Mountains Mountains Mountains
Mountains re-release this excellent slab of organic electroacoustic drone on Thrill Jockey. Following on from his exceptional Type long-player, Field Rituals, Koen Holtkamp regroups with cohort Brendon Anderegg for a long-awaited new Mountains release. Previously encountered on the duo's own Brooklyn-based Apestaartje label, the Mountains sound proved to be one of the most organic and natural examples of how acoustic instrumentation and digital electronics might be merged together. Plugging guit…
Ecstasy & Refreshment
Further down the highway from last year's ace split with Roy Orb D.MT., Food Pyramid reach for lush neo Krautrock heights on 'Ecstasy & Refreshment'. They first break orbit with 'Dexedream''s stellar trajectory powered by twin-panned guitars and rocking rhythm machines to zones of swirling vocals, plateauing at the dreamy psych-house plains of 'Pacifier' and spinning dubwise with the corkscrewing, Ekoplekz-meets-Sun Araw-like scramble of Deep Fantasy'. Up there, the chiming African guitar chops …
NYC, Hell 3:00 AM
James Ferraro takes inspiration from "the things I see" in his 'NYC, Hell 3:AM' dystopia. The follow-up to 'Sushi' is a wry reflection of his locale, "a surreal psychological sculpture of American decay and confusion" evoking imagery of "rats, metal landscape, toxic water, junkie friends, HIV billboards, evil news, luxury and unbound wealth, exclusivity, facelifts, romance, insane police presence and lonely people... all against the sinister vastness of Manhattan's alienating skyline." Of course…
Joke in the hole
Black Dice bod returns to DFA with a playful solo LP of sample-splitting psychotomimetic grooves. Like an unhinged, PCP-huffing cousin of Smith 'N Hack, Copeland deranges plunderphonic globs into stomping, jerry-rigged and unstable structures, equal parts garage rock, wayward blues, disco, techno and avant-garde noise collage. Yet far from being a total mess, 'Joke In The Hole' is possibly his most "musical" effort to date, enriched with fragments of melodic hooks that give something to hold ont…
Harmonie du Soir
Rhys Chatham's 'Harmonie Du Soir' presents three compositions. The title track is the first major piece written for the configuration of six electric guitars, electric bass and drums since Die Donnergtter (1986). The second is The Dream of Rhonabwy, a piece written for large brass ensemble and percussion, realized in 2012 by a 70-piece brass band called Harmonie de Pontarlier, lead by the French conductor Patrick Erard. The last track on the CD version and bonus download for the vinyl edition is…
Swisher
The Blondes duo refract their house abstractions through a smudged psychedelic prism on 2nd album 'Swisher' for RVNG Intl. Picking up where their eponymous debut left off, Sam Haar and Zach Steinman start with the kosmic organ swell and atom-split rhythms of 'Aeon' before locking down to a driving, technoid momentum with 'Bora Bora' which carries through the album in the glyding dub-house gait of 'Andrew' to the ornate, future-baroque arpeggios of 'Poland' to the laser-grabbing, Belgian-styled t…
Variations: a movement in chrome primitive
2014 new reissue. Having sat through two full cd’s of some of the most sublime, drifting piano based variations I’ve ever heard im not quite sure how to go about putting the experience into words. Whilst 'archival' may bring to mind dusty stacks in library basements, there's a slew of old material being reissued by labels at the moment that might just serve to extinguish this semantic connection. A digital reappraisal is American composer William Basinksi, whose extensive 'Variations: A Movement…
Nepenthe
Julianna Barwick returns with the successor to 2011's charming The Magic Place. Given how successful that self-recorded LP was, it’s surprising to see that the Louisiana-born singer has looked to an external producer to document and frame her work this time around, namely Sigur Ros associate Alex Somers. Barwick once again uses delay-pedals to build heaven-scraping towers of chorused plainsong out of her earnestly, achingly pretty soprano, placing them in what John Foxx - whose 90s’ ambient reco…
August Undone
Sweeping and rustically romantic neo-classical and drone flights seemingly dropped from the sky on the wonderful Students Of Decay label "From the very first seconds of “Within/Without,” listeners familiar with the output of Aquarelle, the nom-de-plume of Madison, WI-based sound artist Ryan Potts, will find themselves in territory that is at once familiar and new. This opening salvo explodes into being with the surging, analog fuzz blooms and preternatural sense of rhythm that endeared many to …
Field Recordings from Mali (Bush Taxi Mali)
Bush Taxi Mali: Field Recordings from Mali is an aural tour through the heart of Mali. These field recordings were made by Tucker Martine in 1998 while traveling throughout the West African country. This blend of bluesy ngonis, clamoring street sounds, the stunning voice of Jalimusa Amanita Diabaté (of the famous Diabaté family), passing radios, Fulani flutes, runaway sound systems, and chants from the Dogon country creates a unique portrait of Mali's rich musical heritage. Eventually Martine fo…
