Cobbled to together from out-takes off of the album There Is No Home, this EP splits between fully realized songs and acoustic demos.
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The mysterious Burial had the jump on everyone in dubstep this year, delivering the burgeoning underground scene's most anticipated artist album months in advance of anyone else. However, based on the virulent virility of Skream's unpretentious, nearly eponymous debut, I suspect I, and many others, will be more inclined to listen to this album far more regularly.
The primitive sounding blues being played on White Man at the Door is similar to Tom Waits or Nick Cave’s early excursions with The Bad Seeds. The Lost Domain never match those artists for power and originality but like those artists they do give modern blues playing a swift kick. It is the dark mythological blues that only came into existence when white people came onto the scene (something that is alluded to in the title of the album), something that has been done to death but can still provide the odd surprise. By no means is this a masterpiece but this album at least had some life as the band puts their own spin on the blues.
With the name Hulk and a sleeve color of an angry Bruce Banner I was expecting this album to be muscular and dominating but instead it is subdued and peaceful. The title of the album is apt, as there is a serene, supernatural feeling permeating the recordings. It is sad yet deeply comforting music.
Like all great seven inch releases, this Volcano the Bear disc crams a few of this band’s multiple facets into one value for money package. These three utterly independent cuts highlight a band that never seems to settle into a style, even within the constraints of a single piece of music.
Gregory Isaacs is most known for his vocal works as a reggae singer, with recordings stretching back to the 1960s and worldwide acclaim through releases on Trojan, RAS, Front Line, and other noteworthy labels. However, back in 1978, with a little assistance from reggae royalty King Tubby and Prince Jammy, Isaacs produced this masterpiece, perhaps my own personal Holy Grail of classic dub.
Given that each of the 51 pieces on this compilation are all roughly a minute in duration, there is a lot of hopping around here, with disparate pieces put aside one another to create some varying transitions, sometimes brilliant, sometimes confusing. Unsurprisingly, the individual contributions follow a similar pattern, with some moments that I wish were longer, and others I could do without.
Celebrating the LINE label's status as a separate entity and Chartier's 2010 Smithsonian fellowship (as well as his 40th birthday), Transparency is the document of an hour long performance using the historic Grand Tonometer as it’s primary source. The result is a subtle piece that is captivating, but also demanding
Floating silently through space approximately 1.4 billion km from Earth are the rings of Saturn. Composed primarily of ice particles, they appear as simple concentric circles similar to the grooves in a record. Thanks to the intricate play of moons, magnetic fields, and gravity, their structure is actually far more complex, fraught with braids and knots and unexpected waves of debris. Christoph Heemann's Rings also glide and ripple through the ether, but the space in which they float is both inner and outer, and closer to home than Saturn.
