Shuffling underwater beats, swirling strings, delicate chimes — and vocals pitch-bent up to the verge of chipmunkery. Hey, what? Strangely, this works rather beautifully. The effect isn’t the least bit comic. I’ll admit that it took me one listen through to get over my confusion, and to forget the associations with the dafter ends of […]
Tag: year_2011
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Kreng: Grimoire (CD, Miasmah, June 2011)
So, yes, first of all: Pepijn Caudron has chosen to record under the name Kreng; the album is called Grimoire; the label is Miasmah; the sleeve is entirely black and grey, has a grainy headshot of what might well be a corpse on the front, and makes extensive use of a blackletter typeface… if you […]
This record resists categorization rather brilliantly. The title track is mostly (as far as I can tell) mainly composed of three heavily processed loops of human voices, along with some gentle laptop effects (the only beat is a barely present pad). Two are wordless drones or chants, one a rumbling bass and the other a […]
This is the Icelandic composer’s soundtrack to Bill Morrison’s film about the Durham mining industry, focussing particularly on the pageantry of the annual Big Meeting, a combination of a family day out, a political rally, and a concert for the pit bands. This melting pot theme is echoed by the music, which is a blend […]
This record brings together slick, dubby techno beats and big fat sub-low bass noises. It doesn’t completely grip me throughout — it begs comparison with, say, Senking’s 2010 stonker Pong, but it lacks that record’s breadth of influences — but it is nevertheless a very satisfying listen. There’s just something pleasing about the forthright oomphiness of […]
Dance remixes of classical music can be an ugly thing. Just think what William Orbit did to poor Sammy Barber, my dears. We would expect something rather more subtle from Messrs Villalobos and Loderbauer, and subtlety is what we get in spades. This is a quiet, refined minimalism, never repetitive but with a structure which […]
I first encountered the French avant-garde “sound poet” Anne-James Chaton on Alva Noto’s unitxt: he features in the phenomenal opening track, apparently reading out all the serial numbers he can find in Carsten Nicolai’s wallet. This CD is essentially the logical continuation of that idea. The only (I think) sound here is Chaton’s voice, this […]
Another slice of sublime shuffling techno slides into the Tejada canon. If I wanted to be critical, I could point out that this doesn’t seem to break significant new ground compared to, say, 2008’s Where. And in terms of influences, I could reach back to the pop-minimal of the ’00s Kompakt (on which label he […]
People laugh at me when I describe A Winged Victory For The Sullen as a post-classical/ambient/drone supergroup. Not quite sure why. To be fair, the description is stretching the point somewhat: both pianist/composer Dustin O’Halloran and Stars Of The Lids’ Adam Wiltzie are pretty super, but two hardly makes a group; however, the record does […]
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Cyclo: id (CD, Raster Noton, March 2011)
Cyclo is Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda. Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) is obviously a firm favourite here. Ikeda, I’ve had my doubts about before, but this goes a long way to dismiss them. Because this is pretty damned great. It starts out with a high pitched squeal, into which glitchy clicks slice in a very physical […]
dogrando writes about some records 