this CD make the lesser ones seem worse than they really are, overall even mediocre Bardo Pond is still worth listening to.
This tour-only 3" CD is a postscript to Matmos' recent The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast, a masterpiece of audio portraiture that payed homage to queer heroes. This three-song EP continues the theme, taking as its subject the mathematician, philosopher, cryptographer and homosexual martyr Alan Turing, and featuring the vocals of David Tibet as well as sounds sourced from a functioning Enigma Machine.
Following the 2003 release of Like Hearts Swelling, Sandro Perri began performing under his own name, incorporating more organic sounds as opposed to the processing, and perhaps overprocessing, that Polmo Polpo was regarded for. This five-track EP provides a conceptual bridge between the older sound and new sound as it began as reinterpretations of the songs from Like Hearts Swelling but has evolved a bit further.
Proof that Jesus must have had soul sits in this collection of "gospel funk" songs. The grooves on these songs are as thick and rockin' as anything any secular performer put to wax, but they're all songs of praise, tolerance, hope, brother/sisterhood, redemption, and soul-fueled love. If the churches around here played this stuff at their Sunday service, I'd be there every weekend, ready to communicate with God.
Disliked in their native country of New Zealand, associated with drug-assisted hallucinations and blackouts, and evidently crazy enough to plan their own deaths, the trio of Michael Morely, Robbie Yeats, and Bruce Russell also happen to be more brilliant than most bands they're compared to. This collection is superb: competent enough to entice new listeners and pull in folks that already love their music and want more.
This worthy album by sextet Sparrows Swarm and Sing links traditional song with post-rock and pantheist imagery. SSAS create beautiful music with apocalyptic undercurrents which at times achieves a cinematic splendor.
The Graveyards trio continue their journey past the last markers of free jazz playing with this, at times barren sounding, clear vinyl. Brokenresearch releases are well known for their superbly understated art direction, but this is probably their most striking cover yet. A bright yellow sleeve holds an image of a set of teeth, looking like a cross between Giger’s Alien and an aging Dracula.
This is a poorer than average effort from Christina. The four pieces are all meant to sound similar as they are all in the same key and made of the same chords, but for me, the results show little development beyond self indulgent jamming and sound thrown together and boring. This concept sounds less than exciting on paper and in practice it doesn't work as well as hoped.
