Is it weird to buy soundtracks for films you’ve never seen and basically have no interest in seeing? I dunno. Anyway, I kind of impulse-purchased this, what with it being limited edition and all. I’ve never met an Erik K Skodvin (Svarte Greiner, Deaf Center) record I didn’t like, and Raúl Pastor Medall aka Rauelsson has […]
Author: dogrando
Curious story. I was listening to the Atom™ album Leidgut in my kitchen in 2009 and the bit where it incorporates the effect of audio interference from a GSM mobile phone (remember that? the little morse-cody blip pattern?) and just then my partner walked in, checked the wiring, realized what was going on, and laughed at […]
Categories
Alva Noto: Unieqav (2LP, Noton, March 2018)
Ah, lovely Alva Noto. This record is a follow-up to 2008’s Unitxt and 2011’s Univrs and very much a continuation of those works, although with elements of the Xerrox sequence in there too — it’s considerably less surprising than Glass, his latest collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto. There are those skittering glitchy clicky beats that I just love, there are those […]
You’ll think I’m silly, but I almost didn’t want to listen this: I love Alva Noto, I love Ryuichi Sakamoto, I love Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sakamoto’s latest album was almost heartbreakingly perfect, and I didn’t want to be disappointed. Well, I’m glad I got over myself, because this is a magical and wondrous […]
Anna von Hausswolf’s 2016 Touch 12″ Källan (Betatype) was an awesome bit of drone-rock’n’pipe-organ. It turns out that Hausswolf is quite handy as a vocalist and songwriter, too. I guess this album is a bunch more mainstream, but it’s none the worse for that. Hausswolf sings — I’m not good on vocal styles, but if you […]
This may be a foolish thing to say — I am far from an expert — but this strikes me as a very ECM-ish record. The line-up is strings, piano, and drums (Time Is A Blind Guide are the band; Thomas Strønen takes the writing and percussion credits). It is, for the most part, relentlessly sparse and […]
I’m not quite sure what genre this little 18-minute beauty from Portuguese producer Ivo Pacheco is, except that it certainly isn’t grunge. A lot of the sounds are basically rave: rhodesy keyboards, synths so fuzzy you reckon he must have scraped them out from the back of the sofa, even those heavily-filtered pseudo-operatic vocals at […]
I want you to imagine a giant robot, lost in a world it does not understand, holding a more aleatoric Morton Subotnick in one hand and a noisier Autechre in the other hand and trying to figure out how they work, while the mad scientist who built this poor creature plays fragments of The Caretaker […]
I normally steer clear of reissues and retrospectives and the like: I struggle enough finding time giving enough attention to all the new music I want to listen to. But this one kind of sucked me in. A compilation of material dating from ’82–’88, it’s floaty synth stuff that I guess you might call new […]
Categories
My albums of 2017
Alright, then, popkids, time for my annual round-up… I listened to lots of great records this year, thanks everyone! My longlist included records by Aiden Baker & Karen Willems, Colleen, Duran Duran Duran, Hior Chronik, Kelly Lee Owens, Marcus Fjellström, Still, and William Basinski, but none quite made the final cut. I spent a long time with a shortlist of […]
dogrando writes about some records 