November 30, 2013 at 6:22 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Murmurists: I Cannot Tell You Where I Am Until I Love You
Consisting of 22 movements spread over a single 45 minute track, this album is a sort of industrial spoken word psychodrama, featuring poetry and dialogue by Bryan Lewis Saunders, Pixyblink, Michael Holloway and others, all performed individually without awareness of the final project. Even without any overlying concept connecting the spoken pieces, the reoccurring voices, characteristics and phrases become familiar, and the liner note credits alluding to personal ads frame this some sort of a vague love story. Musically, it drifts through experimental, dark ambient and electro-acoustic textures, with some distorted industrial beats. After it’s all over, you feel like you’ve been taken somewhere else, but you’re not sure where.
November 30, 2013 at 5:24 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Freelove Fenner: Do Not Affect A Breezy Manner
Short album of indie-pop miniatures from a Montreal-based band. The foundation is minimalist post-punk bass/guitar/drums/vocals, but there’s plenty of experimentation with tape loops, analog synthesizers and pianet. The songs are cleanly produced and sophisticated, never settling into predictable structures and hooks. Sometimes it faintly resembles High Llamas or Sea & Cake minus the lush instrumentation. There’s also a few short BBC Radiophonic Workshop-style interludes. Feels a little isolated, so if you’re going to be spending this winter that way, this might compliment that.
November 30, 2013 at 1:36 pm | Posted in The Answer Is In The Beat | Leave a comment
3:01 AM Boards of Canada ~ Sixtyten ~ Music Has The Right To Children ~ Warp/Skam
3:07 AM Boards of Canada ~ Turquoise Hexagon Sun ~ Music Has The Right To Children ~ Warp/Skam
3:12 AM Boards of Canada ~ Basefree ~ Twoism ~ Warp/Music70
3:18 AM Autechre ~ C/Pach ~ Tri Repetae ~ Warp
3:24 AM Boyle ~ 4Feb2013 ~ 2013Disc1 ~ self-released
3:26 AM Bernard Parmegiani ~ Accidents/Harmoniques ~ De Natura Sonorum ~ Recollection GRM
3:33 AM Bernard Parmegiani ~ Dedans-Dehors ~ L’Oeil Ecoute / Dedans-Dehors ~ Recollection GRM
3:52 AM Emptyset ~ Disperse ~ Recur ~ Raster-Noton
3:56 AM Eluvium ~ By The Rails ~ Nightmare Ending ~ Temporary Residence
3:59 AM Deepchord ~ Plankton ~ 20 Electrostatic Soundfields ~ Soma
4:01 AM 303 Committee ~ Gemini Stare ~ Conquest ~ Inam Records
4:06 AM Jel ~ Thnk4u ~ Late Pass ~ Anticon
4:09 AM Daedelus ~ Frission ~ Drown Out ~ Anticon
4:14 AM Daniel Bortz ~ In The Yard ~ Patchwork Memories ~ Suol
4:17 AM Cuscino ~ Only The Beginning ~ Eternality ~ Fashion Sells Music
4:20 AM Alluxe ~ Shades ~ Nomad ~ Electronic Creatives
4:24 AM Trentemoller ~ Trails ~ Lost ~ In My Room
4:33 AM Nathan Felix ~ Broken Down The Walls ~ The Curse The Cross & The Lion ~ self-released
4:38 AM Magik Markers ~ Acts Of Desperation ~ Surrender To The Fantasy ~ Drag City
4:43 AM Throwing Muses ~ Morning Birds 1 ~ Purgatory/Paradise ~ Harper Collins/It Books
4:46 AM Crystal Antlers ~ Paper Thin ~ Nothing Is Real ~ Innovative Leisure
4:49 AM Stillsuit ~ 3 ~ Stillsuit ~ self-released
4:50 AM Monkey Power Trio ~ Downtown Woman ~ Misreattached 7″ ~ Pocahontas Swamp Machine Recordings
4:52 AM Splinter Cake ~ Forever Sleeping ~ split 7″ w/ Foot Ox ~ Folktale
4:55 AM Mutual Benefit ~ Golden Wake ~ Love’s Crushing Diamond ~ Other Music Recording Co.
