One of the things that overly earnest indie/alternative types like to say is this: it’s all about the music. What a load. I’d like to advance the following as a reasonable working hypothesis: not one thing, in the whole history of human endeavour, has ever been all about the music. I’m throwing out this poorly-developed […]
Author: dogrando
This is… wow, I don’t know what this is. It’s bloody great, though. Let’s start with Music For The Quiet Hour. Through five long tracks, fragments of alien-sounding melodies and rhythms circle around, sampled whooshes and whirrs swirl in and out, and through it all runs a very earnest spoken word piece. It’s like some […]
I am somewhat in love with The Sinking Of The Titanic, especially the 2007 version on Touch played by Alter Ego with the wonderful Philip Jeck doing turntable magic. So I was interested to hear this earlier recording by The Cockpit Ensemble plus tapes “prepared” in a physics department, produced by Brian Eno in 1975. […]
Michał Jacaszek is a Polish composer and producer. This record features harpsichord, bass and soprano clarinet, acoustic guitar, various metallophones, and a great deal of static, washing over and occasionally threatening to drown the delicate chamber pieces. The result hovers somewhere between minimalist early music and modern ambient, which I find surprisingly effective. I bought […]
This came out at the high-point of what I am, rather facilely, going to refer to as Raster-Noton’s clicks’n’bass period, released in the same month as Alva Noto’s univrs. Following in the pattern of 2010’s Death Of A Typographer, Byetone continues to represent the poppier side of the label, as far as it goes, with […]
This soundtrack to the indie body horror film of the same name is an accomplished bit of glitch-inflected modern classical. As an album, it is a qualified success. Shorn of their context, I find some of the more dramatic moments a little over-cooked (though I imagine they could be very effective in the movie). But on the […]
This is 55 minutes constructed out of “Original environmental recordings done at multiple underwater and abovewater [sic] locations in the Panamá and Paraguay rivers”. He even made it in his mobile studio on a boat. The effect is a detailed and immersive soundscape. It’s not all whale-song, though: there are spooky cavern-like episodes, all drips […]
There is a strangely determined, and determinedly strange, brilliance to this. The sleeve sums it up: a man (presumably Joel Danell himself) in a flamboyant suit with a light-entertainment grin poses awkwardly behind a cheap-looking synthesizer and in front of a soft-focus backdrop — but his eyes are demoniacally glowing white stars. The music is largely Bontempi-style […]
These 12 pieces of melodic modern classical are charming, melodic, and expertly arranged. Somehow, the record as a whole is a little underwhelming, and I think there’s a clue in its title: it feels rather like Ryan Teague has been on a field trip around half a decade of music, and come back with a […]
The last time we encountered master architects Villalobos and Loderbauer in reshaping and remodelling mode, they were tackling ECM’s back catalogue, and the results were a reductio ad absurdum of abstraction (which, incidentally, I love more now than when I wrote that). This time, they’re working their magic with Conrad Schnitzler’s Zug (itself a vinyl reissue of 1973’s […]
dogrando writes about some records 