Ever since the noise community discovered synth pop and minimal wave was born, there has been an excessive influx of pseudo punks armed with TR-606s and unreliable monophonic synthesizers noodling around trying to be the Human League. The problem is that far too many emphasize the minimal part and crank out Soundcloud accounts full of boring repetition and no real sense of direction. Max Brotman and Jesse Short are one of the exceptions to this pattern, however. The fact that they are not only willing to experiment with that template, but also know how to write an actual song, put them head and shoulders amongst the multitude of their peers.
Two new shows just for you. We have squeezed out two extended release episodes for this weekend to get you through this week. They contain mostly new songs but there's also new issues from the vaults. The first show features music from Rider/Horse, Mint Field, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Anastasia Coope, ISAN, Stone Music, La Securite, Bark Psychosis, Jon Rose, Master Wilburn Burchette, Umberto, Wand, Tim Koh, Sun An, and Memory Drawings. The second episode has music by Laibach, Melt-Banana, Chuck Johnson, X, K. Yoshimatsu, Dorothy Carter, Pavel Milyakov, Violence Gratuite, Mark Templeton, Dummy, Endon, body / negative, Midwife, Alberto Boccardi, Divine. Cow in Maui from Veronika in Vienna. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Much like my approach to Merzbow's prolific schedule, I take a similar tact when indulging in the work of Aidan Baker and Nadja. There is simply too much material coming out under those guises to stay engaged in without quickly becoming burnt out. So again, I am happy to infrequently dabble and keep my interest piqued, which is the case with both this solo release and collaboration with noted minimalist project Troum. In this case, Baker on his own may waiver, but bolstered by collaborators he does extremely well.
The murky depths of low-range tones are like subconscious murmurs. This kind of music speaks in so much depth, more than the imaginary space that an echo brings, or "atmospheres" built with samples and noise. Justin Walter's music is bassy, perplexing and intimate. Lullabies And Nightmares is an album which plays heavily with literal and imagined distances, where contact is always out of reach, always obscured by invariably plump electronic tones and the warmth of his ideas are paired with mechanical rigidity. It helps, too, that he has created a suite of beautiful melodies to mess with.
Glenn Jones' music is an omnipresent force. No pretensions or barriers to entry exist in well-executed American primitivism; the baggage is made along with the impression made on the listener. This album is inspired by a host of personal conflicts for Jones, primarily that the recording sessions occurred while he was taking care of his ailing mother in a nursing home in New Jersey. But he never compromises his artistic intent in the midst of trying times, only injecting them with a savvy humanism. The songs he's created are, even in their exact subject matter, timeless and miraculous things.
This 1982 album was Zoviet France's second release and has come to be known by a few different names over the years, most prominently "Hessian" (an English synonym for burlap).  The reason for that is simple: the original LP was packaged in screen-printed burlap, making it ZF's first foray into the bizarre packaging that they came to be known for in the '80s.  Of course, the music within is also quite bizarre, even by the band's own extremely outré standards.  There are certainly some clear hints of the faux-tribalism and tape loop experiments that would eventually solidify as Zoviet France's aesthetic (for a while anyway), but this enthusiastically primitive affair also features some very unexpected twists, such as absurdist humor, recognizable guitars, howled vocals, and (unbelievably) slap bass.
When it was first released in 2008, this massive (and newly reissued) ambient epic met with a rather polarized reception, but has gradually come to be fairly unanimously hailed as a classic.  I am a bit conflicted about that: while it certainly is a fine album, I have seen it favorably compared to Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II, which seems very wrong to me, despite their similarly bleary, haunted feel.  The difference between the two albums is a massive, fundamental one: with Imperial Distortion, Drumm willfully abandons noise, melody, rhythm, and composition to fully embrace the hypnotic power of gently oscillating stasis.  It is an experiment that works beautifully and yields very listenable results, but it is far from the apotheosis of Kevin's work.
As one of the handful of truly innovative artists to spring off from the drone metal template, the trio of Locrian had previously been rather prolific, tweaking and honing their sound to something singular and unique amidst a flurry of singles and split releases. However, other than a few high profile collaborations of late (Mamiffer, Christoph Heemann), they have been rather quiet since 2011's The Clearing. Return to Annihilation, the first new material after signing to Relapse, proves that this time and effort was well spent, perfecting their sound in ways that are both more accessible, but also pushing the more abstract moments they have been working with since the beginning even further.
Recently, I have been delving deeper and deeper into Esplendor Geométrico's discography and it has become increasingly clear to me that their prime never actually ended.  Arturo Lanz and his varying bandmates have certainly released some comparatively uneven or tame efforts over the course of their three-decade career, but Lanz has never stopped being a rhythmic genius and can still unleash a crushing masterpiece at any time.  One such gem, "Aplicación Insospechada," comes at the end of this intermittently impressive (and woefully underappreciated) 2009 effort.
Between the final Throbbing Gristle albums and last year's stellar Carter Tutti Void collaboration, Chris and Cosey have been maintaining an atypically high profile as of late, which makes it easy to forget that there has not been a new Carter Tutti album in over five years.  While that situation is not expected to be remedied until sometime in 2014, this very solid 10" single makes for a very welcome teaser in the meantime.
