GLOWING RAW

Tobias - Leaning Over Backwards (2011)

2012-01-31T18:08:00.000-08:00

Leaning Over Backwards
Style: Minimal Techno
Label: Ostgut Ton

The debut album from Tobias Freund under his Tobias alias makes for a great techno palate cleanser for Ostgut Ton after the warm and fuzzy deep house of Steffi's Yours & Mine. If your idea of a palate cleanser is swallowing sandpaper, that is. That's the dominant texture on Leaning Over Backwards. Ever the ascetic, for Leaning Over Backwards Freund abandons sequencer technology in favour of an 808 and a Mini Pops.

A man who's produced everything from dance floor bombs to droning diatribes to spiky synth experiments under names like Odd Machine, Pink Elln and Non Standard Institute, Leaning Over Backwards is happily split down the middle by techno material and synth experiments that don't fall too far from the sort of kosmische revival touted by names like Dylan Ettinger or Stellar Om Source. The album is at its heart consummate home-listening techno, detailed and varied enough for even the most fickle of attention spans. Opener "Girts" builds layer after layer of grey crackle, a drum machine raucously fighting its way through the wall of burlap, while "Party Town" sticks unnerving, FUBAR'd vocal samples on top of a steampunk hop. Heading in a more accessible direction, "Leaning Over Backwards" and "Free No. 1" almost owe something to recent UK with their synth tangents and lithe drum machine aerobics, the latter especially making the most of space in an otherwise extremely claustrophobic record.

"Skippy" is eight minutes of unrelenting, ultra-rigid kick drums and endlessly repeating vocals (a voice saying "skippy" at a frenetic clip) and would hold just as much water in a torture chamber as on a dance floor. Thankfully, Freund balances out those moments of extremity with tracks of wanderlust beauty, like the perpetual chime cycle of "Voices Told Me to Do That"—where the repetitive pattern begins to feel uncomfortably vicelike by the track's end—or the synth-drone experiment "Observing the Hypocrites" which wears itself down into intimidating low-frequency hum.

Tracks like that are a big reason why the debut tobias. album feels like a triumph for a man who's spent a career making mostly "difficult" music. It shouldn't come as a surprise—we already knew the man who made Non Standard Institute Plays Non Standards was the same responsible for "Can't Fight This Feeling," after all—but it doesn't make it any less of an achievement. tobias. has given Ostgut a remarkable album that has its finger in nearly every pie within reach but feels unremittingly focused at the same time. It recalls Thomas Fehlmann's Gute Luft in its joyful appropriation of all sorts of techno trends and ideas into one unified palette, but does it with a steely resolve that sucks all the transparent sentimentalism out and replaces it with brutal but inspiring functionalism. Grey never sounded so lustrous. - Resident Advisor

http://www.mediafire.com/?r8fps2t28b9sb47

Steffi - Yours & Mine (2011)

2012-01-31T17:32:00.000-08:00

Yours & Mine
Style: Deep House
Label: Ostgut Ton

Given that Steffi has a paltry six tracks to her name since she began producing—or at least releasing, with "24 Hours" on 2009's Panorama Bar 02 her official debut—to hear news of the Panorama Bar resident's album was bewildering. But that's the thing about Steffi that may surprise you. The tracks she has released (particularly the entrancing disco hypnosis of "Reasons" on Underground Quality) have been sterling exemplars of smooth and stylish deep house.

As a DJ, Steffi is known for her often ecstatic sets, and she's also known for occasionally throwing a bit of techno (and everything else) into the mix. You won't find much of that here—for all intents and purposes, Yours and Mine is through-and-through a deep house album, and one that often sounds like her deep house contemporaries. Steffi knows what she does well, and that's the kind of thrill Yours and Mine offers: the restrained, mature appeal of pure refinement. So while it's not about to blow anyone's mind—not anyone who has been paying attention to house music in the past five years or so, anyway—the effect of near-perfect groove after groove has a wonderful cumulative momentum.

"Piem" has lush chords bubbling between the cracks left behind by the uncharacteristically slamming kick drum. "Yours" does "Reasons" one better, electrifying its deadened thud and throwing on a more impassioned vocal from Virginia—classic house sounds as carefully refracted through the lens of the modern deep house revival. Elsewhere Steffi can be too refined: the chunky groove of "Nightspacer" never quite takes flight and the faux-acid lines of "Manic Moods" feel ornamental and even gaudy when neutered so badly. The album's best moments come when she lets her hair down, with the synth histrionics and wrenching bassline of "Mine" ringing out like Silent Shout on opiates.

Yours & Mine winds down with a contemplative blacklight strobe, Virginia providing a sensual and bass-driven sultry vocal on "You Own My Mind" that nicely underlines the album's strengths: subtlety and a solid foundation. Every track is built from a basic, tough-as-nails structure, which is often sparsely decorated with incandescent chords and thinned-out and pale strings. Your experience with Yours and Mine depends on your tolerance of analogue obscurity, of artificial antiquity and feigned weathering. With her debut album, Steffi never breaks any ground—she's about building, not destroying—but there's something so appealing about the simple way she builds her structures that it doesn't matter if they sometimes look a bit too much like the ones over on the other side of the fence. - Resident Advisor

http://www.mediafire.com/?ykjszjq903acwn4

Anti-G - Presents Kentje’sz Beatsz (2011)

2012-01-31T17:10:00.001-08:00

Presents Kentje'sz Beatsz
Style: Bubbling House / Bass
Label: Planet Mu

First announced a couple of months back, the comp, available on CD, 12″ and digital, documents 18-year-old Anti G‘s brand of Bubbling House, a bastard modern take on a 20-year-old party music from the Netherlands.

As legend has it, it all began at a party in the late 80s when a local Hague selector, DJ Moortje, accidentally dropped a dancehall 12″ at 45rpm. Far from recoiling in horror, the crowd went wild, and Bubbling was born, taking root in the immigrant communities from The Dutch Antilles in Suriname.

According to Mu, huge Jamaican riddims like Fever Pitch and Bam Bam were taken and put through the Bubbling blender, double and half-timed, and for a while Bubbling was the party sound of The Hague. But house soon overtook it in terms of prominence and trendiness, and it went back underground, listened to mainly by small pockets of black and Latin youth. It would be some years before a group of cousins – Shaun-D, Master-D, Daycard and Deschuurman – decided to exploit the compatibility of Bubbling and house, creating a fusion of sickly synth-lines and rugged Dem Bow drums that would quickly come to be known as, you guessed it, Bubbling House.

Which brings us to Kentje’sz Beatsz, sixteen tracks of Bubbling House from the young Anti-G, who dwells in the southern Dutch city of Delft. Drawing not just on Bubbling and house but also reggaeton and hip-hop, Anti-G’s FruityLoops-built confections blend those exuberant synths (described by our friends at Boomkat as sounding “like Sooty & Sweep having a battery acid enema in a Surinamese space station”) with tough but swinging rhythms and ice-cold atmospherics; they’re variously reminiscent of the UK funky derivations of Bok Bok, Scratcha et al (‘Brittle’), the gangster roll of early noughties grime, and even the techno-cut ups of MMM and Errorsmith (check out ‘CrazyShit’ above and see what we mean). The tracks, all produced in 2009-10 and some of which have been turning up in the sets of the more adventurous UK house DJs for some time, are routinely short and brutally functional, which naturally only adds to their appeal. - FACT

http://www.mediafire.com/?jc9zuxzjlnb38vf

Oval - OvalDNA (2012)

2012-01-24T15:12:00.000-08:00

OvalDNA
Style: Glitch
Label: Shitkatapult

Glitch is one of those microgenres that seemed to disappear halfway through the last decade. When the German outfit Oval-- early on reduced to founding member Markus Popp-- made its return in 2010 with O, it was hard to decide how to react. Especially since O was one of its most difficult and fussy efforts yet, and largely divorced from Oval's previously established and instantly recognizable aesthetic as heard on landmarks like 94 Diskont and Ovalcommers. With a palette based on the sound of live instruments, O lacked some of the algorithmic wizardry of Popp's best work and was a fatiguingly lengthy listen either way. You'd be forgiven for thinking that OvalDNA, coming just a year later and clocking in with another 25 tracks-- and this after the complementary 15-track 12" Oh-- is something like overkill.

