Change Ringingfollows Block’s Pure Gaze and Mobius Fuse in a trilogy of sorts,and like those belovedpieces, Change is a perfectly paced,not-a-second-too-short, 30-minute suite for chamber group and environment, everin a limbo state between where found sound ends, instrumentation begins, andwhere digital processing tangles the timeline.
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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Invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1763, the glass harmonicais quite different than today’s mouth harmonica. Sound is createdby the movement of wetfingers along the rims of more than two dozen glass discs, arrangedhorizontally and moved using a foot-pedal. Apparently, playing the glass harmonica became a hip activity no doubtbecause of the enigmatic sounds its produces, compared at thetime to heavenly voices, perhaps also the cause of “serious nervousbreakdownsamong its mostly female players.” 
Chuck Palahniuk's meditation on silence and noise gave me an idea last night while listening to this disc—all those harsh noise providers out there must be afraid. They sit in front of their equipment and they come up with ways to drown the world around them out of existence, at least for a little while.
In my opinion most remixers are lazy, worthless slugs that bring nothing of interest to music. Funckarma don’t appear to fall into this low life form category.
Recompas main man Travis Thatcher gave me a copy of his first album forFlorida’s Nophi label months ago, but I’m ashamed to admit that thedisc sat at the bottom of a bag and then the bottom of a stack on mydesk until just now. I’m glad that I finally dug it up as it’s quicklyfound a place in my year-end “best of” list.
The Hangable Auto Bulb EPs have been a bit of a holy grail for Aphex Twin fans and now I understand why. It covers in eight tracks most of the ground that he covers in the ten years or so since the EPs’ original release.
Lair of the Minotaur’s new single is a bit of a let down. Cannibal Massacreis visually pleasing, a tongue in cheek cannibal monster drawing on thefront and the CD itself is one of those nifty 3” CDs. However the musicgets too tedious over the length of the single and it’s only tenminutes long!
The latest from Architect recaptures a lot of what I used to enjoyabout industrial club music without playing in the regrettable sandboxof melodrama and bad rhyming couplets that forced me to leave most ofthat music behind a decade ago. This is boot-stomping beat musicthat I don't feel ashamed to blast even if I'm not heading to a club.
Until now I’d have called Tape’s musicseasonally or temperamentally effective, but Rideau arrives as a near-reinvention of the trio’s sound, theirmost fully-realized and best record yet. Tapehas clearly taken a chance with this one and I’m glad. 
On his latest album, Randy Garcia sings “Music is the only reason on this Earth for some of us to stay,” and it’s a mantra that’s as catchy as it is bittersweet. Nerd Parade is a celebration of life and music, and it’s just another in a long line of quality home-brewed records from Garcia’s criminally overlooked Nophi Recordings.
