As Imminent Starvation, Olivier Moreau famously trashed his mixing board after the completion of 1999’s Nord and gave the pieces out in a special collector’s edition. Now, after spending time with Synapscape and putting out a few 7” singles, he has returned with a new album that shows he hasn’t missed a step in his near decade hiatus.
Three new episodes for your listening enjoyment. After two weeks off, we are back with three brand new episodes: three hours / 36 tunes. Episode 697 features music from Beak>, Brothertiger, Kate Carr, Gnod, Taylor Deupree, FIN, Church Andrews & Matt Davies, Ortrotasce, Bill MacKay, Celer, Kaboom Karavan, and Ida. Episode 698 boasts a lineup of tracks from Susanna, Nonpareils, KMRU, A Place To Bury Strangers, final, Coti K., Dalton Alexander, Akio Suzuki, The Shadow Ring, Filther, Aaron Dilloway, and Ghost Dubs. Episode 699 is bursting at the seams with jams from Crash Course In Science, Chrystabell and David Lynch, Machinedrum, Ekin Fil, Finlay Shakespeare, Actress, Mercury Rev, Dave Brown / Jason Kahn, øjeRum, d'Eon, Jeremy Gignoux, and Shellac. Mountain photo taken in Japan by Chris. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Triumphantly unfazed by the fact that it is no longer 1950, Francisco López has birthed a sprawling and ambitious double album of undiluted, unabashed musique concrète. Machines is industrial music in the purist sense, as López limited himself strictly to recordings taken from various pieces of mechanical equipment, then masterfully sculpted them into meticulously composed symphonies of clanking and whirring machinery.
The list of singer-songwriters as raw as Emma Louise "Scout" Niblett is very short. Names like P.J. Harvey and Patti Smith come to mind when thinking of her and, in some ways, both of them are more suitable reference points than the grunge bands Scout has named-checked as her influences. On The Calcination of Scout Niblett she sounds as severe as she ever has and starker, too. But, if Scout began her career under the wings of Nirvana and Sonic Youth, she's long since graduated to something more original, less obvious, and much, much more ominous.
This six disc box set is a nice time capsule for the extremely prolific Drumm's work from 2013 through 2016. Which means, of course, by now this stuff is old hat and there is likely to be another 15 or so albums worth of material available to download at this point. However, Drumm's work is something to be digested slowly and methodically, and with Giuseppe Ielasi ensuring a top quality remastering, it makes for an essential collection of work that is fitting for both new listeners and those who have been there for a while.
As loathe as I am of the term, perhaps this is conceptually the best approach to the "mashup" in recent memory. Rather than just slapping together two disparate songs with the same BPM for the sake of being "hip", Petit (a member of Strings of Consciousness and head of the BiP_HOp label) has instead created a soundtrack synthesizing the classic Lynch film with Shinya Tsukamoto’s esoteric cyberpunk nightmare, resulting in a cacophonous, disorienting mess of sound.
This is Psychic Circle's oddest compilation yet. Cult actors and UK game show hosts mingle with ethnic novelties, opera singers, prostitutes and unknowns. The liner notes acknowledge some utter crap and complete nonsense within: welcome relief from talk of forgotten gems and legends which has set me up for disappointment with several of PC’s previous efforts.
In 2006, the rather enigmatic and aberrant Mudboy recorded a live session for the Dutch radio station VPRO, but it took three years for it to finally see release. Upon hearing this odd and uneven set, that delay seems quite justified- there are certainly some moments of sublime beauty and weirdness captured here, but they are few and far between. This probably should have stayed in the vault.
This is a fun album. It takes a high art concept and makes it playful. Albums that are made up purely of percussion are few and far between as it is, and the fact that the instrument in question here is the Mid-Hudson Bridge makes this a rare bird indeed.
This latest Folklore Tapes collection is a perfect illustration of why they are possibly the most unique and fascinating label around, assembling 31 different artists to create free-form sound art based upon their research into a specific plant. I certainly like the concept and appreciate the depth and breadth of their commitment to it (there is accompanying literature, a film, and a pack of seeds), yet none of that would matter all that much if the music was underwhelming. As it happens, the music is absolutely wonderful, as the many brief and varied vignettes form a wonderfully surreal and kaleidoscopic whole. A few of the participants were familiar to me beforehand (Dean McPhee, Bridgett Hayden), but most were not and nearly every single one brings something delightfully bizarre, hallucinatory, or enigmatically esoteric to the table.