Here's the surprise: OvalDNA is actually a collection of bits and bytes from assorted Oval eras past. The even bigger surprise? While it indeed sounds like the old Oval we know and love, there's nothing even remotely scatterbrained or assorted about this one. Not only is OvalDNA remarkably consistent and thematically sound, it's so well-sequenced that its 25 tracks fly by in a glorious, easygoing blur, a far cry from that fatal fragmentation that ate away at O. Its variety renders these sounds in a fluid and volatile technicolor missing from even early records like Systemisch. In a way, it's the best of both Oval worlds. Included in the package is a DVD with ten bonus tracks, a music video, a documentary, and 2000 AIFF files of sounds and elements from the entirety of Popp's musical output "intended for music producers." Okay, so maybe it's a little overkill, but coming from an artist who made a public installation inviting people to render their own interpretations of his work (as part of 2000's Ovalprocess), it shouldn't really come as a surprise either.

Like so much of this music, sometimes it's hard to tell whether or not the decay and destruction that pries apart the layers is accidental or planned, but here the manipulation feels effortless, executed with a smart and steady hand. There are many varieties of Oval on offer, though it's most often a warm-hued, even honeyed sound palette rather than the acerbic distortion of, say, Ovalcommers. While some tracks like "Savvy" do focus on harsher, more challenging sounds, even these-- or the hushed, rushed thermal swooshing of "70 Kino" and its choked string section-- feel oddly accommodating. OvalDNA doesn't dip into the same well of asceticism as the conceptually driven sound-design experiments you'll find on labels like Mille Plateaux or Raster-Noton; instead, each stutter and skip feels melodically driven, each sample caught and clipped mid-moment like a key to some larger world of musical delights that we're given glimpses of but are never actually led to-- dig the teases at jungle on "Mare Fax"-- on account of the album's sprightly pace.

Even if it can be a tease, some moments on OvalDNA are downright welcoming: It's hard to think of anything from Oval since the legendary "Do While" as beautiful as "Australasia". One of the album's more compositionally complete tracks, it juggles jerkily plucked strings, organs that whir to life before being pulled apart into groaning rumbles, and drums that stutter across the stereo spectrum at random. That might sound like a mess, but the elements just slightly coalesce to form a stirring, heart-tugging refrain gently morphing over the track's three-and-a-half minutes, a chief example of the accidental alchemy of OvalDNA. "Octaeder 0.2", which formed the centerpiece to Oval's live contribution to the Henri Pousseur tribute 4 Parabolic Mixes, proves the emotional potential of these flurries of compressed ones and zeroes, while the more recent Oval material is at least coincidentally referenced with a number of tracks that make live-instrument samples their focus ("Credit Line"), stumbling on an odd hybrid of acoustic and computerized sounds in the process, like twang rendered with right angles.

Approachability is one thing, and OvalDNA has it in spades, but there's also the issue of relevance: Can a veteran act in a largely outmoded genre still command attention with an outtakes collection? Certainly, any fan of Oval (particularly those lapsed after O) will find a lot to love in OvalDNA's gentle reassurances, but even for a newcomer, these sounds are idiosyncratic and stimulating enough to get lost in. OvalDNA is curiously timeless, as if these tracks were encased in amber, still holding that intriguingly alien gleam and shine as back in Oval's halcyon days, even polished up a little nicer this time. It might not be something we knew we still needed, but at the least, OvalDNA is a solid addition to the canon of one of the most innovative electronic acts of the 1990s. - PFM

Took a break this month... Sometimes no new music catches my ear for a while, but this one finally did. Fascinating compendium of classic-era Oval odds-and-ends.

http://www.mediafire.com/?5sf4g6bjscpc95h

TOP 20 RECORDS OF 2011

2012-01-02T21:24:00.001-08:00

And so we begin the year of the apocalypse... with a list of my top 20 records from 2011. Thanks again to all the readers for your continued support over the past four years, and I hope you enjoy the list and the music on it as much as I have.

1. John Maus - We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves
[Ribbon Music]
On this record, Maus transcends his lo-fi past to produce a genuine masterpiece of woozy synthetic pop, fusing Joy Division-esque vocal atmospherics and post-punk bass work with shimmering synth melodies that have remained stuck in my head for months on end. I'm not sure what Maus is getting at lyrically with most of these tracks, but it doesn't really matter. Standouts like "Hey Moon" and "We Can Break Through" are jaw dropping in their sheer beauty, and there isn't a weak moment on the entire record. Call me a believer. [dl]

2. Rustie - Glass Swords
[Warp]
Absolutely in love with this one lately. A new take on post-FlyLo, post-everything, sensory-overload electronica geared towards digitally jacked-in, artificially stimulated, and attention-deficit internet dwellers who want their bass music euphoric, shiny, and lit by corridors of endless neon. Don't fight this, feel it.
[dl]

3. James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual
[Hippos in Tanks]
Both a paean to and critique of our technologically saturated existence in 2011, Far Side Virtual takes the most disgustingly ear-pleasing and kitschy elements of ringtones, adverts, 90's soundtracks, VHS educational videos and pre-programmed Casio beats and somehow makes them palatable to even the most jaded of ears. So cheerful you want to hate it, but so amazing that you can't, this album seems to have a struck a nerve with a lot of people this year, and I'm not surprised. Ferraro might just be the spokesman of our brave new dystopia. [dl]

4. Nicolas Jaar - Space is Only Noise
[Circus Company]
An enchanting and bizarre collection of glitchy electronic art-pop that seems to grow more compelling with every listen, Jaar's Space is Only Noise is a left-field wonder of home production. Earworm basslines and crisp, attenuated percussion form the sonic backbone for Jaar's deadpan yet strangely effective vocal chants and pointillistic piano digressions. It is rare to find a musician so young with such a distinct sonic handprint and feel for texture, space, and pacing.
[dl]

5. Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972
[Kranky]
While it doesn't hold a candle to Harmony in Ultraviolet, Hecker's 2006 opus of gorgeous symphonic drone (and what does?), Ravedeath, 1972 is still one of the strongest entries in his catalog, spinning hypnotic webs of dark, smoke-flecked beauty from the oldest of analog sources: a pipe organ. Recorded inside a cathedral and engineered by Ben Frost, these compositions have a vast, elegiac power that continues to stun me months after first hearing them. Once again, I bow down before this man's powers.
[dl]

6. The War on Drugs - Slave Ambient
[Secretly Canadian]
Yearning, nostalgic road anthems set in widescreen technicolor over a pulsing motorik groove. The War on Drugs somehow managed to fuse the most cliche elements of 70's FM / Americana radio rock with shoegaze production and krautrock sensibilities to create an entirely new sound, one obviously designed for blasting full volume with the windows down.
[dl]

7. Zomby - Dedication
[4AD]
One of the most unpredictable and innovative producers of the past few years drops his second proper LP, a pensive, nocturnal affair filled with dark shadows, empty space, and phantoms of jittery apprehension. Pulsating hi-hats, hand claps and disembodied voices shiver and snap their way into your field of perception, only to recede just as quickly. While short on running time, Dedication is an eye-popping, harrowing listening experience from beginning to end, and points to exciting things to come from Zomby. [dl]

8. Grouper - A / A: Alien Observer-Dream Loss
[Yellowelectric]
A return to the gauzy atmospherics of her earlier work, Grouper's A / A is the kind of record that haunts your dreams, that guides you into a hypnotic stupor and plays tricks with your perceptions of time and space. Recording with a minimal palette of guitar, voice, and miles of reverb, Liz Harris manages to craft utterly bewitching and emotionally devastating hymns of dislocation and loss.
[dl]

9. Peaking Lights - 936
[Not Not Fun]
Easily the most accessible and upbeat record that I've encountered in the NNF catalog, 936 took me (and probably a lot of others) by surprise this spring with its day-glo interpretation of lo-fi tribal psychedelia and dub. Working with a similar sonic template as so many other self-styled 'hypnagogic pop' groups, Peaking Lights managed to distinguish themselves due to sheer songwriting prowess and hooky arrangements using pared-down instrumentation. Sunshine, birds, marshmallows, summertime, and sweet dub basslines... the perfect antidote to this year's abounding pessimism .[dl]

10. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
[Constellation]
A pulsing, shrieking, humming explosion of human musical energy, Stetson makes his saxophone sound like three or four people playing for their lives. Embodying the physical ferocity of free jazz but closer in feel, structure, and tonality to the process/pulse music of Steve Reich and John Adams, New History Warfare Vol. 2 shows that there is still plenty of exciting, uncharted territory at the intersection of improv, jazz, and minimalism. [dl]

