You know I don’t like to leap to judgements, but I’m going to go ahead and call it: this record from Canadian duo Anstascia D’Elene Corniere and Vivie-ann Bakos is the most exciting thing I’ve heard from Kompakt in, ooh, about a decade. It’s a blend of minimal house burblings (lead single Endless Games has a […]
Tag: genre_minimal
This is pretty splendid. It’s made entirely with vintage modular synths, but it’s no retro noodling: this, to my mind, is proper techno. Minimal, sure, but the complex polyrhythms and the little blippy melodies are really compelling. It’s kind of like Ricardo Villalobos by way of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Most importantly, though, Taeggi’s timing […]
Minimalist composer James Tenney (an early member of the Philip Glass Ensemble) wrote Koan: Having Never Written A Note For Percussion for experimental percussionist John Bergamo in 1971. It is for a percussion instrument (he doesn’t specify which) and consists of a single note, initially quadruple-pianissimo, then with a crescendo to a quadruple-fortissimo, then with a […]
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 […]
I formed a strange idea once that Ricardo Villalobos is turning into the György Ligeti of minimal house, creating music at once desperately fragile and thoroughly confident, rejecting the usual structures but ruthlessly committed to their own strangely alien rule-set. Then I got over myself. Still, I think it’s fair to say Herr Doktor V […]
It seems hard to believe that this is only Isolée’s third album. There’s more variety on here than on, say, his microhouse classic We Are Monster: there are spots of gloopy acid, and I think I detected a dub techno influence in places. But it still sounds very much like Isolée. Which is, on the […]
I’m always glad to see a new album from Ellen Allien come along, and although it took me a while to get around to buying this one, I’m glad I did. It’s a more approachable record than 2008’s Sool, perhaps most obviously reminiscent of her collaboration with Apparat, Orchestra Of Bubbles, in its warm melodies […]
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 […]
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 […]
dogrando writes about some records 