I’m generally suspicious of live techno: without that machine-tooled precision, it can end up muddy and uninteresting: you wanted vorsprung durch technik and you got a touch of the Flintstones. And this is very live: there’s a guitarist, and a bassist, and a drummer, and it they are (the sleeve proudly states) recorded without overdubs. The producer […]
Category: Music
Why, Ed DMX, you spoil us, with your double disc set of 35 tracks and nearly two hours of nice bloopy acid goodness. Astute readers may have guessed the problem here: it’s all very pleasant, and there are some satisfying sounds and some good tunes here, but there’s no way it can sustain my interest. […]
Oh boy. When I first read that Alva Noto was making a record with Blixa Bargeld, I was pretty excited. When I heard the first previews, I was very excited: they were breath-taking. And when I finally got the album, well, it was even better than I’d expected. Oh boy. I adore the work of […]
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Robert Hood: Omega (CD, M-Plant, June 2010)
This is the Detroit legend’s imaginary soundtrack for the 1971 movie The Omega Man, a zombie-apocalypse sci-fi job starring Charlton Heston and featuring a hefty Christian subtext. I’ll admit now that I haven’t seen the movie or heard Ron Grainer’s score, so for me the film itself is imaginary. Still, the album holds up very nicely […]
In which the techno veterans respond to the first record to be explicitly labelled as “ambient”: Brian Eno’s Music For Real Airports. I’m not clear if it’s a response, an homage, or a riposte: Boomkat claim that they “have long had a problem with Eno’s elegiac score to those transient spaces, feeling that modern airport […]
You’ve got to love Matthew Herbert for going the extra mile. Whereas Carl Craig and Moritz von Oswald, say, used Ravel and Mussorgsky as source material for their Recomposed offering, Herbert has clearly used Mahler as text for his. The work in question is the unfinished tenth symphony, a work which seems to be particularly obsessed by […]
Ah, the Residents, those lovable eyeball-headed art-rock scamps. We have here 14 short tracks of somewhat self-conscious avant-garde tomfoolery: nonsensical lyrics (I mean this at least partly in the formal sense of nonsense verse), half-sung or recited, often in a cartoonish falsetto, over squelching, belching, horn-honking synths and miscellaneous electronics doodah. It really is more […]
So, let’s start with the facts. This consists of ten works for string quartet, composed by Gavin Bryars and performed by the Balanescu Quartet, over which the Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz reads instructions on how to cheat at cards. In some of the later segments, occasion phrases are repeated by a confused-sounding Japanese man (Yukio […]
This is kind of frustrating. There’s some really good stuff on this. Nice drum programming, nice rich organic sound, lots of good ideas. But it just doesn’t hang together as an album — it feels more like a showcase of Pulsinger’s range as a producer. This may be something to do with the fact that […]
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Efdemin: Chicago (CD, Dial, May 2010)
This is just really nice, detailed, finely crafted house. It’s quite heavily Chicago-tinged, as you might guess from the title — then again, Efdemin are based in Berlin, and that clearly shows too. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s gently propulsive, sophisticated without any of that glossy coffee-table feel, and overall I found it very appealing. […]
dogrando writes about some records 