Andrew Liles shuts the door on the Vortex Vault with this final installment which includes contributions from Steven Stapleton, R.K. Faulhaber, and Matt Waldron. It's an atypical entry in the series and one of the most intriguing if only be cause of its spectacular finale.
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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The San Diego band’s sophomore album ticks a lot of boxes. Loud; heavy; and off-kilter time signatures. When they get into it, the music flows remarkably well for such jerky rhythms. However, the longer the album goes on, the more it feels like something is missing. Sleeping People are able to make solid slabs of rock but at times they live up to their name too much as it sometimes feels that they are on autopilot. At the very least their music is fun, the odd rhythms do not sound totally contrived and instead add a bit of spice to what could have been a boring album.
Of the four albums reissued in this series, this is the most recent studio album, originally being released only 12 years ago on Belgium's Les Disques du Crepuscule.
LTM have recently begun reissuing albums by Vini Reilly's Durutti Column, one of the acts who found a home on the late Tony Wilson's Factory Records. This particular album was originally released in April 1986 on the offshoot Factory Benelux label, a venture between the Manchester label and Les Disques du Crepuscule; this present edition features the original ten tracks in addition to ten bonus pieces, including five culled from various compilations and a further five tracks from the cancelled 1983 album Short Stories for Pauline.
Written for one of the composer's former students, this solemn and fragile piece for piano is played beautifully by Stephane Ginsburgh. The constantly shifting music is like a kaleidoscope; chords change character and fragment into smaller, more discrete fractions before collapsing back into a solid chord again. My description may make it sound frantic but it is delicate beyond description.
A work purely of modular analog synthesizer, Piotrowicz uses the simplicity of the sonic pallet to his advantage, creating a work that captures both the experimental dissonance of what is colloquy known as "noise" while propping up the entire work on a structure that’s more akin to electro-acoustic composition than the average Merzbow disc.
In celebration of the label's 10th year of activity as well as 60 releases, Gudrun Gut of Monika Enterprise has curated this compilation of the label's artists that manages to accurately capture the intent and vibe of the label, from electronic experimentations to pure, unadulterated sugary pop. Fans will be happy to know these are all exclusive tracks, and those unfamiliar with the label now have a perfect starting point.
Differing from the other reissues, this one collects a slew of singles and b-side tracks that were recorded in the band's early days from 1980 to 1983 for the legendary labels Factory Benelux, Les Disques deu Crepuscule and Sordide Sentimental. Although the tracks span four years, there still a sense of cohesion to Vini Reilly's delicate chamber pop (mostly) instrumentals, all of which still seem timeless.
The series of deluxe Japanese reissues of Sunn O)))'s oeuvre has peaked with this version of one of the group's finest moments. Long and undeservedly out of print, this early album has had its original vinyl artwork restored (the less than stellar art from the original CD has been relegated to an inner sleeve) and has been supplemented with a reworking of the album by Nurse With Wound. Reissue packages rarely look and sound so good.
Honey Owens' sophomore effort for Kranky encapsulates a mystical space with both moments of direct songwriting and more spaced out passages of psychedelia. The album's artwork suits it's contents: a giant siamese cat swims in moonlight bathed waters that are simultaneously issuing forth from and retreating into some sort of God-head before the stars and a plateau ablaze.
