Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai have made some of the most intense, exciting and intriguing electronic music of the last 20 years, mostly apart but they came together as Cyclo. ten years ago with a terrific self-titled album. When the follow up landed on my doorstep recently, I was expecting something great and got something unexpectedly better than I hoped for instead. Their debut was only a warm up, a training session. id is the real deal. Combining Nicolai’s hard yet yielding rhythms with Ikeda’s lust for ear-bending sounds, the duo has created a stunning album that aims to fuse their music (and their concept of music) with the visual arts.
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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Jackamo was a pretty odd and uncompromising album, but some insightful person at Atco still managed to see commercial potential in it and Annie wound up with a major label record deal.  Unfortunately, that partnership did not get a chance to flourish, as Atco dissolved before her completed follow-up album could be released.  In fact, that album still hasn't been released.  Undeterred, Annie returned to On-U Sound and recorded Short and Sweet (1992), a very fun, accessible, and dance-friendly effort that ironically seems like it could have been wildly successful if it had had a major label's promotional budget behind it.
Eleventh Dream Day has got to be one of the most well-adjusted bands ever, loosely holding together for over two decades despite never quite achieving the level of success they deserved and sharing members with Freakwater and Tortoise.  More remarkable still is how well they've continued to evolve and remain vital after all this time, as 2006's Zeroes and Ones ranked among their best efforts. Riot Now! picks up right where that album left off and continues EDD's late career momentum beautifully, sounding very much like a great rock band at the top of their game.
I try to avoid using the word "challenging" in regards to music—it is typically either a dumb exaggeration, or simply untrue. In this case, however, "challenging" is not only entirely appropriate, but perhaps an understatement. Ehnahre play dissonant, cerebral music that is rooted in death metal, but also throws the rulebook out the window; their latest album is all the more appealing for its inaccessibility.
Since his 2006 debut full-length and 2007's Untrue, which stand as two of dubstep's crowning achievements, Burial has been relatively quiet, releasing a pair of collaborations with Four Tet and Radiohead's Thom Yorke in nondescript packaging. His new 12" on Hyperdub is a formal breaking of silence, then—his first solo work since Untrue.
My reading habits are especially flippant, in that I flip through the pages of books in no prescribed order. Since I am usually engaged in reading multiple books at one time, things can get confusing. I have since given up for the most part, trying to read books in any kind of order, but just open them up at random and start with whatever interests me, except if they are fiction where a linear read is generally (but not always) necessary to get the story. More often than not when I open up to a random page I find something that is extremely relevant for me personally. Network News is perfect for this kind of divinatory reading.
On one of Nigel Ayers’ most recent musical efforts, his dissent against the nominal powers of church, state, and corporate enterprise are channeled into a chilled out, sinsemilla infused, studio session. These are protest songs without many words. This is a soundtrack for a revolution against reality itself. While Jah is not praised anywhere on the album, the spirit of liberation which is so much a part of ska, reggae, dub, and their children is apparent everywhere. It is obvious Nigel has studied the form. The tunes have been built from a solid blueprint of sub-bass beats and propulsive riddim. The reverberations, echoes, and background sound washes are subtle and complex. By washing off the grime he occupies a niche not emitted by diurnal producers.
Over the last few years, Sheeran has been developing her craft as a solo performer. Occasional CD-R and download releases, along with regular live performance have shown her skills as a songwriter and a performer to be constantly increasing. Therefore it comes as no surprise to me that her debut album is absolute perfection. Every time I think that it has reached a peak, I am greeted with an equally good, if not better, song immediately afterwards.
Six years ago, Drag City tracked down outsider folk artist Gary Higgins and reissued his solitary lost album, 1973's Red Hash, a slow-burning work of art that was difficult to find on vinyl 30 years after its release. After that album and a new release by Higgins, 2009's overlooked Seconds, Drag City is now presenting Higgins' recordings made prior to Red Hash, a previously unreleased collection of six hushed, lovely songs that Higgins wrote and recorded in a Connecticut log cabin (eat your heart out, Bon Iver...) in 1970-71.
