This is very much a release of two halves. (Actually, it’s a re-release, for its tenth birthday.) The first disc is a collection of short chamber pieces, 14 of them totalling 46 minutes. They take in a range of influences, from English pastoral (there is one track that reminds me of Vaughan Williams) to Middle Eastern […]
Category: Music
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, […]
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). […]
dogrando writes about some records 