First things first: This album has about the most fantastic, exciting production I’ve heard in ages. The beats clatter and stutter. The synths are choppy and fragmented, but melodic. The powerful bottom-end is taut and muscular, and deployed with restraint. For most of the record, vocals are sparsely used, and then in clipped, abruptly cut […]
Eric Thielemans has made a record using, it seems, almost entirely classical percussion instruments — but not in the way that you might expect. It’s light on the drums, preferring the softer sounds of xylophones, woodblocks, chimes, and I believe (though I wouldn’t swear to it) scraping noises made on the inside of a piano. […]
A friend walked in while I was playing the first track of this, and asked me whether it was Steve Reich. He has a point: the opening number is a pretty obvious tribute (although a synthy backing comes in towards the end which I don’t think he’d go for). Elsewhere on the record, we have: […]
Egyptrixx combines rattling beats with a rich, dark, meaty synths and a fine array of squelches and clangs. It’s the sort of music that demands to be described as cinematic, but as something I find can be a positive or a negative, and here it points to the reason I have reservations about this record: […]
This is the final (sob!) entry in this fantastic series by the fantastic Sub Rosa label, which has been enriching my life regularly since 2001. As always, the range of music is phenomenal, and while not everything will be to anyone’s taste, there’s always loads to keep me interested. One standout track here for me […]
From the first few notes, it’s obvious what this album is going to be like: delicate, intimate piano compositions, recorded with that close-miked sound which is Nils Frahm’s trademark. Handily, that’s a thing I really like, and it seems to have gone somewhat out of fashion, so this record — the debut solo album by […]
Time for another annual round-up. In addition to picking my top albums, which has been giving my fun and headaches for four years now, I’ve added a top track selection, which is basically me cheating to get myself out of a tricky position. In alphabetical order, my Albums Of 2013 are: French avant-garde poetry and […]
I got hold of Ryoji Ikeda’s 1995 debut album 1000 Fragments when it was re-released by Raster-Noton in 2008. I liked it, but I didn’t love it, and I hadn’t really paid him much attention since then. That changed at the 2013 todaysart festival, where his test pattern performance tore the atrium of Den Haag town hall […]
You have to admire Emptyset’s dedication to an ideal. That ideal is making big, chunky music almost entirely formed from clanking and buzzing noises. There are no beats, but the sounds are heavily rhythmical. There are virtually no notes at an audible frequency, but the bassy whirrs are forced through a tortuous tangle of filters […]
In a lot of ways, Max Richter was one of the key early figures in that genre which blends elements of electronica into classical chamber music. Having studied composition under Luciano Berio, and then collaborated with Future Sounds Of London on Dead Cities, he was ideally placed to do so. I’ve been lapping this sort […]
dogrando writes about some records