Forced dramatic line after faux energetic riff mar Ladyhawk's debut from beginning to end. Their proclaimed influences all catch up with them as the disc moves along, promising plenty but eventually crashing in a blur of warn out conventions and over-cooked clichés.
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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This CD-R by Papercut has moments of brilliance amid stretches of standard, by the book noise. By no means is it a masterpiece of noise but it's not a lazy effort by anyone's standards. There are enough shades of detail to make this a rewarding listen even if it won’t light the world on fire.
This remix collection assembles an improbable group of producers and musicians to deconstruct and rearrange songs from the Knut back catalog. Justin Broadrick, Dälek, Mick Harris, and Oren Ambarchi are among those who are along for the ride.
Getting the reissue treatment is this solo album by Tom Carter of Charalambides. Dedicated to the friends and times he left behind in Austin, these are the last recordings he made before his move to the West Coast. By improvising with a different type of guitar on each of the three tracks, Carter explores the limits of each instrument while evoking the heat, pace, and vastness of Texas itself.
Apparently recorded on a Canal Street rooftop in New York, this double disc set documents the No-Neck Blues Band's first ever Orthodox Easter concert in 1996, an event they've repeated every year since. The group's tribal rhythms and crackling electronics have little to do with the Savior, though, and more to do with the strange world they create on their own.
Kid 606 has once again maintained his distance from glitchy cut-up breakcore that so many still assume he still records and has come out with fantastic results. Unlike last year's subdued, melody-heavy Resilience, Pretty Girls is a brilliant 4/4 techno homage, both worthy of the tireless movement from a sweaty night club and a perfectly blastable summertime album.
Despite playing and recording with various groups for nearly ten years this is the first solo release by Norway’s Thomas Strønen. It is a fine way to start a long overdue solo career. Pohlitz is a delightful album focussed mainly on Strønen’s speciality of hitting unusual objects with drumsticks.
For Todd Drootin the commonly held belief that most band's earlier records are better than their later ones must hold true. Dinosaur Dinosaur is a fun record, one that I still listen to; Throw Down Your Laptops surpasses it on every level, however. It's not just a better record and a better place to start with Books on Tape, it actually manages to make sense of the term "beatpunk."
With Six Organs of Admittance, Ben Chasny has orchestrated both guitar-themed and noise-based releases, and on the latest masterpiece he has split the album in half with six bright, guitar heavy songs on one side and a single, deep, dark, and sprawling drone-based song on the other.
Niblock makes drones that, even at low volumes, fill the entire room. At more appropriate volumes the drones replace the room with a thick goo of sound. This three disc album is intimidating to say the least. It is a fulfilling and gratifying endurance test to listen to it all the way through.
