Minimalist composer James Tenney (an early member of the Philip Glass Ensemble) wrote Koan: Having Never Written A Note For Percussion for experimental percussionist John Bergamo in 1971. It is for a percussion instrument (he doesn’t specify which) and consists of a single note, initially quadruple-pianissimo, then with a crescendo to a quadruple-fortissimo, then with a […]
Tag: year_2015
Less “while my guitar gently weeps”, more “while my guitar gently bleeds out onto the canvas”. This rare 1990 recording (originally under his Guitar Roberts alias) has been remastered for this release by Taylor Deupree, which is a hint that we’re in for something a bit special. This is just recognizably blues, but of the […]
The “thrilling ten minutes of proper dark industrial techno awesomeness” which is You Show Great Spirit, from the three-track Through The Window on Blackest Ever Black, was my standalone track of 2013. My quibble with that records was that the title track, basically making one noise (albeit a very awesome one) for almost 18 minutes, slightly outstayed […]
This record isn’t exactly going to be a surprise to anyone who knows Basinski. It’s basically three or four bars of a simple piano melody, looped and recorded and re-recorded and allowed to decay, so that the interplay of the imperfections slowly builds. This is less monumental and less freighted with meaning than my last […]
Fascinating… Nuclear armageddon never sounded so good. The vocal on this decidedly retro treat is a 1975 recording of Leonard Nimoy reading Ray Bradbury’s gently post-apocalyptic 1950 short story There Will Come Soft Rains, which begins as a description of life in a futuristic automated house (internet of things, anyone?) but gradually reveals first that […]
From about a minute in, it’s pretty clear we’re in for a treat here. The Xerrox project has always been at the lush ambient end of Alva Noto’s output, so different from the razor-sharp glitch of, say, Unitxt. But this he’s outdone himself here: there is a huge depth of emotion just humming out of […]
The more-elusive half of Pan Sonic doing Jamaican dub? Yes, please! This is Ilpo Väisänen’s first solo release in a decade. Some tracks are a sort of highly-abstracted dub, sparse things formed of hollow clanking sounds which you could imagine have been reverberating around the ghost of the Black Ark for years. Some tracks add […]
The first of Aphex’s recent flurry of releases (proper releases, that is, I can’t begin to digest all the soundcloud stuff) which really made me go ‘meh’ in the style of a proper old-skool odds-and-sods sort-of-meh Aphex 12″. The title track, which was a bonus track on the Japanese version of last year’s Syro, is a […]
This one is right on the cusp of the modern classical / ambient thing. Strings and electronics blend seamlessly together to shimmering, atmospheric effect. The sleeve notes explain that the title refers to “an ancient Chinese tradition… of a fundamental tone that relates to society’s place in the cosmic order”: while I don’t think there […]
2014 was pretty exciting for old-timey Aphex Twin fans such as your humble blogger, with the releases of both the Caustic Window LP and Syro. The former was recorded in 1994 and only saw the light of day due to a kickstarter campaign. We don’t actually know when the material for the latter dates from, though it […]
dogrando writes about some records 