Hour 1
9:01 PM Immaculate Palace ~ Schizophrenic Ghost ~ Old Haunts ~ Immaculate Palace
9:04 PM Super Thing ~ LIVE!!! ~ Local Music Show ~ WCBN
9:44 PM Orphanage ~ Always Underground ~ WCBN Local Music Show 8-8-2012 ~ WCBN
9:55 PM White Dwarf ~ Badd Ddreams ~ White Dwarf ~ Raveyard Hour 2
10:03 PM Frank Pahl ~ Hombre Lobo ~ Fishers O Wufmen ~ self-released
10:08 PM Duke Newcomb ~ Energy Building ~ Ground Zero ~ self-released
10:11 PM Duke Newcomb ~ Nothing ~ Ground Zero ~ self-released
10:16 PM Duke Newcomb ~ Ground Zero ~ Ground Zero ~ self-released
10:21 PM Duke Newcomb ~ LIVE IN STUDIO! ~ Local Music Show ~ WCBN
10:35 PM Duke Newcomb ~ Masculine Camero ~ Ground Zero ~ self-released
10:38 PM Dabrye ~ Hyped-Up Plus Tax ~ One/Three ~ Ghostly International
10:41 PM Shigeto ~ Ritual Howl ~ No Better Time Than Now ~ Ghostly International
10:46 PM JDSY ~ The Harmonica ~ 7 ~ self-released
10:50 PM KILN ~ Acre ~ Meadow:Watt ~ Ghostly International
10:58 PM Warren Defever’s Control Panel ~ Civil War Xmas Third ~ Music Inspired By Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War ~ Isonauta
mic break music = Tomorrowland: Sequence Of The Negative Space Changes
Hour 1
3:04 AM Duotron/Severous ~ track 3 ~ Electronic Soundscapes ~ cd-r
3:15 AM Coil ~ Amethyst Deceivers ~ Live Two – Moscow ~ World Serpent
3:21 AM Dreamcatcher ~ Against All Odds ~ Less Self Is More Self ~ Ecstatic Peace!
3:28 AM Orphanage ~ Pick A Color ~ WCBN Local Music Show 8-8-2012 ~ WCBN
3:38 AM Gcttcatt ~ U R The Sony Of My Life ~ AmpErase ~ Mego
3:44 AM Kattoo ~ Place6 ~ Places ~ Hymen
3:51 AM Kid606 ~ Twirl ~ PS I Love You ~ Mille Plateaux Hour 2
4:00 AM Chrome Hoof ~ Varkada Blues ~ Chrome Black Gold ~ Cuneiform
4:07 AM Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra ~ Austerity Blues ~ Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything ~ Constellation
4:20 AM Burial ~ Hiders ~ Rival Dealer ~ Hyperdub
4:25 AM Kid Droid ~ Guns (Plexus Instruments’ Hypersleep LaPierre Remix) ~ Project Onyx ~ Droidsong
4:34 AM Debruit & Alsarah ~ Sharara ~ Aljawal ~ Soundway
4:40 AM Ghost Bike ~ Up In Her Room, Just Sleeping ~ Sun Of The Dead ~ n5MD
4:44 AM Somatic Responses ~ Adverts ~ Adverts ~ Component
4:49 AM Caustic Window ~ Italic Eyeball ~ Compilation ~ Rephlex
4:53 AM Martial Canterel ~ Two Before Four ~ Refuge Underneath ~ Wierd Records Hour 3
5:01 AM Common Factor ~ The Sky I Stand Under ~ Dreams Of Elsewhere ~ Planet E
5:07 AM Perth ~ Sunday Stroll ~ What’s Your Utopia? ~ Hidden Shoal
5:11 AM Patrick Cowley ~ Nightcrawler ~ School Daze ~ Dark Entries
5:17 AM Immaculate Palace ~ Man Inside My Brain ~ Old Haunts ~ Immaculate Palace
5:20 AM Figure Study ~ Maze ~ Figure Study ~ Dark Entries
5:24 AM Max + Mara ~ Rest In War ~ Less Ness ~ Dark Entries
5:35 AM Rangefinder ~ Balance Drive ~ Harmony State ~ A Guide To Saints
5:40 AM Nils Frahm ~ Hammers ~ Spaces ~ Erased Tapes
5:44 AM Blevin Blectum ~ Manners Melting ~ Emblem Album ~ Aagoo
5:50 AM Foom ~ Foon ~ No Fidelity Audio ~ No Fidelity Audio
5:54 AM Dhow ~ Brightwork ~ Dhow ~ Inam Records
Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra: Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything
