Given Terrence Dixon’s history, you could expect a little bit of old-skool here. In fact, what you get is a lot of little bits of various types of old-skool: from the poppier side of first-gen Detroit à la Metroplex (an old haunt of his) to dark pounding minimal à la Robert Hood to bloopy underwater […]
Category: Music
I have a big soft spot of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s experimental collaborations, with Christian Fennesz and in particular with Alva Noto. Here, his stately, deliberate piano playing is accompanied by droning guitar and electronic manipulation from Christopher Willets. It doesn’t have the single-minded intensity of the Fennesz work, or the wonderful contrast of precision and fuzz […]
Wow. Spell-binding. I know Guðnadóttir from Mount A, a fine collection of cello-centric drone-oriented modern classical pieces. This is on a whole other level. It is a live recording (with “no post-tampering”, according to a somewhat earnest sleeve note which is, in this case, entirely excused by the power of the music) with the composer on […]
Quite a range of styles here. It starts out quite dubby, and there are some excursions into a kind of glitchy two-step. But the bulk of the album — and, for my money, the best of it — is just really good proper techno like they used to make: complex, sinuous rhythms, gentle plinky melodies. There’s a moment […]
I formed a strange idea once that Ricardo Villalobos is turning into the György Ligeti of minimal house, creating music at once desperately fragile and thoroughly confident, rejecting the usual structures but ruthlessly committed to their own strangely alien rule-set. Then I got over myself. Still, I think it’s fair to say Herr Doktor V […]
I should start by saying that my response to this record is more than normally subjective. I was lucky enough to see this performed at last year’s Today’s Art festival. It was one of those concerts where the music is enhanced by the physicality of the performance, and the two become inseparable in my mind. […]
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Lone: Galaxy Garden (CD, R&S, May 2012)
I think it’s fair to assume that Matt Cutler has at least one 808 State record somewhere in his collection. Also early Aphex Twin and Steve Reich, but most of all the 808 State — there’s one sound that crops up a few times that could almost be sampled from Pacific State. I’ve got to […]
Peter Broderick’s talent in a wide range of styles is hugely impressive, but it makes it hard for me to get a handle on his œuvre. What’s he going to come out with next? Well, I think I’d place Music For Confluence somewhere on an axis between the gorgeous orchestral sweep of Float and the rich Americana […]
This is truly awesome. The CD consists almost entirely of a single drone of strings lasting almost half an hour. There are smooth sawing strings, sharp jaggedy, there’s a repeated phrase of five ascending notes. There may be some kind of cymbals underneath, I think. It starts quietly, crescendos smoothly, and fades away again. Other […]
Mostly, this is the sort of ambient which contrasts pure electronic tones against warm old-vinyl static and an ambient synth which sounds like it’s struggling to stay in tune (and occasionally loses the battle). A couple of tracks break from this template: Brown starts out like a modern classical percussion composition, before introducing an effect […]
dogrando writes about some records 