From the start, this record leaves you in no doubt what’s in store: darkly atmospheric, bass-heavy, righteous shenanigans. Things rumble and clank. There is distant howling and tribal chanting. The beats take a while to kick in, but when they do they are a masterclass in what you can do with not much more than […]
Author: dogrando
I guess that I was expecting James Leyland Kirby’s latest moniker to be doing something akin to the crackly nostalgia of his work as Leyland Kirby or The Caretaker. The links are there, but The Stranger is something altogether starker and more abstract, and it’s taken me a while to get my head around it. The […]
So, we have to start with the stories. Here’s the first story: In 2001, William Basinski came upon some tape loops of slowed-down recordings from radio which he’d made in the 1980s, back before he got (relatively speaking) famous in the ’90s. He decided to transfer them to digital, set the loops going, and hit […]
Ah, Fuck Buttons, it’s been too long. It has to be said, they haven’t exactly revolutionized their sound in the four years since their last long-player, Tarot Sport, but they might just have perfected it. The big, bold, bashing drumbeats and the big, giant, squelching synth sounds are all just spot on here. About one […]
You kind of know what to expect with a Mika Vainio release: it’s going to be big and dark and heavy and there are going to be giant bassy throbs which well up out of your woofers like some sort of sonic kraken, and in between (especially in the work under his own name) there […]
I find Anne-James Chaton strangely wonderful. He has appeared here reading out the serial numbers from receipts found in Carsten Nicolai’s wallet on Alva Noto’s unitxt, and reading news reports of important events of 2009 along with other texts (like the terms and conditions on train tickets) associated with those dates on his solo Événements 09, both […]
It is well known that a good Jeff Mills set is like being on a giant space ship made out of techno. Well, a good Senking record is like being on a giant submarine made out of dubstep (and possibly filled with insects). The awesome buzzing, the gorgeously precise, skittering beats, the sonar pings… pretty […]
The dominant sound here is a dense, driving techno, with a heavy, propulsive beat and a gloopy, psychedelic synth sound which almost remind me of kosmiche. It’s really quite good fun. It could be a bit much, but this heady fare is leavened by occasional floaty ambient tracks. The penultimate track, Sun Harmonics, features the […]
There’s a synth sound in some of Brock van Wey’s dub techno which is so organic it sounds almost human. This record is dominated by what seem to be real vocals, often abstracted to the point of sounding almost synthetic. There’s some wordless chanting, and some that might be church Latin (or might not), and […]
I admire The Orb. I own a couple of seminal works. In practice, I don’t listen to them all that often. And I’m highly sceptical of their more recent efforts. I think they fell into the ambient sandtrap: the genre is inherently loosely structured, but there’s an elusive something which saves the good stuff from […]
dogrando writes about some records 