Following up 2009's Sever, this double LP follows a similar blueprint to that album, here spread across four long tracks. As a piece of sound art, each of these four pieces sound completely distinct from one another, but unified by Haynes’ simply wonderful use of tactile sonic textures that make his work so brilliant.
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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Easily their most well-known release, partially in part due to the Steve Albini production and Godflesh/Jesu's Justin Broadrick on drums, Dustbowl lives up to its legendary status, with the band perfecting the murky, hazy sound of LP. It’s rather unfair that the album is recognized just for those two individual's contributions, because the album as a whole is what is truly praise-worthy.
No matter what a person thinks of the music of Current 93, it must be recognized that David Tibet has always been a champion of other visionaries, whether they be in the realm of music, literature, or in the case of Harry Oldfield, science and invention. The "Current 93 present" series is just one example of Tibet’s gift as a curator. In this series of discs (now out-of-print) he brings to light and showcases talents who might not otherwise have received outside their own circles. While some have been more renowned, such as Shirley Collins and Tiny Tim, others like Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson, the Venerable 'Chi.med Rig. 'dzin Lama, Rinpoche and Harry Oldfield have received less notice. Oldfield’s work in the development and application of electro-crystal therapy is fascinating, and this musical artifact, created in accordance with his research is a wondrous, mutli-facedted specimen.
Lawrence English's latest release arrived at the perfect time for me, as I am in the throes of both a lengthy fascination with drone and a budding obsession with the New York Review of Book's masterfully curated publishing imprint.  The Peregrine is based on an "elegantly misanthropic" 1967 non-fiction work of the same title in which enigmatic writer/bird-watcher J.A. Baker becomes obsessed by a pair of falcons and stops identifying with humanity.  Befitting an album inspired by birds of prey, Lawrence's aesthetic here is considerably heavier and grittier than his characteristic pastoral ambiance.  In fact, this may be the first "difficult" Lawrence English album, but it is also a pretty stunning one.
This performance was commissioned for 2009's A Thing About Machines festival, an event devoted to the theme "Spaces Speak."  Such a theme is right up Janek's alley, as he has long been interested in the role that architecture plays in the listening experience.  He is also fascinated by the fact that we are constantly immersed in a sea of unnoticed waves and transmissions, so he artfully combined them by transmitting some components of the piece to radios distributed to audience members throughout the concert hall.  In album form, sadly, Janek's clever spatial and acoustic manipulations are unavoidably lost, but Phoenix & Phaedra is still an enjoyably warm and crackling soundscape by one of the world's finest sound artists.
Mamiffer, the duo of Faith Coloccia and Aaron Turner, have recorded with a slew of artists who work in similarly contrasting fields of noise and music, but this is the first true work with Pacific Northwest neighbor and the world’s loudest school librarian, Daniel Menche. A previous release, "Live" Through Menche featured him reworking Coloccia and Turner's recorded work as a performance, but Crater is the first time they have truly worked together on record. A mix of live instrumentation, processed field recordings, and who knows what (other than the artists), the resulting record is anything but boisterous, explosive noise and instead a careful meditation on both nature and music.
These two recent collaborations featuring Taylor Deupree capture two distinct extremes in his approach to creating music. Perpetual, his collaboration with legendary pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto and the duo of Illuha is a four-piece ensemble using piano, guitar, modular synthesizer, and other conventional instruments to create a delicate, complex and almost living composition. Twine, an in-studio performance with Marcus Fischer is a much simpler affair, with the two manipulating tape loops in real time, recorded live with just room microphones capturing the performance. One may be a larger production and the other an intimate performance, but both are superb documents of Deupree's (and the other performers') sense of small scale, but infinitely detailed and varied music.
