William Basinski has a remarkable ability to seemingly distil the essence of a moment in time and stretch it out to epic durations. So it seems appropriate for him to tackle the subject of black holes, where gravitational time dilation means that (to an outside observer) a clock will appear to slow and stop as […]
Author: dogrando
Oh my gosh. I can’t quite get over how awesome this is. It’s also kinda hard to describe, so [takes deep breath]. Let’s talk about the vocals first. There’s some semblance of a human voice on all eight tracks here. Some are spoken word, ranging from bits that sound synthesized (but may not be) to […]
Phillip Sollmann throws us a curveball at the start of this album: opener Oh, Lovely Appearance Of Death consists of a sort of ambient wash under an a capella rendition of the (predictably cheerful) Funeral Hymn For A Believer sung by visual and performance artist William T Wiley. It’s simple and affecting and certainly not […]
There’s always a danger with music based around looped strings: get it wrong, and it can stray into annoying-busker-outside-shopping-centre territory and there’s no coming back from there. Well, I’m pleased to report that we’re in far more appealing terrain here. Julia Kent is credited with cello, electronics, and sounds. Most of the tracks have the […]
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Nkisi: 7 Directions (LP, UIQ, January 2019)
I have to admit that I underestimated this record on my first casual listen through. Take the first track, called simply I: the thing that leapt out at me was the floaty synth line and the distorted vocal sample that scream Artificial Intelligence era IDM; which lazy pigeon-holing misses the vital fact that something very […]
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My albums of 2018
Annual round-up time! Lots of lovely rekkids this year (I think I say that every year, but it’s true every year!). In the classical/drone/ambient space, I loved records from Clarice Jensen, Lubomyr Melnyk, and Sarah Davachi. In the nice gentle techno space, there were corkers from ASC and (stretching the genre-bucket a bit, here) Automatisme. […]
Ooh, I’d forgotten how great this is. I streamed this a bunch when it came out in… was it July? I pre-ordered the vinyl, which I think was due to come out in September, and then I gradually forgot about it as the physical release date got pushed back. So this turning up was a […]
Ukrainian-born pianist Lubomyr Melnyk came up with what he called ‘continuous music’ sometime in the seventies, but seems to have been having a bit of a moment recently, at least in parts through his involvement with Erased Tapes. This is my first real exposure to his work, and, boy, what an experience it is. As far […]
The older I get, the less tolerant of excess I find myself. Which means that if you’re going to release a record that’s nearly two and a half hours long, you’d better have a good reason for it. Simply having a lot of stuff to get out isn’t enough; you need to be doing something […]
On the off chance that your knowledge of the Estonian experimental music scene is as non-existent as mine, here’s an introduction: Maarja Nuut is a fiddle player and folk singer, and Ruum (aka Hendrik Kaljujarv) is an electronic musician who cut his teeth on old Soviet analogue synths. This collaboration appears to be the first major […]
dogrando writes about some records 