11. Andy Stott - Passed Me By / We Stay Together
[Modern Love]
Over the course of these two EP's, Andy Stott exacts a suffocatingly dense and brutal reinvention of dub techno, smearing subsonic bass pulses and chopped vocal fragments across the stereo field and deep into your bones. With striking hyper-compressed production somewhat akin to Actress's 2010 LP Splazsh, Stott takes the basic ingredients of what we know as "techno" and subjects them to a process of degradation and mutation; stretching the familiar elements into something new, deranged and completely addicting .[dl]

12. Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact
[4AD]
The culmination of Gang Gang Dance's evolution from NYC tribal noise mavens to colorful ethno-pop collagists, Eye Contact is a hyperactive rush of sound from start to finish, exploding genres left and right and picking up the pieces to form a new hybrid beast. Tracks like "Glass Jar" and "Mindkilla" are kaleidoscopic, bursting with life, and eminently re-playable, and are merely the tip of the iceberg on this excellent album.
[dl]

13. Thundercat - The Golden Age of Apocalypse
[Brainfeeder]
While hardly mentioned in the frantic storm of critical acclaim that rose around Flying Lotus' 2o10 release Cosmogramma, Steven 'Thundercat' Bruner's fleet-fingered bass work was a key element in many of its best tracks, anchoring the electronic chaos with the live feel of a seasoned jazz musician. With his debut album The Golden Age of Apocalypse, Bruner's talents as arranger and producer are allowed to shine on their own, revealing a truly unique sensibility that melds 70's soul, jazz fusion, boogie funk, and left-of-center IDM into a wacky and ear-pleasing hybrid. This is lounge music for the electronically-addled mind. [dl]

14. Kuedo - Severant

[Planet Mu]
An album from a reformed dubstep producer turned sci-fi dreamsmith, Severant is a complex meshwork of skittering percussion and drifting, melancholic synths that conjure a contemporary re-imagining of the noir-dystopian future of Blade Runner. Cyberpunk neon and gaseous fog from the underbelly of a rotting metropolis shadow human regret and night drives to nowhere... This one is addicting and a must-hear for all the Vangelis / Oneohtrix / retrofuturist freaks out there.
[dl]

15. A Winged Victory for the Sullen - A Winged Victory for the Sullen
[Kranky]
The brilliance of Adam Wiltzie never ceases to amaze me. As a member of Stars of the Lid, Aix Em Klemm, and the Dead Texan, he is responsible for some of the greatest ambient / post-classical music ever put to tape. Paired with the pianist Dustin O'Halloran on this Kranky release, Wiltzie managed to craft one of the most sublime and jaw-droppingly gorgeous musical experiences of the year. Working with a soft array of string drones, bass hums, and ethereal, cycling piano motifs reminiscent of Harold Budd or Ryuichi Sakamoto, the duo conjure an atmosphere of sedated melancholia, a sadness tempered by hope and the promise of future bliss. Too emotional and immaculately structured to be relegated to the status of mere "background music," A Winged Victory for the Sullen is a masterpiece of modern composition and deserves your full attention. [dl]

16. Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica
[Software]
I seem to be in the relative minority here, but I consider OPN's Rifts compilation (2009) the pinnacle of Lopatin's compositional output. The drifting sci-fi synth drones and glistening arpeggios of that work cast an indefinable, hypnotic spell over me for months on end, a state which his subsequent work has been unable to duplicate. That said, Replica is still an excellent album, and incorporates elements of glitch, sampling, and electroacoustic fuckery of all kinds to transport the listener into an ambiguous technological interzone populated by ghosts and sonic ephemera. While the symphonic grandeur of older pieces like "Format and Journey North" or "Physical Memories" was macrocosmic in scope, reaching upward and outward, the music here zooms in to reveal microscopic levels of detail and constantly shifting planes of texture, an approach which generously repays repeated listening. [dl]

17. Blanck Mass - Blanck Mass
[Rock Action]
Abandoning the hard-edged rhythmic structures of his primary group Fuck Buttons in favor of a beatless, shimmering ambience, Benjamin John Power created one of the most entrancing electronic-drone releases in recent memory. Listening to Blanck Mass is like entering a hot, murky swamp on an alien planet and watching iridescent forms of life rise out of the mist and shapeshift before your eyes. Composed entirely of synthetic instrumentation, the vibe of this record is nevertheless entirely organic; hot, fetid, all-encompassing... it seems to summon a vast presence. [dl]

18. Mark McGuire - A Young Person's Guide to Mark McGuire
[Editions Mego]
The most prominent heir to the legacy of Manuel Gottsching in the 21st century, McGuire and his primary group Emeralds have, over the past few years, managed to propel Kosmisch psychedelia into a new level of critical and public awareness with works like What Happened and last year's lauded Does It Look Like I'm Here?. This two-and-a-half hour compilation of McGuire's solo guitar work, while sadly passed over by many reviewers, is just as worthy of your attention, as it contains a treasure trove of some of the most affecting guitar work I've ever heard. Mantra-like, meditative, and almost uniformly optimistic in tone, these recordings sit comfortably in the dreamy minimalist lineage of Gottsching's Inventions for Electric Guitar, Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint and Roy Montgomery's Scenes From the South Island, but have their own distinct charm and mind-altering power. Drift away... [dl]

19. The Men - Leave Home
[Sacred Bones]
Records like this don't come around too often anymore. Screeching, overdriven, lo-fidelity, drugged out, balls-to-the-wall guitar rock that hearkens back to early 90's indie, noise rock and shoegaze. In a year when so much of the music I listened to was synthesizer based, it was refreshing to periodically wake myself up with a band so unapologetically reliant on old school analog instrumentation, guitar fuzz and fuck-you attitude. Lester Bangs would be proud.
[dl]

20. Machinedrum - Room(s)
[Planet Mu]
A euphoric and propulsive amalgam of high-BPM footwork rhythms, post-Burial vocal cutup science, and pop-ambient song structures, Room(s) is one of the most foreward thinking electronic releases of the year, and an exhilarating listen from start to finish. Drawing inspiration from the vanguard of club music but also very suitable for sustained bedroom listening, these high energy productions combine the intensity of full-on peak electronica with the melodic complexity and forward motion of pop. Definitely a producer to watch in the coming years. [dl]

Rustie - Glass Swords (2011)

2011-12-27T12:38:00.000-08:00

Glass Swords
Style: Post-Dubstep / Digital Maximalism / Video Games
Label: Warp

Glass Swords seems set on out-gauching a league of contemporaries who are beginning to add completely unfashionable genre signifiers to their music. You don't get much more direct than "Hover Traps," whose slap bass (like it was taken right off of Seinfeld) is quickly rendered irrelevant in the face of the massive flashes of fuzzy white light, enough to invoke memories of Above & Beyond or ATB's heyday. Indeed, on several tracks Rustie prefers the tried-and-tested trance trick of snare rolls and epic build-ups ("After Light") that explode into tacky fireworks.

But it doesn't end there. Influenced equally by progressive rock and video games, he loads his music with theatrical melodrama, the stuff of medieval adventures and space-age voyages. There are searing guitar solos constantly cutting through these beats, another layer of sensory-overload sugar, and at its most potent the mixture is an absolute knockout. Standout single "Ultra Thizz" mixes these prog-rock heroics with drum machine acrobatics and trance euphoria, a dizzying combination of high octane drama so convincing it can't help but ingratiate itself through sheer willpower.

It might all be a little childlike were the music not so dauntingly complex: melodies rarely go the predictable path and they even more rarely repeat. The rhythms are removed from the quantized boom-bap he used to be associated with, effortlessly switching grooves like a live drummer controlled by Rustie's expert puppeteer hands. I'd be hard-pressed to put these tracks in any genre: though tracks like "Death Mountain" and "Cry Flames" have serrated and plunging dubstep basslines, the jagged, unpredictable movements are anything but typical. A track like "All Nite" flips the playful funk of Hudson Mohawke into a convulsing monster where the hot pink synth blasts sound like they're being squeezed through a straw at random.

If an album of tireless prog-dance sounds fatiguing, Rustie's got your back there too. You can only handle so much sugar before teeth are dissolving in your mouth, so these tracks are kept to agreeable lengths, and a dependable dynamic of careful intros (before "City Star" falls off into hip-hop mayhem it's a real sci-fi tearjerker) means there are necessary plateaus and valleys to keep the high from wearing off (or wearing listeners out).

