Time for another annual round-up. In addition to picking my top albums, which has been giving my fun and headaches for four years now, I’ve added a top track selection, which is basically me cheating to get myself out of a tricky position. In alphabetical order, my Albums Of 2013 are: French avant-garde poetry and […]
I got hold of Ryoji Ikeda’s 1995 debut album 1000 Fragments when it was re-released by Raster-Noton in 2008. I liked it, but I didn’t love it, and I hadn’t really paid him much attention since then. That changed at the 2013 todaysart festival, where his test pattern performance tore the atrium of Den Haag town hall […]
You have to admire Emptyset’s dedication to an ideal. That ideal is making big, chunky music almost entirely formed from clanking and buzzing noises. There are no beats, but the sounds are heavily rhythmical. There are virtually no notes at an audible frequency, but the bassy whirrs are forced through a tortuous tangle of filters […]
In a lot of ways, Max Richter was one of the key early figures in that genre which blends elements of electronica into classical chamber music. Having studied composition under Luciano Berio, and then collaborated with Future Sounds Of London on Dead Cities, he was ideally placed to do so. I’ve been lapping this sort […]
From the start, this record leaves you in no doubt what’s in store: darkly atmospheric, bass-heavy, righteous shenanigans. Things rumble and clank. There is distant howling and tribal chanting. The beats take a while to kick in, but when they do they are a masterclass in what you can do with not much more than […]
I guess that I was expecting James Leyland Kirby’s latest moniker to be doing something akin to the crackly nostalgia of his work as Leyland Kirby or The Caretaker. The links are there, but The Stranger is something altogether starker and more abstract, and it’s taken me a while to get my head around it. The […]
So, we have to start with the stories. Here’s the first story: In 2001, William Basinski came upon some tape loops of slowed-down recordings from radio which he’d made in the 1980s, back before he got (relatively speaking) famous in the ’90s. He decided to transfer them to digital, set the loops going, and hit […]
Ah, Fuck Buttons, it’s been too long. It has to be said, they haven’t exactly revolutionized their sound in the four years since their last long-player, Tarot Sport, but they might just have perfected it. The big, bold, bashing drumbeats and the big, giant, squelching synth sounds are all just spot on here. About one […]
You kind of know what to expect with a Mika Vainio release: it’s going to be big and dark and heavy and there are going to be giant bassy throbs which well up out of your woofers like some sort of sonic kraken, and in between (especially in the work under his own name) there […]
I find Anne-James Chaton strangely wonderful. He has appeared here reading out the serial numbers from receipts found in Carsten Nicolai’s wallet on Alva Noto’s unitxt, and reading news reports of important events of 2009 along with other texts (like the terms and conditions on train tickets) associated with those dates on his solo Événements 09, both […]
dogrando writes about some records 