Podcast Episodes 717-720 are live!
After two weekends away, the backlog has become immense, so we present a whopping FOUR new episodes for the spooky season!
Episode 717 features Medicine, Fennesz, Papa M, Earthen Sea, Nero, memotone, Karate, ØKSE, Otis Gayle, more eaze, Jon Mueller, and Lauren Auder + Wendy & Lisa.
Episode 718 has The Legendary Pink Dots, Throbbing Gristle, Von Spar / Eiko Ishibashi / Joe Talia / Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Ladytron, Cate Brooks, Bill Callahan, Jill Fraser, Angelo Harmsworth, Laibach, and Mike Cooper.
Episode 719 music by Angel Bat Dawid, Philip Jeck, A.M. Blue, KMRU, Songs: Ohia, Craven Faults, tashi dorji, Black Rain, The Ghostwriters, Windy & Carl.
Episode 720 brings you tunes from Lewis Spybey, Jules Reidy, Mogwai, Surya Botofasina, Patrick Cowley, Anthony Moore, Innocence Mission, Matt Elliott, Rodan, and Sorrow.
Photo of a Halloween scene in Ogunquit by DJ Jon.
Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
Dutch experimental label/store Staalplaat has a new series in collaboration with the Extrapool art space called Brombron. For the first installment they invited Robert Hampson (Main), David Howell and Alastair Leslie (who make up Antenna Farm) to spend some time together making strange sounds. The results are scattered here, but never dull. The five-track CD does not list song titles, but presents pictures of the final song waveforms taken from the mastering program used to finish this disc off, and that nicely sums up what the music is all about, too. There's little apparent direction here, mostly just collages of found sounds, digitally spliced together and packaged in a beautifully simple all paper sleeve that folds in on itself like the sources of the sounds the disc contains. It's nearly impossible to tell what is making the odd creaks and clicks and knocks here, but I can visualize the musicians walking about the art space, contact mics in hand, with the kind of giddy wonderment that a child who has first discovered a tape recorder might have. While the completed compositions are far from playful in tone, they do represent a kind of 'throw caution to the wind' sort of approach to realizing the acoustic properties of the discreet time spent together in a designated space. This may not hold the interest of old school Main fans who appreciated Hampson's song-based approach to deconstructing sound; there are no basslines or melodies or even songs here. This is like the equivalent of listening to the architechture of the Extrapool, and from the sound of it, it's a place worth a visit.
The pairing of Kid606 and Dälek isn't something that makes immediate sense to me on paper. 606 is known for most for his full throttle laptop cutups, glitchery and appropriation of hip hop as one of a myriad source files to be mashed into his digital melee. On the other hand, Dälek fuse experimental rock and electronics, but somehow grind out real hip hop without any sense of irony or 'look how cool this Missy Elliot sample sounds' tongue-in-cheek humor. However, the musical match-up works well on this EP from Tigerbeat6, further demonstrating that neither artist in the equation here is pinned down to a particular MO. Dälek's contributions from the straight-ahead rap on the Dälek remix to the thick drones of dirty sounds on the original mesh well with Kid606's short-attention span approach to songcraft. 606 seems to take the Dälek material seriously, and with the CD bonus track "Vague Recollection," there's even a reflective moment of pause that recalls equal amounts of the Kid's 'Soccer Girl EP' and Dälek's beat-less live ambiance. Kid606's own remixes of the "Ruin It" track provides the anticipated cut up beats, tiny noises, non-linear structure, and fractured groove that most of his beat-oriented work is like, but it takes the Dälek version to ground the song and really pull it back to earth with a simple head-nodding beat that thunders over the washed out noise beneath. The second CD bonus track, "Satan's Hard Drive," is a recording of Kid606's hard drive failing, a cacophany that almost anyone who's worked with digital audio for any length of time can appreciate, but a track that on its own, holds very little interest other than wonder at the failure of machines. 
Compiling rare 7" and CDR tracks, this compilation is not for the meek. At nearly 80 minutes of shambling, broken guitar riffs and inhuman shrieks, fatigue sets in pretty quick. Taken in small doses, however, it’s the perfect thing to play when something needs to be loud and angry.
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.
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.
