It is difficult to judge a soundtrack when listening to it in isolation from the movie it is meant to accompany. This album, roughly half and half the work of Jason Pierce (under his J. Spaceman pseudonym) and the Sun City Girls, is enjoyable by its own merits but unfortunately has moments where the music sounds incomplete, the necessary images absent.
Look up Music for gazing upwards brought to you by Meat Beat Manifesto & scott crow, +/-, Aurora Borealis, The Veldt, Not Waving & Romance, W.A.T., The Handover, Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri, Mulatu Astatke, Paul St. Hilaire & René Löwe, Songs: Ohia, and Shellac. Aurora Borealis image from California by Steve. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
|
The result of what could only be described as serendipity, an ad-hoc trio of current/former Boston luminaries Vic Rawlings and Michael Bullock joined up with Lebanese trumpet player Mazen Kerbaj on a short tour after a single gig together, two sets of which are presented on this disc. Although recorded only five days apart, the two shows are actually quite different in character and feel, but both show improvisation at its best.
Run DMC once said that a DJ could be a band, or at least that's how Chuck D paraphrased them. Dissecting that statement, it is perfectly logical to assume that a slab of vinyl could be an instrument, and this new disc from Philip Jeck proves that. Working live with record players, junk shop records, old Casio SK keyboards and recorders, Jeck has made a warm, nostalgic album that both personal and inviting.
While Z'EV has been performing since the 1970s, this emerged back in 1981 on Backlash Records as his first studio album. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of its release, German-based label Die Stadt has reissued it as a limited CD, housed in the original LP-sized packaging along with a hand-made insert.
Reissued with bonus tracks and detailed sleeve notes, this album highlights the period where Bryars moves from his previous style involving the synthesis of non-musical sources, loops and an almost standard (but beautiful) orchestral arrangement. Here he composes for small ensembles and includes piano and vibraphone almost anywhere he can. This is a very different Bryars to the one I am familiar with, very different but still utterly captivating.
Back in 1988 the intention was to sequence these mainly instrumental tracks for release amidst the mostly vocal pieces from the same session. Had that happened, then Sun City Girls' best known release Torch of the Mystics would have been the rarest of beasts: a consistently excellent double album.
With each new release, Anthony Mangicapra’s Hoor-Paar-Kraat becomes more distinctive and adventurous. I have enjoyed previous releases, some feeling more finished than others, but In Eros Veritas is probably the stand-out of the lot. Here many of the elements and approaches that work particularly well in other pieces come together like lesser metals mixed to form an alloy, creating a far stronger album.
With a title like this, it would take some level of ineptitude not to guess what this album sounds like. The only fear from such a title is that it will either be campy hipster metal or that it cannot possibly be awesome enough to live up to such a lofty title. Previous releases from Lair of the Minotaur rule out the former worry instantly, and only seconds of listening prove the latter completely unfounded.
Matthew Bower's reappearance as Skullflower a couple years back has already yielded a slew of releases that, while retaining his love of all things noisy and guitar based, has shown frequent stylistic shifts. This, the first installment of Utech's "URSK" series (after concluding the excellent "Arc" series ) is nearly an hour of full on feedback and guitar shriek that, for all its harshness is immensely listenable and demands to be listened to VERY loudly.
On this four track, half hour-ish EP, Kieran Hebden has created something that is for all intents and purposes, techno. We in the field of music criticism hate such simplistic descriptions, and especially one such as that with some unintentionally pejorative connotations, but this is something that could easily get asses shaking at the disco or wherever the kids go to dance these days. But, for all its 4/4 thumping, it is also an amazingly complex piece of programming and composition that is just as well suited for deep, headphone-centric analysis.
