Apparently, Sheela Rahman has been releasing 12″s for a few years now, but this is my first encounter with her. And a thrilling encounter it is, too. The tracks explore a range of vaguely IDM-ish analogue techno and squelchy Chicago acid sounds (rather disproving my overly-neat thesis about techno LPs going either deep or broad, since […]
Author: dogrando
Hooray, Monolake is back! And he’s great! Again! Last week I was pontificating (again) about The Nature Of The Techno Album. In contrast to Roman Flügel’s, this is definitely a record which goes deep rather than broad, sticking to one style and refining and exploring and inhabiting it. Well, I suppose you could argue that […]
Being someone who’s keen on a spot of the old repetitive beats, but doesn’t get much, I’ve mused much (and written here probably rather too often) on the curious creature that is the techno album. To make a very crude generalization, there seem to be two popular approaches: pick one sound that works for you […]
I guess that a duo of acoustic fingerstyle guitar is a little bit outside my normal range, although I did go a bit dappy about a Steve Gunn record a few years ago. Maybe it’s time for me to go through another phase, because this is a little gem. I’m too young (!) to remember John […]
It’s probably a trite observation, but the last week of October was a good one for fans of Icelandic classical music, with Jóhann Jóhannsson’s splendid Orphée and this. Other than the coincidence of the composers’ nationality, these are actually pretty different records. Where JJ’s was clearly very personal, this is explicitly collaborative, each track featuring a […]
The first thing to say is that the 15 short pieces that make up Orphée are some of the most beguilingly beautiful classical music I’ve heard in a very long time. In fact, for a moment I considered leaving this note at that one sentence: everything else seems secondary. But I’m probably being overly sentimental, so we […]
Wow, how brilliantly bonkers is this??? Vocally, Gately ranges from chirpy pop to melodramatic cabaret and incorporates eccentric yelps and shifts of tone and basically comes over like a Kate Bush for the attention-deficit generation. Musically, it’s equally full-on: synth-heavy, densely-layered, chaotic, over-the-top, and wickedly inventive. She never misses an opportunity for an extra flourish […]
Oiseaux-Tempête’s Ütopiya? was easily one of my records of 2015. So I was pretty intrigued to get hold of this. You never know quite what you’ll get with this kind of bits-and-bobs compilation, but this exceeds expectations. It opens with Eclipse & Sirocco, a number based around Christine Ott’s ondes-martenot work which starts of as ethereal […]
I don’t know where Golden Püdel’s Nina dug Scheich in China up from, but this is quite a find. The first side has three tracks of dark, intense, atmospheric, industrial techno: skittering beats, deliciously organic sounding pads, and primeval buzzing noises abound, with the whooping of oscillators being about the closest we get to a […]
Ooh, now this is really, really good. Claire M Singer, who is the musical director at the Union Chapel, has apparently been writing and performing for 14 years, but this is her first record. It’s really top notch classical drone stuff, with the traditional strings supplemented by some juicy work on the Union Chapel’s organ, […]
dogrando writes about some records 