Following 1983's Soul Possession, Annie moved into a shed in Adrian Sherwood’s garden and slowly began assembling an album's worth of new material with his then-wife, Kishi Yamamoto.  The new songs were very different than her previous work: the scary and disturbed-sounding elements completely disappeared and Annie began to make a conscious attempt to assimilate pre-rock influences like Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf into her work.  The actual impact of those divas on her sound was still fairly slight at this point (1987) though, as Jackamo turned out to be a very weird, difficult, and transitional album.
Give us an hour, we'll give you music to remember. This week we bring you an episode with brand new music from Softcult, Jim Rafferty, karen vogt, Ex-Easter Island Head, Jon Collin, James Devane, Garth Erasmus, Gary Wilson, and K. Freund, plus some music from the archives from Goldblum, Rachel Goswell, Roy Montgomery. Rubber ducks and a live duck photo from Matthew in the UK. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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This is the final part of a collaborative trilogy that Henrik Nordvargr Björkk and Masami Akita began back in 2004 and it reaffirms my long-standing belief that Merzbow is almost always more compelling when he is working with other people.  While the two artists divided up creating the raw material for the album, the end result certainly sounds like the duo shared a common vision.  For the most part, the blend of brooding synth drones, subtle pulsing, and Merz-blasts of white noise and dissonant feedback works beautifully, but Henrik and Masami admittedly lose a bit of steam over the album's second half when they ill-advisedly flog a single simple motif for almost half an hour.  Up until that point, however, Partikel III is a quite stellar effort.
This is the first LP by this Northern California sound artist, but he has been active for almost a decade and is most closely associated with the scene around the excellent Root Strata label.  Students of Decay is another appropriate home for Davis though, as Ask the Dust (a rare John Fante reference!) offers up quite a bit of warm drone that also dabbles its toes a bit in stuttering electronic chaos, field recordings, and more formal composition.  Ultimately, it is a bit too chameleonic and intermittently pastoral to fully work for me as a complete work, but several of the individual pieces are quite wonderful.
I have traditionally been a sucker for J Mascis—his songs with Dinosaur Jr capitalize on my favorite aspects of rock music, overflowing with hooks, distortion and blistering guitar solos. After two surprisingly excellent albums with the original Dinosaur Jr line-up, Mascis' first studio album under his own name asks listeners to take out their earplugs for a scaled-back, primarily acoustic effort.
Although a similar CD was released by Sub Rosa 20 years ago, this is not a reissue but a re-recording, an amendment to that 1990 release. Here, Jean-Luc Fafchamps revisits one of Morton Feldman's most popular pieces and casts a new light on it. The themes, which Feldman had developed throughout his life as a composer, are all consolidated into one perfect piece of music. He picks up the delicate beauty of the piece in a different way to his previous recording, a truer rendition of the score but by no means negating the original release.
This young singer-songwriter takes inspiration from Dinosaur Jr frontman J Mascis, among other folks, and will be opening his US tour this spring. In a refreshing twist, Vile has released the better album this year, outshining Mascis on his latest album (and most stripped-down to date).
Eternal Tapestry's album on Thrill Jockey is their first widely available recording, coming on the heels of a slew of limited-press LP and CD-r releases the last couple years. It's a charming, low-key improvisational rock record that I found a bit of a "comfort food" listen, playing exactly to my tastes. While it doesn't strike me as especially innovative or mind-blowing among its peers, I find it a satisfying album, easy to get lost in start-to-finish each time I put it on.
This surreal and wildly ambitious project began quite humbly in 1988 when Greif found an old three-LP audio book of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland at a thrift store and began idly warping and enhancing it.  Sometime afterward, he submitted an unrelated cassette to Staalplaat with some of those experiments on the back side and they offered to release the Alice material instead of the intended work. Originally released only as a series of five limited-edition albums in the early '90s, this sprawling epic quickly became Greif's most well-known and enduring work.  Appropriately, it has now been reissued as a rather striking box set for the second time.
As much as I enjoyed Pedestrian Deposit's first "post-noise" effort (2009's Austere), I didn't think it was nearly on the same level as what Jon Borges and Shannon Kennedy were capable of delivering live.  That disparity has now been conclusively remedied, as this expanded reissue of a 2010 Housecraft cassette captures the duo at their mesmerizing, crackling, and eerie peak.
