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 […]
Author: dogrando
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 […]
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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 […]
I totally loved Spatial’s epic deconstructed sound clash A Music Of Sound Systems back in March. I just stumbled across this remixes record, and it’s pretty tasty too. Actually, only three of the four tracks appear to be remixes: the final track, 111020, appears to be a new Spatial track, still pretty sparse but with a […]
Hior Chronik lists his influences as Max Richter, which I can absolutely see, and Arvo Pärt, which I confess I can’t (although I don’t know Pärt as well as I probably should). This is a dozen tracks of piano, strings (cello by Aaron Martin), and a gorgeous muted trumpet (Christian Grothe — the one who is Kryshe, […]
If, like me, you know Colleen (aka Cecile Schott) from records like Les Ondes Silencieuses and The Weighing Of The Heart, you’d probably be quite surprised that this album ditches the viola da gamba and, seemingly, all other acoustic instruments entirely. Apparently she’d started out adding a Critter & Guitari pocket piano synth into the mix, couldn’t make […]
Ah, good old Godspeed. After the epic metal excitement of 2012’s Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!, this is rather more business as normal. Which isn’t to say that it’s restrained, of course… There’s that perfectly poised counterpoint of resounding melody and screeching dissonance, of guitars and strings. There’s a nice dose of brass this time around. […]
dogrando writes about some records 