I'll admit I wasn't the biggest fan of the surprising new direction on Rustie's Warp EP debut Sunburst, but he's completely reworked the formula here, tightening it, reinforcing it, and making it a whole lot more attractive in the process. Gone is the self-indulgent sense of excess and in its place is a well-oiled system of interlocking melodies catchy enough to lodge themselves into your brain even when there's three of them going at once. Glass Swords is a place where pleasure is the only constant: it doesn't matter that he's playing with self-consciously "cheesy" sounds or untouchable genres when the songs are this good. We've come a long way from "aquacrunk"—so here's your trance, now dance. - RA

Been playing this record basically on repeat for the last month or so. Absurdly colorful, bombastic, and euphoric music that transcends any easy classification and seems to embody a new kind of electronica. On Glass Swords, Rustie combines every garish, eye-popping, serotonin-rush inducing trick up his sleeve to produce one of the best albums of the year.

A rather insightful write-up by Simon Reynolds can be found here regarding the album and its place in today's climate of "digital maximalism."

http://www.mediafire.com/?wkieokuu456qxze

Zomby - Nothing (2011)

2011-12-27T12:28:00.000-08:00

Nothing
Style: Bass / Post-Rave
Label: 4AD

Don't let the title or post-album late-year timing fool you-- there are plenty of good things happening on Nothing. While it sounds like it was taken from the same creative burst that birthed London producer Zomby's recent LP Dedication, here that album's glum funereality gets an almost dance-friendly makeover. With its classic-sounding jungle breaks and ragga vocal samples, opener "Labyrinth" immediately recalls Zomby's vaguely conceptual throwback debut Where Were U in '92?, though drenched in noir melancholy. The breaks stutter and sputter, the perfunctory chord progression is oddly defeatist, and the characteristic airhorns are mockingly empty and peripheral: Breakbeat 'ardkore never sounded this tormented.

That's not to say Nothing isn't ever upbeat or danceable-- it's tinged with Dedication's air of quiet, nocturnal introspection but not shackled by its thematic bent or album-oriented sequencing. Thus we get seven shades of Zomby, and even if they're basically different shades of gray, it's exciting to hear him branch out. He tries something new on the unusually dissolute "Trapdoor", where grainy synths billow over scattershot percussion that has more to do with footwork than Zomby's usual hardcore continuum. "Digital Fractal" and "Equinox" take the pseudo-garage bounce of older tracks like "Tarantula" and turn it somber in two different ways: "Fractal" plays with dulcet, mournful tones and shrouds its cycling arpeggios in reverb so they sound like they're off in the distance, lost in a fog, while the shimmering "Equinox" sucks that echo chamber dry, all crisply slicing snares and tactile hand percussion. It's a brilliant realism often missing from an artist whose work is expressed through glassy, artificial textures or borrowed tropes from extinct genres.

Those extinct genres make a determined comeback on Nothing, however, and Zomby's take on them is stronger than ever. "Sens" toys gently with its breaks, carefully placing them in the white space of a melody caught between jerky and jilted, and "Ecstasy Versions" transitions from a hesitant breakbeat crawler into full-on jungle. Even here, again Zomby's morose melodicism takes center stage, a track more about its sadly cooing vocals-- a common sample source sullied and sullen-- and bleepy melody than the flashy, distracting breaks that should be the center of attention. It's like he's proving once and for all that Where Were U in '92? wasn't just a transparent exercise, blending his hardcore copycat tracks with his more personal, idiosyncratic tendencies.

The Nothing EP was originally included as an appendage to the Japanese edition of Dedication, so it seems almost certain that these were leftovers from the album. But it says a lot about the strength of these tracks-- and Zomby's preternatural propensity for prolific greatness-- that the seven odds and sods on Nothing make for such a strong whole. It's not quite the sound of Zomby having fun-- this music is still too dark for that-- but it's Zomby being his usual tangential self again, after bearing the constraints of a second cohesive album. He recently tweeted: "jungle is going to come back hard, mark my words, it might be five years from now but we will witness a new great age of jungle in England." This sounds like the excitable mouthing-off of a delusional purist, but really, with visionary artists like Zomby behind a potential new wave of the stuff, it's hard not to wonder if he could be right. - PF

Another excellent Zomby release... echoes of jungle and hardcore closer in vibe to Where Were U than the recent LP Dedication. Definitely worth hearing.

http://www.mediafire.com/?4z4bavmup780j95

Balam Acab - Wander / Wonder (2011)

2011-12-26T13:20:00.000-08:00

Wander / Wonder
Style: Ambient / Drone / Electronic
Label: Tri Angle

The rapid emergence of micro-genres has a long history in music, but the Internet has intensified the process. Online communication creates a situation where young artists, separated by geography but brought together through the web, can share the same obsessions and quickly develop remarkably similar aesthetics. The umbrella of music sometimes called witch house is perhaps the most obvious example of this in the last few years, since it combined musical concerns (moody synths, slow tempos, warped vocals, allusions to Southern rap) with a specific visual aesthetic (anonymous producers shielded by hoodies, Christian imagery, deep knowledge of the computer keyboard's symbol keys), and so many artists with these exact qualities appeared simultaneously. Unusually, the bulk of the movement could be traced to precisely one source, Salem, demonstrating how much sway that sometimes reviled outfit had over the minds of budding young producers who spend way too much time online.

Once a scene or sound crystalizes, you can bet that the most interesting artists to emerge from it will quickly set off on their own and develop an individual voice. Balam Acab, the project of 20-year-old Pennsylvanian Alec Koone, was rightly slotted with witch house when he released his See Birds EP in 2010. He has the warped voices and the slow tempos, he was on the right label, and his IRL identity had a cultivated air of mystery. But the careful construction of See Birds hinted that his musical ear was a cut above, and now his excellent full-length debut, Wander / Wonder, confirms it. This is a personal and distinctive record with its share of current reference points that nonetheless doesn't need a scene to prop it up.

A few things set Balam Acab apart from the pack, first being the overall mood. The post-Salem "dark and creepy" crawl became a cliché in record time, but Wander / Wonder, despite the spectral voices that take the lead on every track, has no hints of nightmares or grim violence. Instead, its primary concern is simple aesthetic beauty, the way a small and specific combination of sounds, carefully arranged but given room to breathe, can have a deep emotional impact. It's pretty, in other words, but its prettiness never feels manipulative or overbearing. It's the sort of music that exists at the intersection between art and design, but it manages to avoid feeling sterile.

There are eight tracks here in 37 minutes, the perfect length given the consistent mood. They have vague titles like "Apart" and "Now Time" and "Oh, Why" that serve as a light tint but don't really point to anything in particular. In fact, differentiating between the tracks seems sort of beside the point, since so many of the same motifs pop up over and over again: The album feels very much like one sustained thing. The basic elements are twinkly keyboards and and music-box chimes, dusty crackles floating on sounds of shifting liquid, and deep basslines bumping into the occasional drum machine clap. Floating above it all are the voices, pitched up to accentuate their delicacy and set loose in a cloud of echo. While the current vogue is for sampled vocals that allude to R&B, Balam Acab's mostly have a classical feel, sounding like they are pulled from recordings of ancient hymns and airs. Accentuating the "chamber dub" qualities are liberal samples of orchestral sections and nylon string guitar. But the most important instrument of all is silence, which frames every note and brings it to the foreground.

