Newcastle-upon-Tyne’s Dressed in Wires (aka Simon Earp) continues his one-man mission to inject digital hardcore with his own special brand of I-don’t-really-get-it humour. This cassette’s title track may begin as a one trick assault on the John Williams theme, but thankfully soon reveals much more going on.
Two new shows just for you. We have squeezed out two extended release episodes for this weekend to get you through this week. They contain mostly new songs but there's also new issues from the vaults. The first show features music from Rider/Horse, Mint Field, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Anastasia Coope, ISAN, Stone Music, La Securite, Bark Psychosis, Jon Rose, Master Wilburn Burchette, Umberto, Wand, Tim Koh, Sun An, and Memory Drawings. The second episode has music by Laibach, Melt-Banana, Chuck Johnson, X, K. Yoshimatsu, Dorothy Carter, Pavel Milyakov, Violence Gratuite, Mark Templeton, Dummy, Endon, body / negative, Midwife, Alberto Boccardi, Divine. Cow in Maui from Veronika in Vienna. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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This overlooked album by Serge Gainsbourg collaborator Jean-Claude Vannier is as close as composing gets to stream of consciousness. Seemingly dipolar pieces of music have been sandwiched together with deft skill and grace to make an album so rich in sound that ears everywhere will feel like they’ve just had their last meal care of a Michelin star restaurant. It’s rare that the kitchen sink approach to writing music works but Vannier pulls it off in style.
In the face of diminishing returns from his midtempo/ downtempo releases for Warp, Ninja Tune, and Planet Mu, Luke Vibert's latest for Rephlex showcases his boldest material this century, suggesting that there may yet be some more good ideas up this maturing musician's rumpled sleeve.
These two albums by Isabelle Antena show how easy it is for an artist to lose everything that makes them interesting. On a Warm Summer Night (Tous mes Caprices) is an artifact from a time best forgotten while L’Alphabet du Plaisir, the 'best of' compilation, also contains a lot of stinkers but also enough good pieces that show that Antena wasn’t always crap.
Robert Pollard’s second solo album of 2006 is a mixed bag of pop gems and forgettable tunes that betray an inconsistency of effort. While it’s the sort of thing I expect from one of his numerous side projects, that one of his so-called major releases is so scattershot can only be considered a disappointment.
Gearheads can be counted on to make a fantastic sounding record, however, unfortunately it is commonly difficult for gearheads to compose compelling enough songs to turn a good album into something fantastic enough to match the production.
Armed with dissonant guitars and disheveled rhythms, Glasgow’s Park Attack stagger from the murk to spread discord at every opportunity on this incendiary album.
The cover art of Mathew Sweet's second Boduf Songs release for Kranky hints that this could be a sequel. The design is of a similar style, but the flowers and people of the old Victorian prints are replaced with more foreboding images. Follow a trail of bread crumbs down a shadowy path into the woods depicted on the cover, and there's that scary thrill of being enveloped by trees, not knowing what will be encountered. The air is so fresh, the ground so soft, but once inside, there are serpents, flies, and poison.