5:00 AM Ken Kozora ~ Perceptions ~ Music For Lasers ~ self-released
5:06 AM 15.60.75 The Numbers Band ~ Narrow Road ~ Jimmy Bell’s Still In Town ~ Exit Stencil
5:12 AM Fuzz ~ You Won’t See Me ~ Live In San Francisco ~ Castle Face
5:16 AM Thee Oh Sees ~ Crushed Grass (Demo) ~ Singles Collection Volume Three ~ Castle Face
5:18 AM Bardo Pond ~ Taste ~ Peace On Venus ~ Fire
5:23 AM Cross Record ~ Dirt Nap ~ Be Good ~ Ba Da Bing
5:29 AM Kandinsky Trio ~ Silent Faustus Act III (Songs Of Home) ~ On Light Wings ~ Omnitone
5:33 AM The Gories ~ I Think I’ve Had It ~ The Shaw Tapes: Live In Detroit 5/27/88 ~ Third Man
5:35 AM Orchestra Of Spheres ~ Moro C con ~ Vibration Animal Sex Brain Music ~ Fire
5:39 AM Black Hearted Brother ~ (I Don’t Mean To) Wonder ~ Stars Are Our Home ~ Slumberland
5:43 AM Cave ~ Shikaakwa ~ Threace ~ Drag City
5:48 AM Heaven’s Gate ~ I’m Forgetting ~ Transmuting ~ Inflated
5:51 AM TV Ghost ~ Cloud Blue Moments ~ Disconnect ~ In The Red
5:55 AM Windy & Carl ~ Instrumental 2/Matchbox (demo) ~ Instrumentals 7″ ~ Burnt Hair
November 29, 2013 at 9:30 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
303 Committee: Conquest CDr
Latest release from one of Ryan Huber’s newest projects. This one focuses on noise, drone and field recordings. Charred atmospheres, but still a pulse and forward momentum. Some of it does feel like staring into the face of death, however, particularly “Gemini Stare” and “Adoniram”. “Damascene” and “The Tall Cedars” are more minimal, then the rest plunge back into the void. Hopeless and squalid. You might not make it out alive.
November 29, 2013 at 9:11 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Daniel Bortz: Patchwork Memories
Debut full-length from Daniel Bortz, co-founder of minimal/tech-house collective Pastamusik. Not familiar with his earlier stuff, but I feel like this is the type of album that could be a good sort of crossover album to people who aren’t hardcore into techno, similar to Nicolas Jaar or Matthew Dear. It starts off with “Alone At Home”, a downtempo track with late-night autotune, then goes into a series of melodic, lovelorn dance tracks with vocals. Seems to run the gamut emotionally, from yearning (“Spend The Night”) to lovstruck ecstasy (“First Love”) to depression (“The Misery”). “Bright” is another short, sensuous downtempo track, and “Satisfaction” is a chuggy midtempo synth-disco track with vocoders. “In the Yard” is another melancholy (but brightly melodic) downtempo track, followed by “Pictures”, a depressive dance track with deep, moaning vocals. “My Cats Won’t Let Me Sleep” is a static-covered instrumental with pianos and sharp viola-like synth sounds, and “Friends” ends the album with the phrases “so many friends” and “I’m so happy to have you home” concurrently looped, making it seem like a bittersweet ending to a kind of lonely album, but you feel like something hasn’t been resolved.
November 29, 2013 at 8:07 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Jel: Late Pass
First proper full-length from sampler-wielding Anticon veteran Jel since 2006’s
Soft Money. He’s still sticking to the SP1200 he’s had since he was a teenager, and he’s still pushing the limits of what can be done with the instrument. There’s also plenty of soft-spoken rapping/singing on this album, and the lyrics are listed in the liner notes without designating which tracks they’re from. Both “Late Pass” and “Breathe” find Jel warning us “don’t get too comfortable”, with “Late Pass” in the context of a swampy, dubby hip-hop track with semi-instructional lyrics, and in “Breathe” being the only lyrics of a swift, forward-looking instrumental with a bit of noir-ish guitar. “thnk4u” is a short, uptempo breaky instrumental with lots of scratching and some obscured vocals. Tracks 3-5 get into more lyrical territory, with “Look Up” having a detailed beat in line with other recent works by longtime members of the Anticon stable. The track also seems to weave a pretty impressive tight web of instrumentation, with distorted organ, guitar and horns, making it hard to tell what’s being played by what instrument, or if they’re even those instruments at all.