Newest album from Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s most well-known offshoot. Much more concise and song-driven (but still sprawling and epic), not to mention psychedelic, than previous efforts. Tense, grinding, furious, but still ecstatic, even joyful, in its rage and world-weariness. “Fuck Off Get Free (For The Island Of Montreal)” starts with a short spoken sample of a child speaking about living in Montreal, then gets down to business, keeping up the intense pace until the last few minutes, when it comes to the arresting “hold me under” chorus. “Austerity Blues” starts with sparse guitar, adds in layers of noise guitar, drums, vocals, strings, etc, builds up then settles into a motorik rhythm around 5 minutes. Then keeps building more, vocals, etc, then calms down around 9 minutes. Soft vocals, then last few minutes goes to noise feedback. “Take Away These Early Grave Blues” starts with spoken words (“…they just got closed minds, that’s all”), gets right to it with anti-police lyrics and striking violin and guitars. “Little Ones Run” is a total change of pace, a quiet, fragile, childlike acoustic piano folk song. “What We Loved Was Not Enough” is a slow-burning lament about the destruction of the world, followed by uprising. “Rains Thru The Roof At Thee Grande Ball-Room (For Capital Steez)” begins with an excerpt from a radio interview (which is also translated into French), explaining about how music is an expression of one’s self, not just a part-time gig or hobby. Once the song comes in, it’s sort of a sad comedown, keeping a steady tom-tom rhythm, mellotron, piano, and lyrics about holding on. Almost sounds like recent Flaming Lips, actually. A strangely subdued and straightforward ending to such an electrifying album.
Beautiful cross-cultural collaboration between French producer Débruit and Sudanese singer Alsarah. Broken, left-field choppy hip-hop meets lovely vocals in Arabic. Sort of like a modern update on Ofra Haza, solo or as being sampled by Coldcut while remixing Eric B. & Rakim. Some traditional instruments and melodies, and lots of drum machines and off-kilter synth rhythms. Some uptempo juke-influenced crazy hi-hat moments, but overall pretty steady, forward-thinking and exciting. Definitely avoids a lot of the east-meets-west cliches that have made most ’90s “world music” sound completely dated today. If you’re more interested in this because of Alsarah’s vocals than Débruit’s production, check out “Jamilla X.0 ٣. X.0 جميلة”, which is mostly a capella except for some minimal bass and lots of spacey echo, and “Loulia لولية” , which is just vocals except for some minimal percussion. Alsarah sits “Khartoum خرطوم” out, however, instead letting Débruit chop up vocal samples over a frenetic juke beat. “Jibal Alnuba جبال النوبة” also has more of a relatively straightforward beat and gorgeous vocal performance from Alsarah, which is combined with some vocal effects towards the end. “Alsahra الصحراءة” is a less lyrical, more danceable track, revolving around a haunting distorted vocal loop. “Hawya هوية” ends the album on another minimal note, with fluttering vocals layered on top of gentle, chipper synths and strumming, doused with plenty of delay. The whole album is just a really creative, unforced, natural sounding blend of different sounds and cultures.
Unassuming little album of originals and remixes by a DJ/producer who is apparently the founder of the drum’n’bass scene in St. Louis. Not strictly a d’n’b release, and even the tracks that are d’n’b are more of the intelligent side of the genre. “Guns (Plexus Instruments’ Hypersleep LaPierre Remix)” could totally be on a Boards Of Canada or Plaid album in the late ’90s. 2 remixes by Monad are excursions into deep tech-house. Most of the original tracks are kind of downtempo and minimal, but “Onyx” is a nice quasi-industrial standout, maybe dark and dirty enough to appear on a release on Hymen, and “They’re Coming For You” is a nice breakbeat/acid-heavy 808 State-type jam. Nothing groundbreaking, but a little refreshing, definitely worth checking out.
