I recently made the case that Steve Gunn is best when he’s acoustic. I’d like to enter into evidence this little gem of a collaboration with Mike Gangloff (of Pelt and the Black Twig Pickers). The two share an interest in both Appalachian and Indian music, and on this record sees them spending a night […]
Tag: year_2013
At some point while I was listening to this, I found myself wondering: if Philip Glass wrote experimental synth pop, is this what it would sound like? Well, maybe so, maybe not. Anyway, it’s cracking good stuff. It’s mostly old-skool-sounding lo-fi synths (I couldn’t tell you whether they’re actually old analogue beasts or modern emulations). […]
Egyptrixx combines rattling beats with a rich, dark, meaty synths and a fine array of squelches and clangs. It’s the sort of music that demands to be described as cinematic, but as something I find can be a positive or a negative, and here it points to the reason I have reservations about this record: […]
This is the final (sob!) entry in this fantastic series by the fantastic Sub Rosa label, which has been enriching my life regularly since 2001. As always, the range of music is phenomenal, and while not everything will be to anyone’s taste, there’s always loads to keep me interested. One standout track here for me […]
I got hold of Ryoji Ikeda’s 1995 debut album 1000 Fragments when it was re-released by Raster-Noton in 2008. I liked it, but I didn’t love it, and I hadn’t really paid him much attention since then. That changed at the 2013 todaysart festival, where his test pattern performance tore the atrium of Den Haag town hall […]
You have to admire Emptyset’s dedication to an ideal. That ideal is making big, chunky music almost entirely formed from clanking and buzzing noises. There are no beats, but the sounds are heavily rhythmical. There are virtually no notes at an audible frequency, but the bassy whirrs are forced through a tortuous tangle of filters […]
From the start, this record leaves you in no doubt what’s in store: darkly atmospheric, bass-heavy, righteous shenanigans. Things rumble and clank. There is distant howling and tribal chanting. The beats take a while to kick in, but when they do they are a masterclass in what you can do with not much more than […]
I guess that I was expecting James Leyland Kirby’s latest moniker to be doing something akin to the crackly nostalgia of his work as Leyland Kirby or The Caretaker. The links are there, but The Stranger is something altogether starker and more abstract, and it’s taken me a while to get my head around it. The […]
So, we have to start with the stories. Here’s the first story: In 2001, William Basinski came upon some tape loops of slowed-down recordings from radio which he’d made in the 1980s, back before he got (relatively speaking) famous in the ’90s. He decided to transfer them to digital, set the loops going, and hit […]
Ah, Fuck Buttons, it’s been too long. It has to be said, they haven’t exactly revolutionized their sound in the four years since their last long-player, Tarot Sport, but they might just have perfected it. The big, bold, bashing drumbeats and the big, giant, squelching synth sounds are all just spot on here. About one […]
dogrando writes about some records 