Taking a side step from his series of numbered Astral Social Club volumes, Neil Campbell drops a quick two track smack round the head. Recorded live in April 2006, this may be titled after a bolt from the heavens but it’s much less rapturous than his usual material. This is a simpler, sweatier, and less delicately formed ASC release that shows him in a heads down noisier drive.
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 Matinée Orchestra’s debut album is a treat. It is folky and psychedelic but not like the current batch of artists like Devendra Banhart et al. Instead The Matinee Orchestra combines a mixture of traditional folk styles with modern technology and atypical instruments. The result is a wonderful collection of music with only a very occasional lapse in quality.
Field recording isn’t just pointing a microphone at your scene of choice and hitting record. There is a skill in capturing the atmosphere and life of the moment and allowing a listener to recreate the scene in their mind in vivid Technicolor. All of the artists featured on Recorded in the Field by… have this skill in spades.
As the title suggests, this album contains two improvised pieces. Each one was recorded live and shows Gaping Maw in great form. The mix is at times unbalanced due to the nature of the recordings but overall this is a fantastic document of two formidable performances.
No further proof of noise's validity needs to be made; there are plenty of people in the world messing around in their basements and making annoying sounds that their parents, neighbors, and roommates hate them for. Recorded at the Kongsberg Jazzfestival in 2005, Hana had the chance to annoy a whole crowd of people at once and likely succeeded.
Also on Utech, but of more interest than Anders Hana's release, is the multi-instrumental, sound generating outfit Silo. Cello, trumpet, and "traditional Maori instruments" in hand, this group does more than just pump out disjunctive noise; their soundscapes are intriguing and dark, like a stranger episode of X-Files sewn into a blanket and thrown over my head.
For their second album on Secret Eye, this Finnish group salvages gear from some electronic junkyard to make these gurgling basement recordings. Perhaps not, but that’s what the fidelity of this album suggests. It’s not such a bad thing, however, because the recording quality brings a murky depth to the album resulting in an underwater feeling, caressing the music and allowing it so swim.
A founding member of the late Argentinian trio Reynols, Courtis is no stranger to extreme media. Past works like symphonies for blank tapes, chickens, quartets for whistling kettles, and one piece called Reynols Plays The Eiffel Tower make a record of no-input feedback sound rather tame. And it is, in the best way.
This is an Ache label release of spirited electronic experimentation by eleven different artists, all reworking a sample of sound originally created using only a bicycle. Track #12 is that source material, which you are free to use to create your own piece. While some contributors emphasise rhythm, others favor smoother propulsion. Everyone avoids the temptation to hit-and-run with unnecessary power or weight, in favor of a lighter touch well-suited to this magnificent subject.