Resophonic
Welcome to the third installment in the 13 issues series. This time is the turn of Nicola Ratti from Milan, Italy, and Mark Templeton from Edmonton, Canada, whose musical work was mixed and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi and is accompanied by pictures taken by Leanne Olson, also from Edmonton. Nicola Ratti began his musical career as guitar player. Lately his approach is more focused on beat-analog experimentation and sound installation. He is currently working with Giuseppe Ielasi, with whom he fo…
Ill Fares The Land
**Digitalis debut from Koenraad Ecker, one half of Opal Tapes' Lumisokea, highly recommended if you're into Vainio, Joachim Nordwall, The Haxan Cloak. Initial copies on transparent red wax** Belgium's Koenraad Ecker swiftly follows his 'Apophenia' LP as part of the Lumisokea duo for Opal Tapes with a personalised invitation to his shadowy solo zones for Digitalis. Inhabiting space between slow techno and electro-acoustic dimensions, 'Ill Fares The Land' surveys similar soundscapes to Mika…
Way Down
Robert Turman‘s industrial genre-bending masterpiece album “Way Down†finally has been reissued! "Turman’s contribution to the industrial and synth wave underground in the late 1970s and 80s was unique and substantial. He first rose to prominence as part of NON, collaborating with Boyd Rice on the classic 1977 single ‘Mode of Infection’/'Knife Ladder’, before leaving to pursue his own more expansive solo vision. Turman released a number of cassettes ov…
A short visit to the city that bleeds
Recorded inside a parked rental car during the 2012 High Zero festival in Baltimore, MD, Preggy Peggy brings you kooky growls, gargles, burps, sneezes, Donald Duck impressions, half-poems, unintelligible squeaking, and even a couple of overdubs achieved by using her phone as a poor man's delay pedal. The human body is kind of a disgusting instrument, but it does have one huge advantage in that it goes everywhere you do. Here is a record that tickles with whispers if you listen quietly, but squab…
333 Loops (Volume 1)
333 Loops (Volume 1) is the first chapter of a CD/DL live series, which documents the sound events generated by the homonymous modular system, designed in 2011 by the Italian musician Emiliano Romanelli.
The system is composed by an archive of 333 pre-recorded sound loops, produced between 2008 and 2011 by a sound synthesis software played in different acoustic environments, and documented mainly with internal microphones of several digital and analog portable recorders. Subsequently, by a custo…
Sins of omission
A mutating web of feedback, choral echoes and lo-fi loops of various squeaking, rattling found sounds, settling gently into certain texture combinations before teasing the stasis through jolts of pitch bend or slow fades into somewhere else. It's a real nightmare collage: one minute it's a blast of screaming electronics, like someone tampering with the cockpit controls, and the next it's tornado of factory noise and alien sex. Musique concrete for the mind's darker, more paranoid recesses, with …
Unroof the house of the fishes
Long-awaited vinyl LP reissue of Unroof The House Of The Fishes by Key Ransone's Small Cruel Party. Originally released in 1993 as a limited to 50 copies tape on the Japan-based G.R.O.S.S label run by Akifumi Nakajima. Aube but now upgraded to vinyl by UK label Harbinger Sound. Mastered for vinyl by Scott Konzelmann of Chop Shop 'fame'. The LP is housed in a printed inner sleeve, along with a full-colour jacket, both featuring new artwork by the artist. Side A is a creeped contortion of ambient …
Despairs had governed me too long
(Magnus Granberg, Angharad Davies, Toshi Nakamura, Henrik Olsson, Ko Ishikawa, Anna Lindal, John Eriksson, Erik Carlsson, Leo Svensson Sander and Petter Wstberg). Another beautiful extended composition by Magnus Granberg, exquisitely played by an ensemble of fine musicians whose last two discs on Another Timbre both featured in The Wire's best of year CD lists for 2012 and 2013 respectively. 'Despairs Had Governed Me Too Long' is the third disc on Another Timbre by the Swedish-based ensemble Sko…
LL
Three strange and wonderful pieces from the Chicago-based duo, making music from objects found in the basement of a local thrift store. Sleevenotes by Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Clayton Mills : In 2010 we were invited to participate in an exhibition of site-specific installations and performances at Pilsen Vintage and Thrift, a local second-hand store in Pilsen, a predominantly Hispanic neighbourhood in Chicago. The owner had agreed to make the store's warehouse and basement available for art shows…
Shut In
'Shut In' is a "Beautiful piece of Easy Listening for Cabin Fever courtesy of Kevin Drumm" says Editions Mego, and who are we to argue? It yields some of the inimitable artist's most beautiful, oneiric sounds since his immense 'Imperial Distortion' album for Hospital Productions; in fact, we wouldn't be surprised if we were told it came from those same sessions. One singular piece unfolds for just over 30 minutes across two sides, slowly radiating a sort of soothing harmonic balm with an …