The first time needle was laid to wax on a hot side of jazz, there was certain to be faces frozen in the pulsations and perversions emitted from the victrola funnel. How was one to dance to such syncopated cacophony, let alone find relaxation and good dinner conversation? Of course, evolution does the dirty work for progressive thinker, weeding out the fearsome and strengthening the adventurous. As jazz grew and transformed out of Chicago speakeasies and Mississippi Delta juke joints, it found a larger audience ready for the challenge of gyrating brass and nimble fingers. It’s from this grand tradition that guitarist Eyal Maoz and drummer Asaf Sirkis mold Elementary Dialogues—an album rich in tradition and yet no regard for it.
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It may not be an earth-shattering concept to go analog, but this is not your average take on the idea either. Presenting one nearly hour-long track, there is plenty of room here for this Russian artist to sprawl out and develop ideas, but Alexey, the project's sole protagonist, seems to feel little need for sticking to anything, instead bobbing around from idea to idea with fluid and exciting ease. Pulling from as many realms as he can and synthesizing them into one bombastic go of it this is, as the title enthusiastically suggests, timeless stuff that could just as well be some odd Soviet new-wave experimental excursion as it could be the basis of future beat culture worldwide. If only...
When I first encountered some of the experimental music coming from China, I was intimidated by the amount of people involved. Additionally, the presence of severe language barriers made tracking this stuff down a difficult challenge. The occasional CD-R, some online sources, and the remarkable Buddha Machine have let me dip my toe into this expanse of sound but a toe-dipping was where I had to halt. Thankfully, this anthology compiled by Chinese noise stalwart Dickson Dee has allowed for a massive insight into China’s music underground.
On his fourth solo album for the label, one half of Pan Sonic passes on the bare minimalist techno pulse of that band, as well as his own Ø side project, and instead focuses on pure electronic sound that has all of the austerity of an art gallery installation with Dadaist sound cutups and a comfort in drifting into painful noise, as well as near silent sonic territory.
It's rare for a remix to match an original, but then this isn't your standard remix. The setup being as it is, with Altz remixing the entirety of Roland P. Young's free/spiritual jazz classic "Isophonic Boogie Woogie," this is a more intimate affair, less based on creating new beats to old material than it is with providing an entirely new and updated look at an old classic. This is dangerous territory, but Altz is wise enough to let the original material take the fore. Sometimes this leaves a nagging desire for the original, but it does remain an interesting listen that reveals elements of the original not necessarily viewed so easily.
This Japanese trio have obviously been working hard since 2005’s Dissected Humanity as this tape demonstrates. Human Lust (although not exactly tearing up the rulebook) sees the band pushing their filth even further. Here their music is slower and more brutal than before, making the music something genuinely unpleasant. This is the lead of old school New Orleans sludge and the rusty blade of Florida death metal being combined to make a disturbing and heavy alloy.
Whether paired with Taylor Richardson (Infinity Window) or solo (Oneohtrix Point Never), Daniel Lopatin rarely strays from the world of science fiction. Each synthesized note; each string of composition; each fractured note a piece of a world once brought to us by Carl Sagan and Leonard Nimoy. Zones Without People continues to explore the vast virginal openness that is space—and like the atmosphere he deftly reproduces in sound, Lopatin's boundaries are always contracting and expanding to create music for all beings of the universe.
This endearingly odd, gutsy, and oft-surprising compilation unearths 16 long-forgotten and hard-to-find singer/songwriter gems from the '60s and early '70s. While most of the songs superficially could be labeled as "folk," there is very little here that could be considered formulaic, commercial, or uninspired. For better or worse, these idiosyncratic and intense young women followed their muses down some pretty bizarre paths: some haunting, some beautiful, some crazy, and some just utterly mystifying.
Every great once in awhile an album comes along that completely blows me away. This is one of them. Within the first few chords of the opening song I can feel Overloaded Ark singing in my bones. It is an album that reminds me of the power music has for elevating the mind and spirit. When listening to these songs it is hard to be unmoved and unhappy. Overloaded Ark is rapture made audible, joy stirred by a resonant interplay of voice and strings, a pure sonorous ecstasy.
As a member of the Roll Over Rover roster, a Bay Area based group of musicians headed by Sean McCann, Kellen Shipley continues in the label’s pioneering spirit of bridging the varied forms of experimental music with the pop medium so many embraced as children and have reluctantly held onto as tastes have shifted and moods changed. Deep Breaths, for all its avant pretense, finds Shipley comfortably navigating the choppy waters of blending fresh and salt water with a potent combination of carefully crafted drones amid churning pop melodies.
