Fantastically good. Jens Massel has pulled in elements from a range of styles: off the top of my head, I’d include bleep, dub techno, glitch, dark ambient, breakcore, and sublow — or at least, I think so… I am terrible at genres. What’s certain is that he’s made them work together to form a coherent whole, […]
Tag: year_2010
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 […]
Earlier this year, I discovered and was charmed by Goldmund’s 2008 release The Malady Of Excellence. I am equally taken with this year’s follow-up. Like its predecessor, Famous Places is dominated by the piano, recorded with wonderful intimacy by Goldmund (aka Keith Kenniff) himself. However, this has more other instruments and electronic effects than I remember hearing […]
Brian McBride is half of Stars Of The Lid (whose …And Their Refinement Of The Decline was a big hit in these parts), and The Effective Disconnect is the soundtrack to the documentary movie The Vanishing Of The Bees. I suppose that makes this drone music in two senses, and a lot of the tracks are indeed […]
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 […]
This is excellent, clever, involving modern classical. These compositions are largely for strings (there is a plenty of cello, which is always good for me), but there are also appearances by zither, gamelan, vibraphone, and some processed wordless vocal sounds. Gudnadóttir plays all these herself. The album has a quiet urgency about it — if […]
There are three distinct sessions to the expanded CD version of this album. We start with the 9 tracks of the vinyl release, which mix Americana (banjo, fiddle, accordion, and so on) with an organic ambient sound (field recordings, tape treatments, and unidentifiable snippets and textures). It’s really very lovely, and quite moving: I felt […]
Like the best ambient works, two minutes into this record I feel like I’ve been listening to it for aeons. I mean that in a good way: it is a testament to its immersive, timeless quality. (A few other types of music can do this too me: interestingly — to me, anyway — I get […]
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 […]
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. […]
dogrando writes about some records 