Although dormant for a number of years, Paul Douglas has leapt back into activity on this brief, but effective 7" single. With heavy use of electronics and processing, these two pieces are shaped into fully fleshed out and complicated works that bear the mark of an expert.
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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Anthony Mangicapra's Hoor-paar-Kraat project has always been rather prolific, but a recent spate of limited new releases has made this even more noticeable, but without any reduction in quality or distinction On these two tapes, he (and associates) balances both tense, carefully constructed pieces with shambolic, improvised sonic rituals.
To this day, I am utterly baffled as to how The Haxan Cloak managed to become relatively popular at all–it all seems suspiciously Faustian.  Granted, Brian Krlic's profile has certainly benefited from his getting lumped in with the Raime/Demdike Stare pantheon of glacial, black-hearted "dance" artists, but his debut album was still essentially a collection of bleakly dissonant string dirges inspired by death, something that does not generally offer much in the way of mass appeal (or individual appeal for me, for that matter).  Excavation, however, is intermittently amazing, as Krlic's incredible evolution and inspired addition of deep sub-bass have transformed his previously oppressively sad vision into quite a heavy and frightening one.
I have not been paying much attention to Wolf Eyes for the last several years, but I was inclined to give this album a chance after repeatedly hearing all about how it is both a bold change of direction and a major statement on the state of noise in 2013.  After listening to it a few times, I guess it is arguably both, but it is definitely not some kind of epoch-defining revelation, nor is it a particularly great album (though it certainly has some great moments).  Rather it is merely an uneven, intermittently inspired effort that displays a new penchant for ruined-sounding ultra-minimalism, but offers only a few fully realized, successful examples of it amidst too much filler.
Barn Owl's penchant for subdued guitar music has always been a reliable standard for me. Lost In The Glare and Ancestral Star were easy to dissect, but welcoming and pleasantly sparse with a primal aesthetic that worked as an easy entry point into drone. In contrast, V is a totally different creation. Drawing inspiration from dub and dark ambient music, V is a fresh achievement for Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti, shifting tone artfully and refining their style. It superbly bridges a gap between two common but oddly disconnected subgroups of music.
While I certainly would not complain if the endless tide of synthesizer albums were to suddenly stop completely, that does not mean that an occasional good one does not turn up every now and then.  This one, the solo debut from Jimy SeiTang (Rhyton/Psychic Ills) comes very close to being one of those albums, offering up a handful of thick, buzzing, and obsessively repeating soundscapes that sound like a mixture of John Carpenter and Krautrock.  Unfortunately, most of them either end too quickly or evolve too little to completely suck me in, but the closing piece reminded me very favorably of Popul Vuh's brilliant Aguirre soundtrack (minus all the hippy noodling), which is a high compliment indeed.
A massive ensemble of New Mexico-based artists, DCS features no less than ten bassists amongst other multi-instrumentalists. At first blush I expected an unidentifiable cacophony of noise, which would not necessarily be a bad thing, but this self titled album is much more varied and open than I believed it would be. Across three long and distinct pieces, there is much dissonance, but also subtlety to be heard.
After a 12 year hiatus, Mark van Hoen has unexpectedly returned with a new Locust album.  In fact, I do not think that Mark himself even expected it: he enlisted his friend Louis Sherman to join him for a live performance on WFMU and discovered during their rehearsals that they sounded both 1.) great and 2.) an awful lot like Locust.  As Van Hoen remains the driving force and has a very distinctive aesthetic, the resultant material still shares a lot of common ground with last year's excellent solo album (The Revenant Diary), but You'll Be Safe Forever is floating and melancholic rather than then tense and haunted.
Back in 2010, Tarentel's Cantu-Ledesma blindsided me with an absolutely wonderful dream-pop/drone solo opus (Love is a Stream) that I have grown to love more with each passing year.  Since then, however, he has been keeping a curiously low profile, quietly releasing only a handful of tapes, splits, singles, and a Dutch LP.  I wish I had been paying more attention though, as this latest self-released digital EP shows that he has been both creatively fertile and steadily evolving the whole time.  I guess I have some catching up to do.
Haynes is a multimedia artist who works in many different mediums and formats, but a consistent sense of rust and decay carries through them all. Recent audio works Sever and The Decline Effect exemplify this perfectly each, built upon layers of found sounds and field recordings, processed and disintegrated into textures and sounds that are enticing, yet alien. For his debut on Editions Mego, he follows the same successful format, using the sounds of desert winds, laser cooling systems, and thin wires as the source, resulting in a work that sounds entirely alien.
