This is an album of such glorious and near-comic excess that it could only have been released by Hospital Productions, as it clocks in at a staggering 2 1/2 hours of brooding dark ambiance.  In fact, it feels like a perverse negative image of the perfectly distilled brutality of last year's Relief, drowsily stretching out endlessly in drone-mode without a hint of violence to be found.  A few of these seven pieces are (of course) quite good for what they are, but this is not an album that showcases Drumm's power, vision, and distinctiveness particularly well at all.
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!
|
For their fourth album, Theme’s Richard Johnson and Stuart Carter have picked up Faust’s Jean-Hervé Peron and Budapest musician Zsolt Sörés to pad out their already exciting sounds. The three barely restrained improvisations that make up this LP show a group that knows how to cook in the studio. At times tense, at others serene, Theme manage to cover a huge amount of ground with a fairly limited palette of sounds.
To celebrate their reissue of 2008's acclaimed, widely beloved, and charmingly titled Dragging A Dead Deer Up a Hill, Kranky has concurrently issued this surprisingly solid companion album of unreleased recordings from the same period.  Nearly all of these pieces adhere to Deer's aesthetic of strummed acoustic guitars amidst a warm, dreamlike haze, but the hooks are not nearly as strong or frequent this time around.  With most artists, that would generally mean "these songs were not good enough," but Grouper has always been far more about atmosphere and mood than "songs."
American Power Electronics is a divisive sub-sub genre for me. My tastes tend to lean towards the more industrial/punk tinged, politically ambiguous European type (Genocide Organ, Grey Wolves, etc), because the US projects are too often hung up on violent misogyny or politically unambiguous shock tactics. Projects like Nyodene D, however, manage to transcend the clichés and put together albums that stand entirely on their own, such as Edenfall.
Welsh psychedelic rockers Ectogram return with a limited edition album that sees them try some new approaches in the studio. Eschewing their propensity for unrestricted jamming and long, long pieces of music, they have instead tried to create shorter, poppier works with as little electric guitar as possible. They succeeded in the song length/format but were less successful on the guitar front. The end result is one of the best albums they have put their name to.
Formerly of Volcano the Bear, Nick Mott has been working on his own music for the last couple of years. This single is a mixed result, too short to give a good idea of where he is going yet it contains glimmers of potential. It looks fantastic with Mott’s distinctive collage-work on the cover but somewhat falls down on the actual music. Luckily the limited edition version succeeds where the regular version fails by adding a substantial amount of music to the work.
Sidsel Endresen and Stian Westerhus recorded Didymoi Dreams back in 2011 live at the Nattjazz Festival in Norway, but have not had an opportunity to release it as a record until now. Endresen's characteristically enigmatic caterwauling hits new peaks of oddity while Westerhus provides her a scarred drone landscape, making for one of the more unique releases of 2013 so far.
Germano walks a line between serene peace and dissonant chaos. She dips from one into the other on the piano while her voice remains unwavering; songs carry themselves with a cinematic air that feels compact, hanging on to every word and symbol with tenacity.
After 12 years and two very small cassette editions on American Tapes and Hanson Records, Dilloway and Drumm's I Drink Your Skin is available on CD. Dressed up in cheesy horror movie duds and packed tight with overblown noise, Aaron and Kevin each dish out a 25 minute ribbon of goofy loops, obnoxious high-end squeals, and blathering garbage sounds. It is gruff, but invigorating stuff—and more carefully put together than it at first appears.