November 29, 2013 at 7:31 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Deepchord: 20 Electrostatic Soundfields
Detroit’s Rod Modell has been making spacious, aquatic ambient dub techno under aliases such as Deepchord, Echospace and cv313 for well over a decade. This album is another extended (nearly 80 minute) meditation, heavy on moist atmospherics and with less emphasis on beats than some of his other work. Many of the tracks are under 2 minutes, and function as transitional interludes, leading smaller, concentrated moments through the labyrinth of extended, repetitive rhythmic tracks. Tracks such as “Prayer Wheel” are steeped in hissing atmospherics without beats to guide them, while “De Wallen” and 10-minute epic “Aerosphere” are closer to the throbbing dub techno of Porter Ricks and the whole Basic Channel/Chain Reaction axis. “Oceanic” is appropriately wide and vast, but it doesn’t progress much, making it feel deceptively deep. “Fern”, on the other hand, builds with a lurching slo-mo beat and tinted dub effects, and a proper dub bassline. “Barcelona” has filtered street chatter, and is a bit reminiscent of Burial’s ambient interludes, but stretched out over 9 minutes. “Bronze” is similar, but it’s a 2 minute interlude and feels a bit more tense and worried, and it has a very brief soft IDM-ish beat segueing into the rain-fog of “Lotus Leaves”, which has some spare psych-dub echo ripples behind the rainy hissing. “Amsterdam Remnant 6” is a bit more of a straightforward percussive dub-techno track, heavy on the dub reggae flavor but with also a bit of glitchy delay. “Seaweed” is another swirly haze of a track, which seems to shift more the closer you listen. The final 3 tracks are full of rain, street sounds (laughter, dialogue, footsteps) and brittle moonlight, with closer “Rooftop” having the most close-miked rain crackle.
November 17, 2013 at 11:52 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Clearcut: Messages 12″ EP
Illbient lives! This is the first solo release from former WPKN DJ Davo, whose radio show got me into all sorts of weird awesome music when I was a kid, and helped inspire me to be a freeform DJ. 3 tracks of cut-n-paste downtempo, chock full of spaced out samples (pretty sure that’s Sun Ra on “Teleportation”), scratches, reggae drum fills, trumpets, and deep bass. “Depends On You” takes up the entire second side, and it sounds straight off a late ’90s WordSound release, and that is a super high compliment. For more sounds, check out
DJU’s Soundcloud, and to order this record, Paypal $15 to sammydvsjr at gmail dot com.
November 17, 2013 at 11:28 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Unicorn Hard-On: Weird Universe LP
File under most anticipated debut album of the year, by far. Val Martino is a noise scene veteran (I still have a CDR she did with Japanese Karaoke Afterlife Experiment and Knifestorm about 10 years ago that I bought in my friend’s kitchen, probably from Ren Schofield) and she’s been pretty far ahead of the curve as far as noise musicians adopting beats and doing more techno-ish music. UHO used to feature cheerleader-like fog machine karaoke vocals along with bright synths, but her newer material is instrumental and seems to focus more on dark, pounding grooves and squiggly synths. Much more polished and clear than her earlier stuff, but still very much a noise scene techno record. Plenty of feedback noise, crunchy beats, and messy synths. There’s even some calmer, slower, more melodic IDM-ish stuff (“Night Diamond”), some brightly shining Detroit-influenced techno (“Houndstooth”), and a slow, dizzy space-out (“Wet Pet”), all before the giddy, high-speed rush of “Mysterious Prism”. Seriously fun, playful, pretty, and just plain joy-inducing music.
November 17, 2013 at 10:58 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
People Like Us: Don’t Think Right, It’s All Twice
I love how Discogs notifies me of new releases by anyone I own anything by, because it lets me know of things like this, a new People Like Us CD, on a new label, which I suspect might be self-released, but I can’t tell for sure. Too bad international shipping is more expensive than ever, this ended up costing $19. But anything PLU is worth it. This album consists of recordings made for audiovisual performances from 2006-2013. It’s probably the most straightforward A+B mashup release PLU has ever done, it seems like there’s far less glitch/shredding audio effects than previous work. The samples also seem a lot more recognizable than before. Not that there weren’t plenty of recognizable samples in her work before, but it just seems way more oldies radio this time around. Plenty of Beatles, Elvis, Carpenters, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Rod McKuen, Van Halen (David Lee Roth a capellas never get old), and LOTS of Velvet Underground. And also some Laurie Anderson, which sounds a little poignant coming out so close to Lou Reed’s death. There’s still some of the “irritainment” magic here, as on “I’m Dreaming”, which samples many different saccharine, maudlin versions of “White Christmas”, but cutting them off after the first two words. “Crazy” similarly chops up Willie Nelson saying “I’m crazy” with no further context supplied, along with a previous PLU staple, The Carpenters’ “(They Long To Be) Close To You”. PLU & Ergo Phizmiz’s cover of “Femme Fatale” appears, featuring the duo’s naive, Chris & Cosey-esque vocals mashed up with songs from
Singing In The Rain,
Mary Poppins and
Bambi, as well as the original VU recording. The song titles are generally as punny as the album’s (one’s even called “Once A Pun A Time”), my favorite being the Negativland reference “Panic As Usual And Avoid Shopping”. Fun as usual, but I don’t feel like this album is quite as weird or subversive as PLU’s work usually is.
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