Podcast Episodes 717-720 are live!
After two weekends away, the backlog has become immense, so we present a whopping FOUR new episodes for the spooky season!
Episode 717 features Medicine, Fennesz, Papa M, Earthen Sea, Nero, memotone, Karate, ØKSE, Otis Gayle, more eaze, Jon Mueller, and Lauren Auder + Wendy & Lisa.
Episode 718 has The Legendary Pink Dots, Throbbing Gristle, Von Spar / Eiko Ishibashi / Joe Talia / Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Ladytron, Cate Brooks, Bill Callahan, Jill Fraser, Angelo Harmsworth, Laibach, and Mike Cooper.
Episode 719 music by Angel Bat Dawid, Philip Jeck, A.M. Blue, KMRU, Songs: Ohia, Craven Faults, tashi dorji, Black Rain, The Ghostwriters, Windy & Carl.
Episode 720 brings you tunes from Lewis Spybey, Jules Reidy, Mogwai, Surya Botofasina, Patrick Cowley, Anthony Moore, Innocence Mission, Matt Elliott, Rodan, and Sorrow.
Photo of a Halloween scene in Ogunquit by DJ Jon.
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2009 has certainly been a great year for this young banshee from Wisconsin. Zola Jesus has put out numerous releases this year, each featuring high quality songwriting and production. To have so many releases of such a high quality is truly impressive, and this collection continues that hot streak.
Wire have announced the forthcoming album, Change Becomes Us, due March 2013. The album consists of material not recorded between 1979-1980, existing until now mainly as "sketches" for a one-off performance. More information including ordering details below.
Sylvain Chauveau’s acoustic tribute to Depeche Mode starts off well but soon plummets into a chasm of middle of the road yawns. Down to the Bone is less of a tribute and more of an insult.
Eight new broadcasts from the chilly world of the Arctic Lofoten Islands are made available on this double disc and, in some ways, they all exemplify just how much Steven Stapleton must be falling in love with digital sound stretching. Just as the first volume was an effort to reshape the world around them in sound, the second volume of Shipwreck Radio turns the world of Lofoten into a strange place occupied by distortions of the Arctic's natural sound world.
For their latest collaboration, Boris and Merzbow have produced an elemental and tempestuous album. It sounds like a year’s worth of weather condensed into the space of a CD.
These four musicians completely overcome the wedge so often forced between musical excellence and immediate accessibility. Too many buckets of wank and showmanship have been filled in the pursuit of making a technically demanding record that simultaneously sounds and feels exciting. "SZ2" laughs in the face of that problem with bravado.
Continuing the label's tradition of beautifully packaged, limited edition releases, Endingsis the second text + music project from Crouton founder Jon Mueller. Anestablished and diverse drummer, playing with indie instrumentalistsPele, Collections of Colonies of Bees, and a myriad of improvensembles, Mueller's written works offer unique glimpses into thestrange reality of a clearly eccentric artist whose role is nevermerely complimentary. Endings combines eleven very shortstories (in a boxed, spineless book) with a 30-min. CD-R of readingmusic, and several black-and-white illustrations by Kaveh Soofi, theBay Area graphic artist who designed the cover for Pele's last album.Mueller's stories are by far the most exciting piece of the puzzle. Theauthor uses the concept of "endings" to create postcard lengthvignettes launching the reader into a darkly absurd and chaotic worldwhere narrative seems to strive immediately toward a propheticconclusion. The extreme shortness of the texts provides that nocharacter or scenario is developed outside of a series of scrupulous,often ridiculous details serving only the anticipation of some unifyingfinale. Mueller always delivers the goods, in the sense that he hurlseach clipped plotline into an unmistakable, impassable "end;" howeverhis endings are never the epiphanies his stories require. Instead theyoffer only the further mystification of an already lost cast ofcharacters, managing to transform a clever variety of hum-drum pursuitsand circumstances into windows to another hellish dimension. A man,inexplicably followed while on the way to the grocery store, eventuallyconfronts his enraged pursuer, severs his own finger, and proceeds toreverse the chase, threatening the other man with the bloody appendage.Another character puts on a play for his dinner guests starring apicture