I admire The Orb. I own a couple of seminal works. In practice, I don’t listen to them all that often. And I’m highly sceptical of their more recent efforts. I think they fell into the ambient sandtrap: the genre is inherently loosely structured, but there’s an elusive something which saves the good stuff from […]
Tag: year_2012
Mika Vainio treats us to another fine selection of sudden clunks, gut-wobbling buzzes, and long ominous silences. An obvious reference point would be his last album with Ilpo Väisänen as Pan Sonic. The comparison is interesting: this trades a little of Gravitoni‘s raw power for a little subtlety. You could almost say that this is the chamber […]
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Sigur Rós: Valtari (CD, EMI, May 2012)
Sigur Rós are one of those instantly recognizable bands. They invented a kind of melodic drone-pop which nobody has really even tried to imitate (I suppose the closest I’ve heard would be Amiina, who sometimes sound like a kind of instrumental version ― and, as Sigur Rós’s backing band, that’s not too much of a surprise). And […]
This record is immense. Let me try that again: this record is IMMENSE. The first track, Mladic, starts out in typical Godspeedy fashion: a crackling loop of vocal sample, a few bleeps and bloops, a distant-sounding folky melody over a buzzy drone, a clanking noise reminiscent of a passing freight train. Then, after a few […]
Given Terrence Dixon’s history, you could expect a little bit of old-skool here. In fact, what you get is a lot of little bits of various types of old-skool: from the poppier side of first-gen Detroit à la Metroplex (an old haunt of his) to dark pounding minimal à la Robert Hood to bloopy underwater […]
I have a big soft spot of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s experimental collaborations, with Christian Fennesz and in particular with Alva Noto. Here, his stately, deliberate piano playing is accompanied by droning guitar and electronic manipulation from Christopher Willets. It doesn’t have the single-minded intensity of the Fennesz work, or the wonderful contrast of precision and fuzz […]
Wow. Spell-binding. I know Guðnadóttir from Mount A, a fine collection of cello-centric drone-oriented modern classical pieces. This is on a whole other level. It is a live recording (with “no post-tampering”, according to a somewhat earnest sleeve note which is, in this case, entirely excused by the power of the music) with the composer on […]
Quite a range of styles here. It starts out quite dubby, and there are some excursions into a kind of glitchy two-step. But the bulk of the album — and, for my money, the best of it — is just really good proper techno like they used to make: complex, sinuous rhythms, gentle plinky melodies. There’s a moment […]
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 […]
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Lone: Galaxy Garden (CD, R&S, May 2012)
I think it’s fair to assume that Matt Cutler has at least one 808 State record somewhere in his collection. Also early Aphex Twin and Steve Reich, but most of all the 808 State — there’s one sound that crops up a few times that could almost be sampled from Pacific State. I’ve got to […]
dogrando writes about some records 