This is truly awesome. The CD consists almost entirely of a single drone of strings lasting almost half an hour. There are smooth sawing strings, sharp jaggedy, there’s a repeated phrase of five ascending notes. There may be some kind of cymbals underneath, I think. It starts quietly, crescendos smoothly, and fades away again. Other […]
Tag: year_2012
Mostly, this is the sort of ambient which contrasts pure electronic tones against warm old-vinyl static and an ambient synth which sounds like it’s struggling to stay in tune (and occasionally loses the battle). A couple of tracks break from this template: Brown starts out like a modern classical percussion composition, before introducing an effect […]
Cheery album title, eh? Indeed, this album starts out in pretty mournful mould, reminding me of one of the more sombre string sections from a Godspeed or Silver Mt Zion record. (There’s also something Constellation-like about the track listing, which contains wonders like “Dislocated Harmony i. into small Cold EYES ii. Several Miles Above”. Well, […]
This is… wow, I don’t know what this is. It’s bloody great, though. Let’s start with Music For The Quiet Hour. Through five long tracks, fragments of alien-sounding melodies and rhythms circle around, sampled whooshes and whirrs swirl in and out, and through it all runs a very earnest spoken word piece. It’s like some […]
This soundtrack to the indie body horror film of the same name is an accomplished bit of glitch-inflected modern classical. As an album, it is a qualified success. Shorn of their context, I find some of the more dramatic moments a little over-cooked (though I imagine they could be very effective in the movie). But on the […]
There is a strangely determined, and determinedly strange, brilliance to this. The sleeve sums it up: a man (presumably Joel Danell himself) in a flamboyant suit with a light-entertainment grin poses awkwardly behind a cheap-looking synthesizer and in front of a soft-focus backdrop — but his eyes are demoniacally glowing white stars. The music is largely Bontempi-style […]
These 12 pieces of melodic modern classical are charming, melodic, and expertly arranged. Somehow, the record as a whole is a little underwhelming, and I think there’s a clue in its title: it feels rather like Ryan Teague has been on a field trip around half a decade of music, and come back with a […]
The last time we encountered master architects Villalobos and Loderbauer in reshaping and remodelling mode, they were tackling ECM’s back catalogue, and the results were a reductio ad absurdum of abstraction (which, incidentally, I love more now than when I wrote that). This time, they’re working their magic with Conrad Schnitzler’s Zug (itself a vinyl reissue of 1973’s […]
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Grouper: A I A (2CD, Kranky, April 2012)
I’d never quite got Grouper (aka Liz Harris) before. I remember the fuss about 2008’s Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, and at the time I didn’t quite see the attraction. After taking the plunge with this double album, though, I’m a fully paid-up fan. Let’s start with the more conventional half, Alien Observer: […]
This is seriously deconstructed dub techno, picking up (in album terms) where Tummaa left off. (The move from Leaf to Raster-Noton doesn’t appear to have had a massive effect.) Again, the dominant elements are all recognizable genre staples, but the structure is something quite different. This outing feels possibly less meandering. This is most obvious […]
dogrando writes about some records 