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Music

Eartheater: IRISIRI (LP, PAN, December 2018)

Ooh, I’d forgotten how great this is. I streamed this a bunch when it came out in… was it July? I pre-ordered the vinyl, which I think was due to come out in September, and then I gradually forgot about it as the physical release date got pushed back. So this turning up was a […]

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Lubomyr Melnyk: Fallen Trees (LP, Erased Tapes, December 2018)

Ukrainian-born pianist Lubomyr Melnyk came up with what he called ‘continuous music’ sometime in the seventies, but seems to have been having a bit of a moment recently, at least in parts through his involvement with Erased Tapes. This is my first real exposure to his work, and, boy, what an experience it is. As far […]

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M Geddes Gengras: Light Pipe (CD, Room 40, October 2018)

The older I get, the less tolerant of excess I find myself. Which means that if you’re going to release a record that’s nearly two and a half hours long, you’d better have a good reason for it. Simply having a lot of stuff to get out isn’t enough; you need to be doing something […]

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Maarja Nuut & Ruum: Muunduja (LP, 130701, October 2018)

On the off chance that your knowledge of the Estonian experimental music scene is as non-existent as mine, here’s an introduction: Maarja Nuut is a fiddle player and folk singer, and Ruum (aka Hendrik Kaljujarv) is an electronic musician who cut his teeth on old Soviet analogue synths. This collaboration appears to be the first major […]

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Music

ASC: The Outer Limits (2LP, Auxiliary, December 2018)

This is simple but beautifully effective. There are four generous slices of, basically, ambient techno (clocking in at 53 minutes in total). It’s a little bit dubby in places, a little bit bassy in places, a little bit Artificial Intelligence in places — actually, to my ear, it’s quite a lot Artificial Intelligence in places, but […]

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Music

Giulio Aldinucci: Borders and Ruins (LP, Karl Records, September 2018)

This is a rather awesome and intense bit of ambient. Each track sounds like it has been spun out of a single moment of classical music: stretched, looped, processed, snap, crackled, and popped. The source material includes sacred-sounding choral music, avant-garde-sounding strings, organs. It’s powerful stuff, with a real glacial heft, but at its core […]

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Music

Sarah Davachi: Gave In Rest (LP, Ba Da Bing!, September 2018)

It has to be said, Davachi isn’t going out of her way to make this accessible. The opening track, Auster, consists of eight chords, each sustained for over a minute, played I assume on some kind of analogue synth, with the natural fluctuations of the means of production providing the only variation (well, it’s possible […]

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Tim Hecker: Konoyo (2xLP, Kranky, September 2018)

I have a bad habit of using Tim Hecker comparisons in this blog as kind of a lazy shorthand for a really full kind of ambient drone, the sound that fills the spectrum, fills the sound-stage, and fills every last cubic millimetre of your brain cavity with a giant pulsating fuzz monster. This is largely based […]

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Music

Aphex Twin: Collapse EP (12″, Warp, September 2018)

First impressions can be deceiving. Having been underwhelmed Aphex’s two releases in 2015 and, I’ll admit, having largely forgotten about the 2016 one, I was prepared to be hurt again with this. And the first two minutes of the lead track, T69 Collapse, seemed to confirm my fears: it’s kind of a skittering drill’n’bass number with […]

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Automatisme: Transit (LP, Constellation, August 2018)

This one from William Jourdaine is super hard to categorize. According to the blurb, ‘the sonic material is all sourced from the field, with recordings captured in the forests and caves of rural Quebec, along with ex-urban “non-places”, and various waiting rooms’. This seems to have gone through a whole load of modular synth gear […]