Where the ghostly dubstep of Burial, an obvious antecedent, has a crucial connection to the urban street, Wander / Wonder is pastoral, more likely to bring to mind sunlight slanting through a window that overlooks a rural garden. And you can't have a garden without water. As anyone who has ever knocked over a cup next to a computer knows, water is the digital sphere's mortal enemy, the thing that can bring our precious electrical circuits down in an instant. In line with recent productions by Clams Casino and AraabMuzik, Wander / Wonder has has an obsession with the sound of the life force: Laced throughout are samples of lapping currents, slow drips, and light splashes. These accents reinforce both the bucolic feel and, with the complexity of the natural world that computers still envy, liberates the music from the computer grid. They also make Wander / Wonder an immersive experience, like something you lower yourself into, inch by inch. And in the end, that seems to be the overriding idea: This is functional music that highlights the simple pleasure of artfully arranged sound, the kind of gorgeous and evocative record that fills up the room and shifts your perception for 37 minutes and then brings you gently back to the surface.

http://www.mediafire.com/?n6uwz33w4su1zl3

Hype Williams - One Nation (2011)

2011-12-26T13:07:00.000-08:00

One Nation
Style: Psych / Hypnagogic-Pop / Lo-Fi
Label: Hippos in Tanks

Pre-eminent H-Pop geniuses, Hype Williams, deliver the crackish satisfaction of 'One Nation', their third album proper and first for the hugely exciting Hippos in Tanks label - home to Laurel Halo, Games, SLEEP ∞ OVER, Grimes, D'eon, Autre Ne Veut and others. With the same fugged-up blend of sly insouciance and deceptively naive production that made 'Find Out What Happens...' so vital, Denna Francis and Roy D. Blunt have assembled a sublime followup which makes so much else out there seem over-earnest and over-dressed. From the warped VHS signature of 'Ital' inwards, their surreal grasp of possessed, private synth music and deliberately economical production is delivered with innate confidence and the blackest humour. Whether it's the hilariously frank self-help samples and new age tones of the first 'Untitled' or the poor chap chatting about Peregrines who is so abruptly cut off in the second 'Untitled (And Your Batty's So Round)' to what sounds like a "chillout" version of track 3 from Pita's 'Get Out', the juxtapositions are knowingly acute and unforced. It's partly that aspect, the fluid transfer of concise but free wandering thought processes into sound, and their consolidation of free psyche methods with a bass-soaked UK flavour, that makes their music so interesting while keeping their semi-conscious illusion so intact and enigmatic. Also, by eschewing glossy production they've cut straight to the essence, or the truth of the matter, and this is a mighty, mighty beautiful thing.

Inside 'One Nation' you'll find some potential future favourites like the gobsmacking post-House condensation of 'Mitsubishi', the Juicy Fruit tang of 'William, Shotgun Sprayer', the brittle but gloopy slowfast vibe of 'Warlord' and the heart-melting R&B cover 'Your Girl Smells Chung When She Wears Dior', all heard through their inimitably cracked veneer. What Hype Williams hold back is equal to what they put in and this sense of considered restraint makes for a listeining experience pretty much unlike anything out there. And ultimately, beyond the haze of mystery, 'One Nation' is a moving, romantic, almost melancholy listening experience, and one we just cannot stop playing. Beyond essential. - Boomkat
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Have you ever had a really bad time at a rave? Hype Williams clearly have, and with One Nation, they returned the disavowed puking, jabbering, jangling confusion of the raved body to something like integrity with a great ethereal smack of downtempo downheartedness. It’s as if the mind-dulling escapism of cosmic disco’s eclecticism has been excised, leaving behind an (an)aesthetic of weird, body-oriented juxtapositions. Just two examples: “Mitsubishi” — a blunted 4/4 saga in muddy slo-mo — and the dubby darkwave of “Your Girl Smells Chung When She Wears Dior,” both exhibiting a poise only hinted at in the scrappy experimentalism of previous works. The narcotic drift of this bag of box jams further blurred the line between subversion and reverie, in an anti-social, anti-realist Balearica of codeine and early nights that staged an unsettling psychedelic meditation on rave’s death wish — on its flirtation with limit states, blank exhaustion, and brain damage. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux — these smudgewave sorcerers spent the year laughing in the dark, pushing at the boundaries of the impossible: the better, it seemed, to mockingly dissect the possible. An oily nugget of shit buried beneath layers of precious stones, this was an overdose of ecstasy at the back of a rave bunker — a trembling panic of beat-tape haze.- TMT

http://www.mediafire.com/?zb3wbtp5cppu2zk

Barn Owl - Lost in the Glare (2011)

2011-12-26T12:52:00.000-08:00

Lost in the Glare
Style: Desert Psych / Drone
Label: Thrill Jockey

Of all the candid cosmological images evoked in Barn Owl’s album and song titles (Ancestral Star, In the Red Horizon, Bridge to the Clouds, Burning Dunes in Moonlight, etc…), one might suspect, prior to initially hearing the band, that their sensibilities would align with acts like Portland’s Pulse Emitter and Chicago’s Caboladies, or any of the other projects indebted to their Krautrock and Kosmishe predecessors.

One quickly realizes that Barn Owl is a different beast all together, who over the short span of a couple years have managed to make as much of an impact as some of the heavier hitters in the flourishing synth scene. The band deserves credit for not trading in their guitars and pedals for electronics with auto-pilot settings, and for creating music that — although not without its own obvious crumb trail of influences (for starters, Pandit Pran Nath and Tony Conrad) — explores an alternate definition of contemporary minimalism.

Lost in the Glare, Barn Owl’s seventh album proper and second since they’ve signed with Thrill Jockey, is the culmination of a sound that the core members of the band, Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti, have stuck to since the beginning. Delicately thrummed and confidently plucked guitars, raga-infused tonalities and vocal drones make up the core of this sound. From album to album the band have built on its foundation, incorporating percussion, harmonium, bells and gongs and some synthesizer as a back drop, creating an ever shifting blend of Appalachian-flecked drone music.

That doesn’t begin to describe the diversity of Lost in the Glare, which starts off on a familiar note but then gives way to “Turiya,” the excellent second cut that sounds like Japanese rockers Boris at half speed, thanks to some slow and heavy drumming by Jacob Felix Heule. “Devotion I” finds the band’s familiar string plucking coupled with cymbal washes and a raspy tanpura drone acting as the piece’s main artery, feeding it life. The band maxes out their amps on “The Darkest Night Since 1683,” a track whose distortion soaked guitar riffs would mesh well with nearly any Southern Lord release, while “Devotion II,” the album’s closer, lays on more of the doom-laden beat before unfurling into a barrage of free drumming and low-end guitar crumble.

Unlike so many bands’ failed attempts in trying to be five acts at once, Barn Owl pull it off here unintentionally. Lost in the Glare leaves the impression of an album whose sum is half amassed from the experience gained in making a half-dozen albums, while the other half borrows from doom metal, Japanese psychedelia and Hindustani classical music to complete the picture. Ultimately, this album manages to sound like all and none of these, making Barn Owl a band that’s becoming harder to pin down and easier to appreciate. - Dusted

http://www.mediafire.com/?0o5qjjxmxa6oxdx

Thee Oh Sees - Carrion Crawler / The Dream (2011)

2011-12-26T12:42:00.000-08:00

Carrion Crawler
Style: Psych-Rock / Garage
Label: In the Red

Propulsive, careening, and at times, openly dangerous, Thee Oh Sees are like the house band for a runaway train. Much of their appeal comes from the fact that they're a machine with four equal parts: the wide-eyed, cult-leader charisma of frontman John Dwyer, the effortless cool of keyboardist/singer Brigid Dawson, the pulsating low end of Petey Dammit, and the steel-solid rhythmic anchor of Mike Shoun. With unspeakable chemistry and an instinctual bond that borders on telepathic, the band has taken its wildly cacophonous and setlist-free live show to must-see status, turning music venues populated by arm-folding spectators into anarchic riot scenes. An Oh Sees show is a place where combing the floor for your shoes when the house lights come on becomes ritualistic, where getting kicked in the face by a renegade crowd-surfer provokes a shit-eating grin instead of a scowl. Most of the band's best albums serve as recorded documents of their live sets; you can practically hear Dwyer swallowing microphones and spitting upwards to the rafters.

Castlemania-- Thee Oh Sees' first record of 2011-- made it easier to remember that the band started out as Dwyer's solo project, a vehicle forged as a left turn from the eardrum terrorism of his garage-punk cult heroes Coachwhips. Rife with kaleidoscopic woodwind arrangements and vocals akin to the green cartoon monsters that grace the cover art of many Oh Sees full-lengths, the record was a refreshingly weird slab of hallucinogenic psych-pop, a headphones record for the arty garage-rock über-faithful. (You know, the kind of people who own more than two volumes of Back From the Grave or take a road trip to Gonerfest every single year.)

The opening seconds of Carrion Crawler/The Dream feature the squawking of a saxophone-- the last remnants of Castlemania's woodwind-centered psychedelia sputtering out like smoke from a 1920s automobile that ran out of gas. Just as Castlemania was the apotheosis of Dwyer's cracked vision as a singer/songwriter, Carrion Crawler/The Dream showcases the full-band version of Thee Oh Sees at the height of their powers. Many of the album's songs have been road-tested for over a year, and Intelligence brain-trust Lars Finberg was drafted as the band's second drummer. Instead of disrupting the dynamic, Finberg fits in perfectly, occasionally adding some polyrhythmic flair, bolstering the already tight and rock-solid rhythm section. Dammit, Shoun, and now Finberg serve as the grounded basis that allow the songs to veer off on wild tangents without completely falling apart.

