Declaimed in a number of pompous and unhelpful reviews for mostly unintelligible or contradictory reasons, Marc Nguyen Tan's second full-length as Colder is, in reality, a dark and seductive electronic record with virtues to spare. Whether updating the anthemic possibilities of new wave or cross-breeding fake jazz with dub and cold motorik, Heat exudes a cool, sophisticated, and infinitely accessible atmosphere that is entirely unique to it.
Three new episodes for your listening enjoyment. After two weeks off, we are back with three brand new episodes: three hours / 36 tunes. Episode 697 features music from Beak>, Brothertiger, Kate Carr, Gnod, Taylor Deupree, FIN, Church Andrews & Matt Davies, Ortrotasce, Bill MacKay, Celer, Kaboom Karavan, and Ida. Episode 698 boasts a lineup of tracks from Susanna, Nonpareils, KMRU, A Place To Bury Strangers, final, Coti K., Dalton Alexander, Akio Suzuki, The Shadow Ring, Filther, Aaron Dilloway, and Ghost Dubs. Episode 699 is bursting at the seams with jams from Crash Course In Science, Chrystabell and David Lynch, Machinedrum, Ekin Fil, Finlay Shakespeare, Actress, Mercury Rev, Dave Brown / Jason Kahn, øjeRum, d'Eon, Jeremy Gignoux, and Shellac. Mountain photo taken in Japan by Chris. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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This live LP (and download for those inclined) picks up where previous live albums left off and show another side to Will Oldham’s work. Other live albums showcased his rock and folk inclinations but here his music sounds like it belongs on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry rather than in the clubs he usually frequents. Wonderfully performed and perfectly captured, Funtown Comedown sees Oldham push further into a mainstream country sound like he did on last year’s Beware (though strangely includes no songs from that album here). However, his charm and larger than life character still come through strongly.
Hardcore CV fans and anyone who's a connoisseur of “classic” industrial are always quick to cite this as one of the zeniths of the genre, and it isn’t a claim that should be taken lightly. One of the darkest records ever made, it acts as the Maggot Brain to The Conversation’s Mothership Connection: it’s like when P-Funk were hanging with the Process Church and writing songs about finding decaying corpses of dead friends.
The meeting of one of Sweden’s premiere drone noise collective and the electronic duo featuring the king of Elgaland-Vargaland produced this single track where no input mixing boards dual with amplified rakes and found instruments to produce an expansive drone piece that isn’t afraid to get messy.
Since his recent reemergence, Matthew Bower has been more than happy to continue pushing his venerable project further and further into raw noise territory while bringing in a fair share of black metal influenced chaos to bolster the already maxed out volume levels. Here is roughly 100 minutes of pure feedback worship and dedication to distortion pedals. However, there’s none of the noise rock tendencies of Xaman or IIIrd Gatekeeper, for better or worse.
Unlike previous solo efforts, here Baker is flanked by a concentrated orchestra, propelling his demur drones into consonant and complete compositions. The result is an album of staggering growth as Baker explores the elegant side of drone and the filth of classical percussion and strings that not only established Baker as an innovator but as a inventive curator of drone and its many variants.
The latest release from this up and coming Polish sound artist steps away from his usual preference for walls of digital noise and instead plunders through tapes of traditional folk music for source material, leaving enough evidence of its pedigree there, but taking it to far off realms of sound.
The first part of an expected trilogy devoted to iconic advances in technology, this marked the beginning of new stage in Jóhann Jóhannsson's career. While already established as an acclaimed composer at the time of its release in 2006, IBM 1401 was a bold leap forward in both concept and scale from all that preceded it. Although it was later eclipsed by the stone-cold instant classic that followed (2008's Fordlândia), it nevertheless remains a haunting, visionary, and unexpectedly personal work in its own right.
I long ago abandoned hope of a new Gil Scott-Heron record. Yet here it is: a delicate, intense, skeletal testament to his history, progress and survival. He covers Robert Johnson, Bill Callahan, and Brook Benton but this is a deeply personal album from which we all can draw hope; a beautifully convincing snapshot of an artist very much unbowed.
Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert’s New Order side project began very promisingly with the popular and critically acclaimed single "Tasty Fish" in 1990, but the collapse of Factory left the duo in label limbo. Three years later, this (the duo’s debut album) finally got released to lukewarm reviews and sales. Now that LTM has finally reissued it, I can confidently state that its unenthusiastic reception was entirely warranted. There are a number of remixes optimistically appended to this expanded edition to prop up the weaker songs, but they cannot hide the fact that this is a pretty bland effort (three versions of “Tasty Fish” aside).
