Ponytail, Ponytales
Tommaso Clerico and Luca Sigurta' mixed noise, ambient, fake hip hop and weird techno: the new frontier of melanchofreak or if you prefer a ride on deformed flying horses. Second album full of guest stars, from the legend of American noise To Live and Shave in L.A. to the giants of no(w)wave Zeek Sheck and MC Trachiotomy, plus some incredible Italian artists such as Bologna Violenta, Madame P, IOIOI and Trashsound.
Get Lost
And yet another killer album from the ever-productive Mark McGuire (Emeralds). It just keeps getting better, as he delivers another fine set of tunes in his perfected style. A few more electronic elements than usual and even some voices, but still the unique blend of feel-good riffs, electric and acoustic loops and melodies that just stick in the head. This album is chockablock with short hits and one long jam of blissed-out McGuire ambience. Awesome. Electric and acoustic guitar, vocals,…
The state we are in
The first thing this CD reminded me of was Tape...then I checked out the press release and it turns out that Tape's Johan Berthling (also very recently sighted on that Fire! with Jim O'Rourke record) is in fact one-third of this band, the other two being Andreas Soderstrom (Ass) and Per Eklund on drums. It is, as you would expect, gently paced instrumental stuff, slightly pastoral-sounding, with intertwining guitars and a some subtle Hammond organ and trumpet bits. This is a mightily rel…
Maria Minerva's Cabaret Cixous
Over the course of a 12", cassette, and a stream of ace youtube vids, Maria Minerva has emerged as one of the most interesting artistes to come into leftfield-pop focus over the last 12 months. 'Cabaret Cixous' is her debut album, a coruscating water-bed of mottled '90s dance-pop memes writhing under blankets of slyly sexy new age synths while her dreamy vocals whisper and croon seductively suggestive lyrics. It's not quite aural soft porn, but there's an inescapably lascivious element to …
Emeralds
Emeralds is the new album by guitarist/songwriter, producer and sound architect Robin Guthrie. Another uncompromising step along the path that is his vision, enveloping the listener with the aesthetic enchantment which has become his trademark. From the opening notes of ‘Digging for Gold’ to the last echoes of ‘The Little Light Fades’, Emeralds takes us on a voyage which moves our emotions, stimulates our senses and leaves us feeling that the world must be a better place seen throug…
Uffuff
12” with 1 new Quehenberger orginal (Uffuff) and a trio of near remixes from his lastest album Hazard (released as LATON 047 in 2009). Patrick Pulsinger tackles New Beat, in his unique future funk sound. A welcome return of Elin (who hasn’t been on a Mego record since 1995, check MEGO 003). He slurps out a version of Hey Gert, making it into an slamming slowed down twister of a track.This leaves the pumping exccess of Altroys (Minimal Soul) Keep Talking remix.
Heartland's Suite
More cosmic psychedelia on Aguirre now, this time from Stellar Om Source, which is the project of Dutch visionary Christelle Gualdi, who also designed the album's crazy neo-psych nightmare of a sleeve. Tripped out stuff. As for the record itself, we're in synth central here, drinking a synth and coke and sucking on a syntharette. The first side is largely based around motorik drone workouts with simple melodies and immersive textures. There's no percussion and the whole experience is quit…
Lunar
Secret Colors offers up his latest, a bubbling album called ‘Lunar’. Homespun ambient soundscapes taking you on a space trek without any sort of cliche spacey noise. Glitchy without being abrasive, hollowed out yet wholly satisfying. You’ll find a new jungle planet with this as the soundtrack. Its about to get humid. (Leftist Nautical Antiques)
Civiltà Paleospaziale
Italian minimal synth & drum machine duo, another side project by Ottaven/Canedicoda, abstract dread sounds with elements of clinical drone and throbbing frequencies to a more introspective ambient chaos
Lacunae
Sound and video artist MPLD works in a world of sentiment and detachment, creating a Lost & Found aesthetic uniquely his own. Lost are the old Kodachrome slides which make up the foundation of his work. Found are the feelings of misplaced memories the slides conjure, as well as the sounds — processed and amplified — of the projectors that bring those images back to life. What’s seen on lacunae is a straight shot of the screen during a rehearsal for a concert, although that might not be clear to …
Fragen
Kluster - Cluster - and now Qluster - an extraordinary shedding of skin of one of the most important german electronic groups. Hans-joachim roedelius was there from the beginning (kluster from 1969 on with conrad schnitzler and dieter moebius; cluster from 1971 on with dieter moebius; qluster with onnen bock since 2010). Little need be said about roedelius, whose collaborations with conrad schnitzler, cluster and harmonia earned him a worldwide reputation as a pioneer of electronic music. Onnen …
Echtzeit
LP version. Includes CD. The third incarnation of the legendary krautrock project Kluster/Cluster expands its audience with the contemplative, mature, and intelligent electronic music of Echtzeit. Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Onnen Bock, and Armin Metz are Qluster, founded under the name of Kluster in 1969 by Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Conrad Schnitzler.