of his dead son, whom he directs: "Sing, boy! Sing!" A businessexecutive returns from an emergency call to find his interruptedinterviewee sipping from the potential employer's coffee cup, his eyesrising in blank defiance. Most impressive is Mueller's ability tostreamline each story with a detail-driven first-person narrative thatassumes normalcy and connectedness, only to completely break down bythe end. More than simple plot twists, the author's endings might becalled 'anti-epiphanies' in the way they are positioned, through astriking economy of language, to effectively dismantle the story'sprior logic. Mueller's musical accompaniment is unlike anything I'veheard from him yet and clearly serves the box's theme. A fadedsymphonic loop plays over and over to simulate a continuous,regenerating "ending," essentially a false ending that, in its 19-sec.length, reminds me of the obscured, darkened tones of a Badalamentiscore played out like one of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops,only without disintegrating. The atmosphere is soothing for a smallsecond, but ultimately turns to a sinister, anxious tension, both aptand almost nauseating when coupled with Mueller's words. Soofi'sillustrations are less fitting, but interesting nonetheless. From thelook of it they are digital images arranged comic-strip-style butwithout any explicit narrative. The images are almost all stylized,grey toned portraits, progressively clouded, shadowed, fragmented,cropped, and later barraged by clusters of nail-covered blocks. I cansee comparisons to Francis Bacon's portraiture, with the sectionedmurkiness and sketchy inaccuracies reminding me of animations by SouthAfrican artist William Kentridge, though Soofi's work has an unsettlinggeometric base that feels very unique. Endings is well worth itto anyone keen on interesting packaging and multimedia formats; I amstill involved in picking apart and connecting the contents of thisbeautiful release, no end in sight.
Just like their previous album, Face.(a,this year's release from Collections of Colonies of Bees manages tosqueak in very quietly just underneath the radar, without a lot of hypeor fanfare, to surprisingly become one of my top albums of the year.The formula holds close to the last album: taking an instrumental rock"band" setup and mutating it through inhuman editing. It's a setupwhich has gained popularity in the last couple years with groups likeRadian, Nudge, Trapist, and Supersilent, but Collections of Colonies ofBees have become masters at the art. Pele have decided to call itquits, however, the Collections lineup is now almost identical to Pele,with Jon Mueller and Chris Rosenau bringing other Pele alumni Jon Minoron board this time along with Jim Schoenecker. (Perhaps they weregetting tired of being in TOO many bands—see above review!) Bright andspringy guitar melodies live harmoniously with manipulated twitters,beats and whirrs, while miscellaneous unidentifiable objects providerhythm colorization in spots. Fans of both the upbeat Pele andMuller/Rosenau's improvisational experimental outings find a mediumhere, as the line is delicately walked between pop melodies and nerdyimprovisation. Some songs, (nine out of ten are named "fun") are mostdecidedly organically driven, while some are clearly more electronic.The story of the recordings is that the band took a number of differentapproaches to each composition, and the Japanese version of Customer,on Some of Us, uses the more electronic versions of the more organicsongs here and more organic versions of the more electronic songscontained here. If that's not confusing enough, a vinyl edition of therecord contains only the "electronic" songs from both. While a disclike this might be good for an afternoon read at home, I highlyrecommend playing at loud volumes to fully enjoy some of the fantasticlow frequency bass sounds and alien ticks which dance around the ears.Like a fantastic sushi dinner, at the end I'm eager for more, andunfortunately that means getting a hold of Customer's Japanese counterpart.
While the days of guitar maximalism are long in Cranes' past, Particles & Waves showcases a band who is doing a very good job when they attempt to recapture the stunningly haunting sound that drew so many fans a decade ago. On songs like "K56," and "Here Comes the Snow," Alison Shaw's piercingly high pitched voice is fragile and lonely, almost naked against the patient and pretty melodies. However, there are certain points where I simply cannot connect with the music.
