I’ve seen Charlemagne Palestine live three times. Each was a mesmerising, transformative, and unique experience. I’d never bought any recordings because I’d been slightly underwhelmed by those I’d heard. After all, how could it be the same without the ritual, the teddy bears and the bunting and the brandy, and how could it hope to […]
Tag: year_2010
This is 55 minutes constructed out of “Original environmental recordings done at multiple underwater and abovewater [sic] locations in the Panamá and Paraguay rivers”. He even made it in his mobile studio on a boat. The effect is a detailed and immersive soundscape. It’s not all whale-song, though: there are spooky cavern-like episodes, all drips […]
Now, this is great stuff. I’ve not heard techno quite like this before. The beats range from dubby to a hard warehouse-style techno. The dominant instrument is the piano: dissonant stabs and abrasive jazzy runs — uplifting Balearic this is not. Occasionally, the beat drops out leaving only dark swirling atmospherics, which I guess is […]
This is a huge amount of fun. Vikki Bennett and Jon Leidecker have done something quite rare: they have dug up countless old records, films, radio and television programmes, and who knows what else, and done a massive cut-and-paste job, and ended up with a work of great musicality and humour, and one which makes […]
When I wrote about Leyland Kirby’s Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was almost a year ago, I mentioned his work as The Caretaker inspired by the haunted ballroom scene in The Shining. This is that record. It has to be said it takes its brief fairly literally. Snatches of old records, I guess […]
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 […]
Hold onto your hats, this is going to be a big one. Actually, forget your hats: hold onto your heads. This is Pan Sonic’s swansong, and they’re going out in style. The first half of Ilpo Väisänen and Mika Vainio’s final (apparently) record offers brutal beats, immense buzzing and rumbling bass, and a selection of […]
As you would expect, Surgeon’s mix for Fabric is highly skilled and inventive. It may be restrained by his standards (there is nothing like the moment in his This Is For You Shits mix on Warp where he drops Whitehouse’s Dumping The Fucking Rubbish), but for Fabric it’s pretty adventurous. It’s mostly good hard techno, with […]
The audio CD consists of 35 tracks, averaging at a minute each (though some are longer, and some just a few seconds). Bretschneider has taken a very direct approach to the Raster-Noton template, centred around very simple clicks and pads, bassy hums, and sine wave tones. I wasn’t keeping score, but I noticed two tracks featuring […]
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 […]
dogrando writes about some records 