The Body are, it seems, a Portland-based duo who might be characterized as being on the experimental end of black metal. Apparently, they felt they were in a rut, so their label hired Bobby Krlic, better known as The Haxan Cloak to produce this record, and add a bit of his industrial drone techno magic. Apparently, […]
Author: dogrando
This summer featured the surprising re-emergence of two ’90s techno deities. I have raved elsewhere about the twenty-year-belated release of Aphex Twin’s Caustic Window. We also got a new release in eleven years from Richie Hawtin as Plastikman, the first since 2003’s staggeringly awesome Closer. This is actually a recording of a live performance at the Guggenheim. […]
Let’s start this with a TL;DR, ‘cos I kinda want to shout this from the rooftops: this is an album which Aphex Twin mysteriously didn’t release in 1994; it got a semi-official digital release funded by a kickstarter this year; and it’s GREAT. As you can probably tell from the excited tone, I was a […]
I have to admit, this isn’t what I was expecting. I’ve heard Erik K Skodvin in contemplative mode as half of Deaf Center, and in doom-drone mode as Svarte Greiner. This is a much looser business, with open, clattering percussion, abstract cello scraping and clarinet tootling, half-prepared-sounding piano, and on the one-minute-long near-title-track Flames a big […]
Okay, I’m not a huge dubstep fan, but there seem to be some interesting people pushing the genre boundaries out there, and in a determinedly leftfield direction. Wen’s Signals would be one example, but this takes it further: there are tracks here which only seem to contain trace DNA betraying their origins. Like the Wen record, […]
This record was quite a surprise to me. I associate Christian Fennesz with a kind of ambient drone. On The Black Sea, for example, his guitar is mostly looped and processed beyond recognition to create a richly textured fuzz; on his collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, he provides a similarly fuzzy backdrop to Sakamoto’s delicate piano […]
This record opens rather arrestingly with a song whose lyrics are more-or-less nonsense verse in Mandarin, sung to the tune of Nothing Compares 2 U, accompanied by little more than a synthesized celestial choir. The effect is rather surreal, but the significance is clear: Al Qadiri (who is Kuwaiti, born to Russian-educated parents in Senegal, […]
The opening track here couples a mournful modern classical style piano and cello with a big low-key sort of dub-techno beat and rumbling atmospherics. Just near the end a jazzy trumpet line seeps into the mix. It was pretty much inevitable that I was going to fall in love with this. The second track brings […]
At some point while I was listening to this, I found myself wondering: if Philip Glass wrote experimental synth pop, is this what it would sound like? Well, maybe so, maybe not. Anyway, it’s cracking good stuff. It’s mostly old-skool-sounding lo-fi synths (I couldn’t tell you whether they’re actually old analogue beasts or modern emulations). […]
This is a slightly strange record. From the very start, it plunges us deep into that bvdub world of swirling synth noises and droning strings, everything swathed in so much reverb that it feels oddly timeless, and for, yep, over two and a half hours, that’s where we’re going to stay. Somewhere deep in the […]
dogrando writes about some records 