Matmos have made something of a name for themselves as purveyors of unusual samples (the liner notes for their 1997 debut Matmos featured such gems as “amplified hair, breathing, bowls of water, Polish trains”) and eye-catching concept albums (2001’s A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure was famously built mostly from the sounds of plastic surgery and […]
Category: Music
Mika Vainio treats us to another fine selection of sudden clunks, gut-wobbling buzzes, and long ominous silences. An obvious reference point would be his last album with Ilpo Väisänen as Pan Sonic. The comparison is interesting: this trades a little of Gravitoni‘s raw power for a little subtlety. You could almost say that this is the chamber […]
Hah, now, this is splendid fun: three big fat slices of hard, thumping, dark industrial techno bordering on proto-trance. The title track is dominated by a huge pounding bass drum, an evil-sounding buzz, a huge minor-key acid synth riff, and a guy who whispers in a sinister fashion like the bad guy in a horror […]
Stephan Mathieu’s A Static Place is an exceptionally well-named record. He has a talent for letting notes play out for what seems like minutes or hours, leaving you wondering over the subtle interplay in the standing waves forming between two sounds. His source material here is Japan frontman David Sylvian’s 2003 experimental pop record Blemish. He spins […]
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Sigur Rós: Valtari (CD, EMI, May 2012)
Sigur Rós are one of those instantly recognizable bands. They invented a kind of melodic drone-pop which nobody has really even tried to imitate (I suppose the closest I’ve heard would be Amiina, who sometimes sound like a kind of instrumental version ― and, as Sigur Rós’s backing band, that’s not too much of a surprise). And […]
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Autechre: Exai (CD, Warp, February 2013)
Shortly after buying this, I got an email saying that they’d discovered a glitch in the 24-bit WAV download of the track T ess xi. I’m afraid to say, my reaction echoed that of Dorothy Parker on hearing of the death of Calvin Coolidge: how can they tell? (I say this from a place of […]
This record is immense. Let me try that again: this record is IMMENSE. The first track, Mladic, starts out in typical Godspeedy fashion: a crackling loop of vocal sample, a few bleeps and bloops, a distant-sounding folky melody over a buzzy drone, a clanking noise reminiscent of a passing freight train. Then, after a few […]
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 […]
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 […]
dogrando writes about some records 