Having the bassist and two drummers holding everything in place gives the high end room to explore, a task in part handled by the extraordinary vocal interplay of Dwyer and Dawson. In spite of the former being the creative nucleus of the band, there is no "lead singer" designation in Thee Oh Sees-- Dwyer and Dawson singing nearly every lyric in unison. As Dawson's straight-laced vocal presence stays in line on most of the songs, Dwyer naturally plays the madman, his voice coasting below, zigzagging between, and occasionally even scaling above hers-- the latter reminiscent of the way Black Francis would often take the higher octave over Kim Deal on several Pixies tracks. Dawson provides poppy "ba-bas," while Dwyer shouts his head off on "Contraption/Soul Desert", and she's there to eerily coo while he's practically speaking in tongues on "Crack in Your Eye". But more often than not, it sounds like Dwyer is singing backup for Dawson, a testament to how equal the parts in Thee Oh Sees really are.

Scratching away at his strings with bloodthirsty ferociousness, Dwyer's guitar playing is best described in terms usually reserved for feral cats. His solos are not as much foot-on-the-monitor, spotlight-capturing moments as they are products of primal instinct. This is particularly evident on the album's two longform tracks, the two songs that combine to make up the album's title. Much like last year’s "Warm Slime"-- the audio equivalent of a pro-wrestling iron man match-- "Carrion Crawler" and "The Dream" experiment with what happens when you tighten things to a breaking point and then let go. Short blasts of distortion leave their mark throughout the album, guitar tones evoking the image of exploding paint cans in a mid-size room, adding to the unruly spirit of the band's albums and live sets. See, Thee Oh Sees understand the intrinsic value of making a huge mess. - PFM

Cacophonous, mind-melting garage-rock from a group that keeps getting better and better with each release. Would love to see these guys live at some point. Until then, I'll listen to this.

http://www.mediafire.com/?no2ypdugdxkr75g

The Men - Leave Home (2011)

2011-12-26T12:25:00.000-08:00

Leave Home
Style: Fuzz / Shitgaze / Punk
Label: Sacred Bones

Nothing is sacred to the Men. For one, this Brooklyn quartet's name is pretty much identical to that of fellow New Yorker JD Samson's active post-Le Tigre project, MEN. Their 2010 sophomore release, Immaculada, featured a caterwauling noise-punk thrasher called "Oh Yoko" that had absolutely nothing to do with the classic John Lennon song, or Ms. Ono herself, for that matter. Their new album swipes its title from a legendary record by New York's most famous punk band, the Ramones. And part way through the obliquely titled mid-album track "( )", when the band realize they're ripping off the fuzz-bomb riff to Spacemen 3's "Revolution", they just go ahead and swipe a line from the song too, and cap it with another quote from Spacemen's "Take Me to the Other Side" for good measure. And yet: For all the cheeky references and inside jokes at play on the Men's Leave Home, you'd be hard-pressed to find a purer, no-bullshit, serious-as-a-heart-attack rock record released this year.

Listening to Leave Home feels a lot like living inside of Michael Azerrad's 1980s indie-rock tome Our Band Could Be Your Life, variously bringing to mind Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.'s SST stints, Sub Pop-vintage Mudhoney, and Touch and Go-era Butthole Surfers (who surely would approve of a song title like "Shittin' With the Shah"). Tellingly, Azerrad's book ties up its narratives the moment its subjects signed to majors-- partly because, technically speaking, they ceased to be indie rock at that point but, more importantly, because those artists produced their most enduring, groundbreaking music while recording for independent labels. Leave Home is likewise a frozen tableau of that tipping point, imagining a parallel universe in which your favorite first-wave indie-rock bands never had to sign on corporate letterhead, never got anywhere near MTV, never toned down their act, and never got old-- they just kept on blowing minds at the peak of their powers in perpetuity.

Where the discographies of those aforementioned influences can more or less be plotted on a straight line from chaos to control, the Men's modest catalogue thus far presents no such linear evolutionary trajectory. Immaculada may have introduced folky acoustic guitar passages and extended doom-metal instrumentals to their post-hardcore attack, but rather than continue to explore those stylistic detours, Leave Home sees the Men return to the full-torque distorto-rock of their 2009 debut EP, but blow it up on a grander scale with a more intense batch of songs. And rather than try to upgrade the fidelity to accommodate the more epic execution, the unapologetic corrosiveness of the sound is ultimately what gives it its power and heft.

So that means Leave Home's boldest gesture-- the seven-minute opener "If You Leave..."-- is also its least typical, not just for its tsunami-sized shoegaze haze, but for its open-hearted candor, as its lone, repeated lyric ("I would die") provides a surprisingly affecting answer to the title's open-ended suggestion. The song is every bit as surprising coming from these guys as the similarly miasmic "Farewell" was on Boris' 2006 album Pink, showcasing the respective bands' abilities to be as blissful as they are bludgeoning. But where "Farewell" anticipated the Japanese doom demigods' eventual drift toward melodic accessibility, "If You Leave..." is a calm-before-the-storm misdirection. By the time Leave Home's side one winds down with the grueling, hoarse-throat howls and torturous, slow-motion squall of "L.A.D.O.C.H.", you'll be wondering if you're still listening to the same band.

But on Leave Home's second half, the Men's dual affinities for brute punk-rock force and bad-trip psychedelia fuse together to brilliant effect, with a searing series of songs that refuse to relent even as they encroach on the five-minute mark-- in particular, the storming "Bataille" suggests Sonic Youth's "Hey Joni" as recorded by Funhouse-era Stooges, while the closing "Night Landing" effectively blurs the line between krautrock and punk in fine Neu! '75-style. Of course, with a name like the Men-- and reference points like these-- it's all too fitting that this album will undoubtedly appeal to a certain subset of record-collecting dudes. But the Men's treatment of their well-curated influences is less akin to that of fan-boys playing in a tribute act and a lot more like an irreverent hip-hop producer's approach to breaks-- key in on your sources' coolest moments, change the context, and ride that perfect sound forever. - PFM

Records like this don't come around too often anymore. Screeching, overdriven, lo-fidelity, drugged out, balls-to-the-wall guitar rock that hearkens back to the early 90's noise legends. In a year when so much music was synthesizer based, its refreshing to hear a band so unapologetically reliant on guitar fuzz and fuck-you attitude. Lester Bangs would be proud.

http://www.mediafire.com/?dve1mjy62clg7a3

Amen Dunes - Through Donkey Jaw (2011)

2011-12-26T12:20:00.000-08:00

Through Donkey Jaw
Style: Psych / Lo-Fi
Label: Sacred Bones

Back in 2009, Amen Dunes’ Dia felt like a god-damned godsend. Damon McMahon appeared seemingly out of nowhere (untrue, naturally: like any good savior, he’d been puttering along unnoticed for years with Inouk and as himself), saw the flood in that year of Merriweather Post Pavilion, and built an Ark with two of practically every creature that seemed worth keeping: blind and incoherent surf-punk that shits in the mouth of any Best Coast; lonely-as-a-dust-mite Anaasheed; spindly “Space Prophet Dogon” aping riffage ‘n’ ramshack; clacking wooden-clockwork drones; and, holy hell, when you least expect it, extraordinarily fine troubadour-folk. We were flushed: fractured listen though Dia may have been, it was sequenced to tickle and its osmotic changelings were swaddled in a devil-may-care gauze. The album meant a lot then, and it means more each subsequent year. To the attentive ear, Amen Dunes’ first proper follow-up Through Donkey Jaw feels like the slightest jerk of the wrist, but I’m forbidding myself to sell it as any kind of a reigning-in or compromise.

Because it still sounds like nothing else. McMahon is, more than ever now, doing for psych what everyone told me Dungen was doing for psych back in 2004 — but with all due respect, I’ve put some recent Dungen stuff on Mother’s Day mixtapes, and Through Donkey Jaw makes vanilla crossover sound like a flat-out logistic impossibility. How is it that, against all odds, McMahon totally owns the music that he produces? Far fewer tracks on Through Donkey Jaw complicate this question than did those on Dia: opener “Baba Yaga” alone compounds in less than five minutes a huge chunk of what we might’ve realized we loved about the guy. I could be talking about his guitar, reverb’d to such oblivion that his idea to multitrack it all over the place amounts to sonic fingerpainting, but no: the issue always resolves to That Voice.

