Austere delivery makes Dagonite everything it is. Aside from the obvious references to H.P. Lovecraft there are few if any embellishments on this record. That fact calls attention to Brown Jenkins' greatest strengths (raw simplicity and a strong sense of purpose) and weaknesses (raw simplicity).
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!
|
For his first proper full-length album in nearly a decade, Douglas P. sets the time machine back to the early 1990s, returning to the guitars-and-windchimes sound that characterized classic Death in June albums such as Rose Clouds of Holocaust and But What Ends When the Symbols Shatter? The only problem is, you can never really go home again, and this album proves it.
As part of Important Records' quadruple-vinyl issue of Coil's swansong The Ape of Naples, an album of new material has been included, finally making good on the long-scheduled-but- interminably-delayed Backwards album. For The New Backwards, Sleazy and Danny Hyde have returned to the storied Nothing Records session tapes and created a suite of six songs that engage in an oddly ambivalent conversation between Coil's distant past and its posthumous present.
Both of the artists working on this piece are known for stretching the boundaries of music: Mueller heads up the Crouton label, one of the most active and prestigious recent electro-acoustic labels, while Jerman has been working for years to redefine percussion, using such things as cacti as instruments. Here the two take their love of sound to a full on audio-visual level that gives the listener a rare glimpse into the creation of such work.
As an artist whose work often crosses the boundaries into the visual as well as the audio, it is interesting to hear a music only work from Monterio. His dedication to working with singular sound sources through an album's worth of material may call to mind other artists such as Akifumi Nakajima (Aube) in approach, but the results are in a world of their own. Here, using only the sound of his voice, the artist creates a frightening soundscape that still maintains a conventional, almost musical feel to it.
Every once in a while a record comes along that does something a little different with a particular genre– it admittedly doesn't happen very often but when it does it makes me sit up and take notice. Such is the case here with this debut full length disc by German rhythmic industrial dance act Ahnst Anders.
While I feel that their peak is still 2005's masterful Horses in the Sky, this new album's energetic stomp is by no means a disappointment. Whereas that last album was heavily focused on vocal harmonies, here Silver Mt. Zion let their rage flow freely through their instruments. High volume riffs and squeals of feedback come to the fore, a rock monster that has been carefully concealed behind the careful arrangements of earlier releases.
Baby Dee's latest album and her first for Drag City is somewhat of a departure from her previous work in a lot of ways, yet many of the new songs still retain the fragility that made her earlier material so intimate. Backed by a band of admirers that includes Will Oldham, Matt Sweeney, Bill Breeze, John Contreras, and Andrew W.K., her music comes alive like never before.