Minimalist solo piano works. The pieces are extremely simple and repetitive, usually consisting of just a few notes, but the recording environment (a church in Berlin) and the sustain and delay transforms them into something that blurs time and space. “Set Ikon Set Remit” starts off with just 2 notes, and gradually clusters more, ending up as a thick wall of sustained piano that becomes too blurry to discern individual notes. “Ellipsis”, “The Voice Imitator” and “Poul” do similar tactics, fluttering and swelling and becoming thick audio fog, although “Ellipsis” and “The Voice Imitator” sound a bit less treated and more human. “Posture”, “9er On/Off Switch” and “Moth to Taper” are slower-moving, focusing on individual notes moving at a glacial pace. The more flurry-like pieces tend to work best to these ears, the slower ones can seem kind of awkward.
Irisarri is best known to these ears as The Sight Below, a project which has released two incredible albums on Ghostly International. His work under is own name steps away from beat-based ambient techno, and instead works with chilly textures which ebb and flow gracefully, awash in static and surface noise crackle. The overwhelmingly foggy cover art and oceanic title are perfect descriptors for this, as it’s just so vast, blurry, and enveloping. The tracks establish their atmosphere and loop endlessly, but usually for the last few minutes, they’ll add a distorted texture or some other element that takes it to a different location. “The Witness” has the most immediately striking melody, and it strikes you down. “Daybreak Comes Soon” plays with subtly reversing piano notes. “Lesser Than The Sum Of Its Parts” ends the album on a particularly beautiful/dreary note, with (what sounds like) lilting steel guitar and vocal textures, then in the last minute, swarms up and quickly cuts back to hushed vocals before fading away.
Interbellum: This was an important place in their lives
Second album from Chicago artist Brendan Burke. Minimal, melancholy neo-classical, mainly utilizing piano and strings, but with plenty of field recordings and chatter. “Some Rather Poor Advice” has pulsating, jittering bass tones underneath the slowly paced piano melodies. “I Wish You Hadn’t Done That Richard” is a long, sad piano and string dirge with plenty of voices chattering underneath (and even some horses clopping by, it sounds like), which barely become audible enough to understand, but it doesn’t matter. You’re just too absorbed in the gloriously bummed out mood to care what anyone’s trying to talk about. “We Are All Micromentalists Now” obscures the music even more, with piano and synth softly playing underneath the loud whirr of cars passing by, and just general outside ambience. “He Looked Beyond My Faults (And Saw My Need)” is a return to the studio, with no more field recordings, just piano and crystalline synth tones. “Cayo Costa” is another long droney piece with spoken recordings and a constant machine hum, along with its melancholy piano and strings. Constant seems to be the operative word here; it just keeps going, occasionally focusing on a heart-tugging string part, but otherwise not really building to a climax. Is it hopeless? Is it depressing? Is there a reason to continue? Who knows. All that matters is that this exists, and that you’re in this moment, and that regardless of anything else in the world, right now, this feels right.
Gloomy darkwave drone from New Zealand. Blends a gloriously uneasy synth drone texture with ringing guitars reminiscent of the best vintage Factory and 4AD, and delayed shadowy vocals. Very lonely, sheltered, can’t-deal-with-the-world, which means (sadly) I can relate to this all too well and feel perfectly at home listening to it. The crows cawing throughout “Being In The World” feel like they’re circling overhead, giving it an extra grey, doomy feel, but not in a metal way. “To Deny The Inevitable” starts with a spoken sample saying that “this whole area used to be a sacred place”, and the music retains that feeling of something which used to be glorious and has now just faded into oblivion. “Into The Negative” is where things really plumb the depths, with a loop that sounds like wind blowing through a dungeon, mixed with completely grim synth lines. So full of despair, so hopeless, and it goes on for seven and a half minutes and you just feel like there’s no way out. The way I’m feeling right now, I don’t want to find a way out, I’m feeling totally comfortable listening to such grim, gloomy music like this.
The Answer Is In The Beat 