People hear all sorts of associations inside McMahon’s voice. I’ve already committed the crime of evoking the Middle East, a sure sign of pasty ethnocentrism if I’ve ever seen one, but one could just as easily/problematically evoke bestial oblivion, an unhelpfully broad lineage of art-pop vocalists from Bush to Björk to Buckley (erm, Tim), the Banshee or somesuch fantastical creature, ‘otherworldly,’ or Motherfucker Just Can’t Sing. The last one might actually be the most accurate — the rest a colorful array of kneejerk responses to Bocce microtones —but there’s nary a drunken escapade in the world that sees that festering, choir-evading kid sing at you with such flavor. McMahon’s got the same relationship to language as Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, who used to sing her syllables like Shaker exsufflations, and in that light his words are useless until long after they’ve had their impact. (Part of the reason it’s such a relief that he doesn’t sing words on the CD-only bonus “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which is of course therefore a delight: a 10-minute acknowledgment of legacy over melody/lyric.) Without getting into a big puffball debate about the merits of ‘outsider’ art, that gluey melody in “Not a Slave,” which seems to expand and contract like yellow wallpaper and eventually curls into thicker scrolls, could frankly not have been the product of study.

Instinct seems to guide a lot of Through Donkey Jaw, but it rarely overtakes the comfortable structures of songs. Okay: on “Lezzy Head” he tries playing Sigur Rós-size piano chords with his elbow, and addled on repeat listens you might just hear what he hears; “Jill” is a stuttering and cluttered paean to hormonal overload: “That’s not— true… I want out— of in.” But that either jar is a testament to how natural the majority of the album feels. I love that McMahon loves so much of the same tactile stuff that I do: every carefully-paced decision on “Sunday” is to taste, from the three-hammer piano to the periodic analog clicks to the garbled recorder loop to, oh yes, the slats of light on his mythologized, whispered-of “Mexico.” And if I’m grinning like an idiot here, McMahon sounds like he’s having the time of his life, clucking out into the universe on “Good Bad Dreams” or convulsing in time with the tremulants on “Christopher,” his limbs far looser than they were in Dia’s most jubilant deluges. In fact, the occasional tribal beat is the only thing that anchors the work to a specific place in time — and oddly enough, that place in time is the 21st century. Such, I suppose, is the nature of the vaguest crossover stab, but to McMahon’s credit it’s never distracting or baiting. I couldn’t let go of “Swim Up Behind Me” even as I contemplate playing it for my Yeasayer-nodding friends.

If Amen Dunes has a lineage, it’s more attitudinal than sonic. I’m afraid to evoke the Syd Barrett troupe (not that they knew each other, for the most part), mostly because I’m sure this is how prog-dopers must’ve felt listening to Syd back in the day — like diamonds were melting away behind closed doors, like that forge could scald contemporary Gods. Yet Syd, despite himself, sounds a bit dated — tethered too roughly to his (now dead) body and history. It’s almost as if there’s a constant relationship, even if that relationship is a disconnect, to one’s cultural surroundings that remains vital even as time passes and trends slosh all over one another. Which I think is why it feels particularly imperative to embrace what McMahon is doing at this exact moment: shit converges if you let it recede, but give Through Donkey Jaw a listen now and I promise it will resist convergence and nestle itself in your brain till you become that rambling fogey on its behalf however few years down the line. That kind of identity imprint is rare and personal, but I can thank McMahon for providing such a durable, inimitable voice that 2009 no longer needs to get involved at all. - TMT

http://www.mediafire.com/?aer5va4py5jas3l

Arrington de Dionyso - Suara Naga (2011)

2011-12-26T12:11:00.000-08:00

Suara Naga
Style: Psych / Throat Singing / Ritual Skronk
Label: K

Last year, as reported on TMT, Arrington de Dionyso released a cassette called Naga Suara. It was pretty weird, made up mostly of throat-sung splurge, skronking horn freakout, and freakish rhythm. Now comes the relatively more accessible Suara Naga under Dionyso’s Malaikat Dan Singa alias. It’s only fairly weird, especially if you’re already familiar with the self-titled album from this project released in 2009. One reason the disc’s more accessible than the cassette is that there are songs. Okay, so they’re songs that make use of throat singing, skronking bass clarinet, and, er, lyrics in Indonesian. But they’re songs nonetheless, and some of them are kind of catchy.

As before, Dionyso’s band (which features K labelmates Angelo Spencer and in-house producer Karl Blau) comes on full-force with its mutant Beefheartian blues and Indonesian extreme metal vocals. That is, it asks us to think at least about the relationship between extreme metal vocals, throat singing, Indonesian rock, scorched desert rock, free jazz, and much more besides. The album’s title apparently translates as “The Dragon’s Voice,” and that seems as apt a description as any of the fiery vocalizing and blowing found in its grooves.

The title and cover art also suggest an ongoing obsession with entities magical, mythical, and diabolical, a trait that can be traced back to Dionyso’s work with Old Time Relijun. Shapeshifting, shamanic practices, animal possession, and magnetism: all of these come to mind as one looks at the paintings and listens — or, rather, is exposed to — this music. It’s music of transformation, new registers, and, if you missed out on Malaikat, is truly unlike anything you’ve heard before. Dionyso sounds like a man possessed on opener “Kerasukan” (which translates, appropriately, as “possessed by a spirit”), as if some vile entity is speaking through him. Things get even spookier when, halfway through the track, the vocals develop into a kind of call-and-response routine — but who is calling whom? From where? To what?

On “Aku di Penjara,” the vocals are less hostile but arguably more disturbing, a half-wheezed, half-crooned whisper into the listener’s ear. This is the kind of sleazy creep you don’t want leaving a message on your machine; you feel sullied just listening. Then, seemingly looped female backing vocals start doo-dooing away like a distant, chilled, dubby take on “Walk On The Wild Side.” A chiming desert guitar adds Morricone-like space but only increases the sense of distance and despair.

For much of the album, the bass clarinet, throat singing, and Indonesian lyrics become sonic manifestations of Dionyso’s visual art, which can be found on virtually all his album covers and in such publications as Yeti and Prism Index. People change into animals, angels, or demons; masks and wings are donned; chants are sung, secret registers droned. The overall experience is one of summoning-up, of sound as magick, music’s ritual origins revealed. At times it’s laugh-out-loud hilarious, at other times freakishly scary. (These are stock responses when we hear humans speaking in tongues or being spoken through by others; check out the recent Fringe episode where Olivia Dunham’s body is taken over by William Bell — silly and uncanny at the same time.)

But Suara Naga is also damn funky in places (and funk’s a word you’d never throw at Naga Suara, its tape namesake). Although Dionyso is fond of utilizing a stop-start dynamism and a clipped vocal style in many of his pieces — two features that further invite the comparison to extreme or death metal — he also adds a more flowing element to certain tracks, such as “Bianglala,” which sets off on a guitar and bass riff that hints at funkadelia and works through to a spiky post-punk denouement. “Madu Mahadahsyat” also rides out on a catchy groove that suggests possession of a different, dancier kind.

When “Bianglala” (“Rainbow”) is followed by the vaguely Middle Eastern sonorities of “Bianglala Batin” (“Inner Rainbow”), one is also put in mind of the modal Ethio-jazz of Mulatu Astatke. “Wada Rohani,” a track seemingly about the search for spiritual contact, mixes the best of both worlds as it develops a droning, drawn-out modality into funky liftoff. Dionyso’s sense of variety and dynamics is masterful throughout, and, providing that the listener is willing to be possessed by his auditory spell, there is never a dull moment. Incantory, spellbinding, sinister, and surreal, Suara Naga is the work of a highly original mind, a man unafraid to don a demon’s mask and speak with a dragon’s tongue. Whether Malaikat dan Singa allows Arrington de Dionyso to attain the kind of truth-seeking communicative possibilities he has previously spoken of is questionable, but there is little doubt that he knows how to transfix and transform. - TMT

Ritualistic freakouts that sound like Beefheart channeling the soul of an Indonesian demon over propulsive Sunburned Hand of the Man-esque psych jams. Bizarre and quite an essential listen.

http://www.mediafire.com/?8oigs7hkg8gq3i0

Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges (2011)

2011-12-18T16:22:00.001-08:00

New History Warfare Vol. 2
Style: Experimental / Minimal Sax Improv
Label: Constellation

Once in a while, I can convince myself that it's impossible to say anything truly new in music. There has been so much music made and documented in the last 50 years, my thinking goes, that the best we can hope for is an artful re-combination of elements of the past (which seems like more than enough, most of the time). But then I'll come across a new record that sounds like nothing else I've heard: I can't quite place it, but its appeal feels so organic and easy to understand, I don't really feel a need to place it, either. Such is the case with the second solo album from Michigan-born, Montreal-based saxophonist Colin Stetson, New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges.

