For Black Dice's third full-length LP for DFA, they've almost completely abandoned the tropical sunshine of Creature Comfortsand embraced their family's beat tendencies. It's still Black Dice,however, and the whimsical surrealistic approach to songwriting isstill present, however it's more refined than ever.
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This bloodless zombie movie from France winds up saying more
about the human condition than anyone might have expected of a film
full of the walking dead. By throwing out genre conventions and
focusing on the human story, this quiet character film turns out to be
creepier and more anxiety-inducing than almost any film with a proper
gut-chewing scene.
The box cover depicts what could be a strange retro-digital flower with
Buddhist temples pictured in the background. The writing is entirely in
Chinese, with something which loosely translates as "electronic prayer
machine" on the spine and on the back a list of good things about
buddhism (being nice to others, not killing, etc,...) and the all
important "Made in Hong Kong."
Sohgo Ishii’s movie of Einstürzende Neubauten’s first visit to Japan is a mesmerising
piece of work. Ishii mainly filmed Neubauten both at a traditional concert and at a private
performance in a disused factory. The industrial setting suits the band perfectly and vice versa. This
movie documents the old lineup in its prime.
Twenty-one of the bigger names in independent music can be and probably have been wrong, but they're spot on with The Now Sound Redesigned,a remix project that can rightly be called an event. The relevant backstory: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the four Dedrick siblingscreated some beautifully constructed and legitimately awe-inspiringsunshine pop over a five year period. Never garnering commercialsuccess, the Dedricks called it quits in 1972, leaving their creationsto languish in obscurity forever, but for the LPs purchased second-handby vinyl junkies and fanatical crate diggers.
For any musician that has had a career as long and as important as Michael Gira, keeping up the momentum must be an almost overwhelming task. As if the early Angels of Light material wasn’t enough of a departure from Swans, successive albums and tours have seen Gira stripping his sound and his songs down to a rootsy, folk-fueled core that is both more immediate and more direct than most of his back catalogue. While the last Angels of Light full length left me feeling that I’d peeked a bit too closely in on the man behind the curtain, Gira’s portion of the latest split release with Akron/Family accomplishes more of that uneasy closeness and it’s his portion of the disc that I’m most apt to skip.
Inna City Pressure was a true revelation on its initial releasein 1998. Long before the term "mashup" entered the lexicon andunforeseen marriages between, say, Jay-Z and the Beatles were commoncurrency, Dr. Israel welded together reggae, dub, metal, punk, jungleand drum 'n' bass with ease and verve, simultaneously revealing theunderpinnings the genres had in common while seamlessly creating afresh and vital sound all his own. Seven years on sees Dr. Israel witha new label, hordes of imitators, thousands of these new "mashups," anda large potential audience that may not be in the know. So the braintrust at ROIR has deemed it time for an Inna City Pressure reissue.
