Stepping away from the Donna Summer guise, on this album, Jason Forrest uses and abuses a wide range of platters and mixes themtogether into a bubbly cauldron of bad tastes that stays fun andbouncy. Disco, new wave, arena rock and punk are all represented insmall one or two measure doses, and it's the way that Forrestseamlessly combines disperate sounds that makes the record remarkable.
We made it to 700 episodes. While it's not a special episode per se—commemorating this milestone—you can pretty much assume that every episode is special. This one features Mark Spybey & Graham Lewis, Brian Gibson, Sote, Scanner and Neil Leonard, Susumu Yokota, Eleven Pond, Frédéric D. Oberland / Grégory Dargent / Tony Elieh / Wassim Halal, Yellow Swans, Dental waste in Saigon photo by Krisztian. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Warren Ellis, Mick Turner, and Jim White take aslightly different slant on Cinder, restricting themselves to shorter times for each piece. The distinctivesound of Dirty Three remains intact but they sound rejuvenated. This is a definite strong contender for album of the year.
While there never seems to be any shortage of Nadja related material being released, this release of older material (recorded in 2005 and previously only available as MP3s) drops a lot of the metal elements to Baker's sound and replaces them with trumpet and violin, and emphasizes the ambience and also the underlying melody and structure of these songs.
Thisalbum is the sound of Matthew Herbert nailing his long list of protestto the door of the food industry, composed and constructed by samplesof food. Each track highlights a different aspect of what Herbert seesas a wasteful business. This way of working couldeasily result in tedious, academic-sounding music but I found it veryenjoyable to listen to both as an album and as a more serious statementon what we are ingesting.
Sound artist and previous Philip Jeck collaborator, Kirkegaard presentsan album of geothermal recordings collected around geysers inIceland. Surprisingly, the results are a little flat: the record exists more likebank of archival documents, gravelly source material awaiting revamp.
Long has Brad Rose maintained Digitalis, a beacon of experimental music nestled in the heartland of America. Spreading across the landscape like an epidemic, Rose—along with his wife, Eden—has delivered stack upon stack of gratifying discoveries both influential and enjoyable. But recently the pioneering duo has upped their own musical game, flooding an eager market with a steady stream of fantastic releases. Mechanical Gardens, however, stretches Eden and Brad’s Alter Eagle outfit to the brink of the mainstream.
While Michael Gira certainly wrote many of his finest songs in the late '80s and early '90s, I was never able to embrace the "softer" phase of the Swans oeuvre as readily as I could the rest (a trait that is not uncommon). The main reason is that Gira's defining traits, for me, have always been his iconic intensity and his willingness to be bluntly honest and ugly. Such content was complemented perfectly by the Swans' early, more primal aesthetic, but the more traditionally melodic late-period material made things a bit more complicated.  I have no problem with the change in direction itself, but the central emphasis on melody and conventional rock structure often has a tendency to undercut or obscure the weightier themes in Gira's lyrics. Hearing Gira wrestle with that central conflict as he continues to expand his sound is what makes Love of Life both fascinating and frustrating.
Tepid and, at times, hesitant, James Blackshaw's latest record for Young God is a disappointment. For much of All is Falling he and his band work diligently, trying to weave Blackshaw's erudition into something unique and captivating. Unfortunately, their success is all too infrequent and what results is an unsatisfying collection of stoic songs.
Leona Anderson's mock-pompous operatic voice can provoke amusement and nauseous grimacing. Music To Suffer By is as beguiling as a jar of pickled walnuts: nectar for a few people, odd and repulsive to others. Either way, this re-mastered album shouldn't be swallowed in one sitting.
After the two most recent Jesu works had returned to the heavy guitar sound the project began with, Justin Broadrick saw fit to separate that project into two distinct entities: Jesu for heavy guitar music, and Pale Sketcher (named for the 