Kluster were responsible for two milestones of electronic music.
Schnitzler quit the band two years later, leaving Roedelius and Moebius
to c…
Backworld
Terrific, 9/10 on Foxy Digitalis...Belgian artist Hans Dens puts out his sophomore effort, Backworld, after releasing his highly praised work, Future Life, last year on Aguirre. Dens uses synthscapery to construct his dystopia. Usually, artists who go to work and rely heavily on the synth create pleasure-induced bliss, but Innercity is all about the beautiful tension that the synth lends itself to between tranquility and melancholia. Good times can be had in the urban tragedy, but overall life…
Okkupation
Thomas Rehnert lives and works in Berlin. He was deeply influenced by the European free jazz of the 1970s, and in West Berlin in the 1980s he played percussion in various punk bands. In the world of punk and experimental music of these years, he began to occupy himself with electro-acoustic music, machine music and automata. He builds sound machines from analogue modular synthesizer systems that are voltage- controlled and steer themselves.His formative principle of organization is variation by …
Hammond Pops
After hard and insisting work to revitalise the art of instrument bashing Golden Serenades has turned towards newer hunting grounds: the Organ. The queen of instruments - or more specifically the instrument as it sounds in the hands of organ master Sigbjørn Apeland - is the starting point for GS´s sonic experiments on "Hammond Pops". The result is a drone piece of highest quality. Slowly deveolping, massive sound breaking in and out of the source material from the organ. Always moving tow…
Lumiere (For Synthesized and Concrete Sound)
This real masterpiece of Concrète and Synthesized music was no more available since its original manufacture in 1973. Dub Taylor is an US composer, producer, engineer and designer born June 22, 1948 in Burbank, California. He has many creative facets: recording and mastering engineer, record producer as well as composer, graphic designer and visual artist. He has studied with pianist Richard Bunger and composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Not long after the release of Lumière, Taylor established Varg…
Radian lines
Wet Hair heads Shawn Reed and Ryan Garbes have been jamming sideways strains of long-lensed electricity music for years now, but their trajectories as visual artists arc back even farther. So after a small infinity of J-cards and zines and LP sleeves designs, it’s a real pleasure to finally be able to present a preferential suite of some of their finest (and, till now, unseen) compositions in a glossy, full-color, pro-printed 22-panel art volume, bookended by a brand new black vinyl 33 RPM singl…
Some Days Are Better Than Others
We have waited with eager anticipation to release Matthew Cooper's spellbinding soundtrack to Some Days Are Better Than Others since before his creative breakthrough album, Similes (released under his more widely known Eluvium moniker) was even made. The film stars James Mercer (Broken Bells, The Shins) and Carrie Brownstein (Portlandia, Sleater-Kinney) as strangers whose lives occasionally intersect as they navigate their way through the struggles of personal attachment and disconnection. When …
Mureedil
**300 copies** Tonton Macoute is a French band formed in 2006. With a stock of cheap instruments, the trio wanted to find a dense, subtle and massive sound, in order to create motorik soundscapes, psychedelic drones, electric hypnosis and timeless storms. Rehearsals and recordings took place in a basement. Using the studio as an instrument, all the tapes were re-worked to produce this LP record titled “Mureedil”. Early listeners mentioned experimental rock and compared the music of Tonton Macout…
House
CD edition, 'House' is the 2nd official full-length offering by Cleveland, Ohio duo MIST featuring Sam Goldberg (of Radio People) and John Elliott (Emeralds, Outer Space, Imaginary Softwoods etc) after 2009's self-titled debut effort on Amethyst Sunset. A suite consisting of 7 complex, layered compositions shows new progression in composition and melody from the duo. From the lightning fast, bittersweet crescendo of 'Twin Lanes' to the dramatic chord progressions of 'I Can Still Hear Your Voice'…