Just your regular duo: Duane Pitre plays bowed guitar and piano, Cory Allen plays piano, harmonium, and 49-stringed drone harp. Hang on, what? The drone harp was custom-made by sound artist Allen, it more or less sounds like the name suggests, and it’s rather magical. It’s also worth mentioning that at least one of them […]
I’m going to find it tough writing about this without going all swooningly lyrical. This gorgeous double LP is swathed in warm, twinkling piano which gives me a lovely warm feeling right from the first notes. Then there’s the contrastingly simple but beautiful melodies played on either piano, clarinet, or strings. The harmonies and the […]
I first came across Steve Gunn earlier this year by way of a couple of collaborations (which I may write about sometime later, or I may not). I was intrigued enough to investigate his previous work. After extensive research, I can reveal that by far my favourite recording of his is this 2011 digital-only live […]
I loved Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran’s self-titled debut as A Winged Victory For The Sullen. At the time, I indulged myself by describing them as “a post-classical/ambient/drone supergroup”, based on contributions by Peter Broderick, Hildur Guðnadóttir, and Nils Frahm. This album, of music originally written for a modern dance piece, features no such big-name contributors. […]
As I mentioned recently, I was a huge Aphex fan back in the day. So I was pretty excited about his first full album in 13 years and his first proper release in 7. Given his long-standing haphazard attitude to quality control, and frankly the downturn in quality of his more recent material, I was also […]
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 […]
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 […]
dogrando writes about some records 