When this came out, it seemed like the king of glitch was reclaiming his crown. I forget why I didn’t buy it right away: I do remember that it became hard to find quite soon. So I came to it over two years late… I am glad to say that it appears to have aged […]
Category: Music
This is a good deal sillier than most of the records I talk about here. It’s tempting to describe it as a guilty pleasure, but I don’t really feel very guilty about it. Reinhardt is all about the synths, and creates wonderfully warm analogue music with layers of synths and drum machines, plus a good […]
Fantastically good. Jens Massel has pulled in elements from a range of styles: off the top of my head, I’d include bleep, dub techno, glitch, dark ambient, breakcore, and sublow — or at least, I think so… I am terrible at genres. What’s certain is that he’s made them work together to form a coherent whole, […]
This record pairs the most laid-back shuffling techno beats to some delicately pretty melodies, with an emphasis on the chiming sounds of bells, vibraphones, steel drums, and the like. At times it risks being just too sophisticated for my taste, a bit too late night cocktail bar, but for the most part it reins it […]
Earlier this year, I discovered and was charmed by Goldmund’s 2008 release The Malady Of Excellence. I am equally taken with this year’s follow-up. Like its predecessor, Famous Places is dominated by the piano, recorded with wonderful intimacy by Goldmund (aka Keith Kenniff) himself. However, this has more other instruments and electronic effects than I remember hearing […]
Brian McBride is half of Stars Of The Lid (whose …And Their Refinement Of The Decline was a big hit in these parts), and The Effective Disconnect is the soundtrack to the documentary movie The Vanishing Of The Bees. I suppose that makes this drone music in two senses, and a lot of the tracks are indeed […]
Oliver Ho (for it is he) marries über-minimal 4:4 beats with dark atmospheric instrumentation, and creates something that sounds very fresh. At times, I was unsure whether or not I was listening to a techno record. But I like music which keeps me guessing, so that’s okay. The clicks and pads of the drum machine […]
This is excellent, clever, involving modern classical. These compositions are largely for strings (there is a plenty of cello, which is always good for me), but there are also appearances by zither, gamelan, vibraphone, and some processed wordless vocal sounds. Gudnadóttir plays all these herself. The album has a quiet urgency about it — if […]
There are three distinct sessions to the expanded CD version of this album. We start with the 9 tracks of the vinyl release, which mix Americana (banjo, fiddle, accordion, and so on) with an organic ambient sound (field recordings, tape treatments, and unidentifiable snippets and textures). It’s really very lovely, and quite moving: I felt […]
Like the best ambient works, two minutes into this record I feel like I’ve been listening to it for aeons. I mean that in a good way: it is a testament to its immersive, timeless quality. (A few other types of music can do this too me: interestingly — to me, anyway — I get […]
dogrando writes about some records 