You know how sometimes you stick a record on and you’re immediately spirited to a particular time or place or scenario via some kind of sense-memory transporter beam? That. I’ve just stuck this rather beautiful slice of hot pink and milk marbled vinyl on the ol’ Technics, and I find myself lying contentedly in the […]
Tag: year_2019
UnicaZürn are Stephen Thrower out of Coil and David Knight out of Shock Headed Peters, and Sensudestricto is a mix of moody ambient and pulsating psych-tinged drone. Across four long tracks (five on the digital streaming version) they pull an impressive array of blarps, bloops, squishes, and swirls out of what sounds like mostly analogue […]
Previously, on “dogrando writes about some records”… Eight (8!!!) years ago, Deaf Center’s Owl Splinters was a pretty big deal in these parts. It had some fine examples of the kind of close-miked solo piano sound that was very popular back then, and some excellently spiky string numbers, and helped to define a distinctive movement […]
This is pretty exciting. The sound palette is heavily rave-inspired, but the methodology is all glitch. The drums are glitchy; the punchy little synth melodies are mostly glitchy; on the handful of tracks that have synthesized or sampled vocals, they are glitchy. (One minor quibble I have with this record is that, if the title […]
In my formative years, the term “new-age” was pretty much an insult. In Thatcher’s Britain, you could revel in the spirit of corporate greed or you could rail against it, but either way the concept of any kind of cosmic harmony seemed hopelessly naive. Well, times change, and these days secular spirituality is quite on […]
William Basinski has a remarkable ability to seemingly distil the essence of a moment in time and stretch it out to epic durations. So it seems appropriate for him to tackle the subject of black holes, where gravitational time dilation means that (to an outside observer) a clock will appear to slow and stop as […]
Oh my gosh. I can’t quite get over how awesome this is. It’s also kinda hard to describe, so [takes deep breath]. Let’s talk about the vocals first. There’s some semblance of a human voice on all eight tracks here. Some are spoken word, ranging from bits that sound synthesized (but may not be) to […]
Phillip Sollmann throws us a curveball at the start of this album: opener Oh, Lovely Appearance Of Death consists of a sort of ambient wash under an a capella rendition of the (predictably cheerful) Funeral Hymn For A Believer sung by visual and performance artist William T Wiley. It’s simple and affecting and certainly not […]
There’s always a danger with music based around looped strings: get it wrong, and it can stray into annoying-busker-outside-shopping-centre territory and there’s no coming back from there. Well, I’m pleased to report that we’re in far more appealing terrain here. Julia Kent is credited with cello, electronics, and sounds. Most of the tracks have the […]
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Nkisi: 7 Directions (LP, UIQ, January 2019)
I have to admit that I underestimated this record on my first casual listen through. Take the first track, called simply I: the thing that leapt out at me was the floaty synth line and the distorted vocal sample that scream Artificial Intelligence era IDM; which lazy pigeon-holing misses the vital fact that something very […]
dogrando writes about some records 