Sprawled over two discs, this album from New Zealand’s Mrtyu! is a lumbering behemoth of rumbling bass, feedback, and layers of distortion. It’s a gloriously unholy mess, suggesting subterranean rites held far from the light of day.
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Brothers John and Michael Gibbons of Bardo Pond take an exquisite and enjoyable side trip into harmonious interstellar regions with this low-key study of vibrations. With stripped down instrumentation, they drift into shimmering passages of temporal displacement.
After several months of hefty improv submersion it’s possible to cultivate the taste buds enough to be able to sift out the quality from the claptrap. This is most definitely the former, a 21 minute improvised freak out wrapped in a brain-splurge primary colored aggro cover
Not a mysterious Frenchman in fact, Benoit Pioulard is Thomas Meluch, another Midwestern boy mutating folk tradition through personal mythology, only this time it’s not founded on states in the Union or suburban Americana but on the fuzzy sublime of forests and oceans, cryptic continental romance and Bergman films.
Perhaps Planet Mu's clearest attribute is founder Mike Paradinas' willingness to put out diverse releases from artists he believes in regardless of where they lie on the electronic music spectrum. Yet as this budget-priced compilation demonstrates, it's also the label's most obvious weakness.
New York’s No Wave scene of the late ‘70s was a brief but visionary moment in music history centering around bands whose members were frequently non-musicians but came from a variety of artistic backgrounds. While this documentary is by no means a definitive statement, it certainly sheds some light on what the movement was all about and what it meant to many of those involved, and how their pioneering spirit may or may not live on in the music of the generations who followed.
Although as per usual, the performance is short (only around 30 minutes) this is a powerful and exciting album. Slowly building up like a stalker moving through the bushes before ending in a bloody mess, this is Wolf Eyes at the top of their game. Braxton fits in perfectly, adding an extra dimension to the noise that lifts Black Vomit from being just another Wolf Eyes live CD to an essential release.
She was a tightrope walker, a writer, performed with Coum, was billed next to This Heat, and appeared in Derek Jarman's film Jubilee before becoming a musician of any kind, and yet none of these facts could prepare anyone for the quirky and sultry music on this, her second album. She was called unmusical, considered unprofessional, and never once sat herself along side the French royalty to which she was compared, but most of all she was blatantly playful and 22 years removed she's still as intriguing and confusing as she must've been then.
