The ringing of the bells and the long carrier tone that eventually emerges beneath it signals the beginning of a descent into the underworld. Two tracks on each side carry me down an icy river of song. The ingredients are minimal, but a good cook can do a lot with just a few things, and I never felt heavy or gross from a cluttered presentation or an over-saturation of fatty content. This sonic fuel burns clean. And like any good meal the nourishment derived from the listening experience strengthened my nervous system, while none-the-less tuning it to alien frequencies. Here is an example of automatic music, and the methodology produces similar unconscious material as that evoked in automatic writing. It all makes for a fascinating foray into electronica as prepared by such experienced exemplars of the craft as Drew McDowall and Tres Warren.
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Beginning life as a Throbbing Gristle album back in 2007, this cover album of Nico’s Desertshore has had a tumultuous life. Its four parents went through a divorce when Genesis P-Orridge left the group in 2010 before unexpectedly losing Peter Christopherson a month later. Desertshore was Sleazy’s baby but Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti have done their best to foster it and give it the chance it deserved. The end results are unsurprisingly mixed, the range of guest vocalists that have replaced P-Orridge are varied in background and skill which has not served the source material well but taken as a whole with its sister albums, The Final Report and แฝดนรก (Faet Narok), this is as good an ending to Throbbing Gristle/X-TG as possible as well as being a fitting tribute to Sleazy and his work.
Although this record is a compilation of 12" singles and unreleased tracks, that should do little to dissuade anyone from conceiving of it as an album. Released on Kieran Hebden's own Text imprint (which has seen little activity until recently), Pink carries with it the indelible stamp of a Hebden release, with all the affects and nuance that name suggests. That it was culled from entirely different releases but still fits together is a testament to Four Tet's unique musical identity.
By cultivating a garden of ambient vignettes, Andrew Chalk brings his usually sprawling soundscapes into precise focus, never allowing anything to repeat itself too deliberately. Forty-Nine Views is a wistful record of fractured memories; brief glimpses into a surreal world triggered by a collection of electronic melodies and effects, each song distinct in small degrees.
I had a very hard time understanding the disproportionate amount of excitement surrounding last year's Pass Me By and We Stay Together EPs, but I have since come around a bit: there are definitely a couple of areas in which Stott truly excels.  In many respects, Luxury Problems essentially picks up exactly where those releases left off, but there is one massive curve-ball: the addition of vocalist Alison Skidmore.  That particular innovation turns out to be a mixed success, but overall the highlights are both more impressive and more frequent this time around.
It seems like most (if not all) of the better ambient artists have moved onto other things in recent years, but Auburn Lull guitarist Jason Kolb and Danish producer Jonas Monk (Manual) have done their best to pick up the torch left behind by bands like Stars of the Lid.  Then again, perhaps this is just sort of an inadvertent time capsule of an earlier era, as Monk and Kolb's trans-Atlantic collaboration has been painstakingly unfolding since 2005.  In any case, the duo have done a fine job filling that languorous void (even if I was not terribly concerned about that particular void remaining open).
It has been several years since the last Windy & Carl album, but thankfully they are back and just as reliably excellent as ever.  Maybe even more so, as several of these songs easily stand with the duo's finest work.  Some long-term fans may be a little disappointed that they don't indulge their song-like or epic-length tendencies much this time around, but I doubt it: We Will Always Be largely sticks to what they do best  (beautifully glacial and glistening guitar) and does it warmly and purposefully.
