Oh boy. When I first read that Alva Noto was making a record with Blixa Bargeld, I was pretty excited. When I heard the first previews, I was very excited: they were breath-taking. And when I finally got the album, well, it was even better than I’d expected. Oh boy. I adore the work of […]
Tag: year_2010
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Robert Hood: Omega (CD, M-Plant, June 2010)
This is the Detroit legend’s imaginary soundtrack for the 1971 movie The Omega Man, a zombie-apocalypse sci-fi job starring Charlton Heston and featuring a hefty Christian subtext. I’ll admit now that I haven’t seen the movie or heard Ron Grainer’s score, so for me the film itself is imaginary. Still, the album holds up very nicely […]
In which the techno veterans respond to the first record to be explicitly labelled as “ambient”: Brian Eno’s Music For Real Airports. I’m not clear if it’s a response, an homage, or a riposte: Boomkat claim that they “have long had a problem with Eno’s elegiac score to those transient spaces, feeling that modern airport […]
You’ve got to love Matthew Herbert for going the extra mile. Whereas Carl Craig and Moritz von Oswald, say, used Ravel and Mussorgsky as source material for their Recomposed offering, Herbert has clearly used Mahler as text for his. The work in question is the unfinished tenth symphony, a work which seems to be particularly obsessed by […]
This is kind of frustrating. There’s some really good stuff on this. Nice drum programming, nice rich organic sound, lots of good ideas. But it just doesn’t hang together as an album — it feels more like a showcase of Pulsinger’s range as a producer. This may be something to do with the fact that […]
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Efdemin: Chicago (CD, Dial, May 2010)
This is just really nice, detailed, finely crafted house. It’s quite heavily Chicago-tinged, as you might guess from the title — then again, Efdemin are based in Berlin, and that clearly shows too. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s gently propulsive, sophisticated without any of that glossy coffee-table feel, and overall I found it very appealing. […]
Jóhannson is an Icelandic composer, probably best known for the concept piece IBM 1401: A User’s Manual. This (splendidly titled) album is big, swooshing, string-drenched, and shamelessly dramatic. There are moments which remind me of Philip Glass, others which remind me of György Ligeti. He has a great knack for structure, bringing back themes from […]
This is a two CD set. One is a compilation of nine of Terje’s remixes. It’s always good to hear his version Lindstrøm’s “Another Station”, though I must already have it on at least half a dozen different mixes. I didn’t know M’s “Pop Muzik” before, but his remix is really extremely catchy. Other than […]
There is a lot of variety in this collection of 11 tracks of laid-back minimal. What unifies them is a production style which is detailed, deep, and assured. There’s nothing here that sets my world alight, but every track is superbly put together, and there’s a great warmth to it. I bought this from Boomkat. […]
An exciting collection of 12 works for strings. There is a great ragged, wild feeling to this record, along with an intense sense of location — many tracks were apparently recorded in ruined farmhouses and the like, and this really comes through. The pace is always measured, but there is a great variety in technique, […]
dogrando writes about some records 