A few things about this record make it highly unusual. First, Stetson generally records his pieces solo, live, and in a single take. Some of these tracks have so much sound, so many cross-crossing and overlapping elements, it simply doesn't seem possible that one musician is making them in real time. "Judges" has clattering percussion, a menacing bassline, and a growling lead element that sounds like an anguished voice processed in a strange way. Well, the percussion turns out to be a close-mic'd recording of the instruments' keys being manipulated, the low-end comes from the fact that Stetson plays the enormous bass saxophone and has a good sense of how to underpin a tune with a deep pulse, and the lead voice is indeed his voice-- Stetson vocalizing through the horn as he blows. That all of these things come together at once in a piece that is compelling and highly musical is nothing short of miraculous. The key to Stetson's approach is that he uses an array of microphones placed in strategic places-- on the horn, on his neck, on the other side of the room-- and then mixes everything down into a churning cauldron of sound (engineer Efrim Menuck from Godspeed/A Silver Mt Zion and producer Shahzad Ismaily had their work cut out for them, and they succeed brilliantly; Ben Frost is equally great on the mix). Stetson has also mastered the technique of circular breathing-- playing continuously with his mouth while breathing through his nose-- so that the sound can unspool unencumbered by his body's need for respiration.

The record does bring certain reference points to mind. When Stetson really gets the circular breathing going and unleashes a torrent of notes the climb up and down the scale, fans of free improv might think of solo material by players like Peter Brotzmann and Evan Parker, whose mind-boggling technique is put at the service of in-the-moment expression. But Warfare Vol. 2 doesn't sound much like improv or even jazz, despite our associations of the genre term with the solo horn. These pieces sound composed and carefully ordered, often closer to the precision of classical minimalism than the expressionism of fire jazz. And compared to someone like saxophonist/composer/bandleader Anthony Braxton, with whom Stetson has worked (if you are a virtuoso on bass sax, you're going to wind up working with Braxton, who greatly expanded the context for unusual reeds in jazz), Warfare feels less cerebral, almost like a "pop" version of some of those heady compositions.

So there's no prior experience needed here. You can dive in and immerse yourself in the swirl of musical color that is "From No Part of Me Could I Summon a Voice", in which Stetson's blast of notes, many per second, are recorded as though from across a vast stone space, each one vanishing into the air in a cloud of natural reverberation. Or marvel at the way Stetson makes a track like "Red Horse (Judges II)" sound almost as if it had a breakbeat, the slap of the keys on the instrument so pronounced in the mix you focus on the rhythm first and the texture of the air coming through the horn later.

Reinforcing the music's connection to both minimalism and pop, several tracks here feature the vocals of Laurie Anderson, whose approach is a natural fit with this material. "A Dream of Water" features her clear and hypnotic voice articulating memorable imagery ("There were those who lived in the crawlspace/ There were people lighting candles") over a grinding and relentless arpeggiated figure from Stetson. "All the Colors Bleached to White (ILAIJ II)" begins with Anderson's vocal and a swelling chorus of voices and then shifts gears to a hard, noir-ish stomp whose deep tones can easily shake an entire room. Shara Worden from My Brightest Diamond joins the proceedings on a powerful and affecting cover of Blind Willie Johnson's "Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes", a mutant, arted-up blues that reminds me of the overlooked album of Ekkehard Ehlers, A Life Without Fear, the way it abstracts a folk idiom and boils it down to a central emotional idea.

Like the rest of the record (and Vol. 1 is also excellent, if not quite as varied or powerful), "Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes" feels like music I've been subconsciously craving without even knowing it exists. And though New Warfare Vol. 2 is easy to enjoy on a purely musical level, as sound, without bothering about the underlying ideas or any notions of how it's made, it's also a gratifying reminder that horizons of musical expression are so much more vast than prevailing trends would indicate. - PFM

Astonishing display of compositional talent here; "New History Warfare" is one of the most original records I've heard in a long time and certainly one of the best of the year. Stetson makes the saxophone do things you never imagined it could. Fans of Steve Reich and other minimalist / pulse music would be well advised to check this one out.

http://www.mediafire.com/?a3ylllgg78o3ajb

The Advisory Circle - As The Crow Flies (2011)

2011-11-23T20:47:00.000-08:00

As the Crow Flies
Style: Hauntology / Electronic / Library
Label: Ghost Box

Past recordings by the Advisory Circle sometimes felt like long-lost Cold War transmissions held in reserve in case the British government needed a reason to assure the general public that everything was okay. Jon Brooks, who has functioned under this moniker since the mini-album Mind How You Go in 2005, plugged into the fear and paranoia induced by such declarations. If you feel the need to assure people that everything is alright, they're going to wonder what caused you to tell them that in the first place. Or, as Brooks put it in an interview: "Everything's fine, but there is something not quite right about it." Brooks is obsessed with the government-sponsored enmity that flows through many of the public information films (PIFs) Britain produced in the 1970s and 1980s, often recreating the stern, authoritarian tones of their announcers at certain points in his albums. As the Crow Flies, his third record as the Advisory Circle, also begins that way, with a female voice claiming: "The Advisory Circle. We make the decisions so you don't have to."

Another album modeled on such austerity might feel like Brooks was over-egging an idea that partially helped inspire the hauntology sub-genre. So instead he's slowly evolved the Advisory Circle sound, bringing in acoustic instrumentation to supplement the banks of old analog equipment that remain his primary source tools. This pushes As the Crow Flies a little closer to the kind of darkly pastoral electronic work Boards of Canada were tinkering with on Geogaddi. But this has more conceptual weight than that record, with Brooks concocting a series of songs inspired by the dueling qualities of stasis and change that cycle through the changing of the seasons. It's even got some wonderfully apt sleeve notes by Ronald Hutton, the head of History at Bristol University, who points out the various merits of seasonal festivals in Britain. Like most Ghost Box releases, the attention to detail is impressive, with designer Julian House completing the package via a series of images of an imagined TV title sequence, aimed at dredging up damaged memories of barely remembered children's dramas from yesteryear.

On listening to As the Crow Flies it's easy to picture Brooks fully taking to his task. You can almost see him clad in a thick wool sweater, watching the droplets of snow amassing on his window frame as he prods at an old synthesizer during the wintery "Now Ends the Beginning". On the sci-fi fantasy "Learning Owl Reappears" it feels like he's been gazing up to a star-filled sky through a telescope on a long autumnal evening to find inspiration. This is a less foreboding record than prior Advisory Circle outings, but it's no less sad. "The Patchwork Explains" might be one of Brooks' most impressive pieces yet, with its icy synth tendrils spiking away at a plodding Kraftwerkian throb, somehow managing to be both playful and quietly beautiful. That it's dedicated to the memory of Broadcast singer Trish Keenan couldn't be more appropriate, reflecting her group's sense of wonder and love of offbeat pop.

Brooks carefully varies the character of the album as it progresses, nudging the listener down a subtly shifting stylistic gradient that takes in a Renaissance era lament ("Ceridwen"), steely Europop with prog intonations ("Modern Through Movement"), and a lone vocal venture reminiscent in mood of Air's underrated 10,000 Hz Legend ("Lonely Signalman"). It's evocative, touching, and nostalgic, with the simple keyboard melodies often making it feel like this is all being experienced by a child blinking in bewilderment and amazement as the concept of the natural world is explained to them. But mostly there's a strong sense of discovery, of someone attempting to make sense of their surroundings, with Brooks cast as a voyager trampling through vast stretches of the British countryside, crisp leaves crinkling underfoot as he expertly funnels everything he sees and feels into song. - PFM

http://www.mediafire.com/?2m7juyyrokhdwji

Oren Ambarchi - Intermission: 2000-2008 (2009)

2011-11-21T16:46:00.000-08:00

Intermission
Style: Ambient / Drone
Label: Touch

It never fails; the week after you compile your year-end lists, a record turns up that should have been on one. Intermission 2000-2008 certainly deserves more notice than it’s likely to receive given that is is a semi-archival collection with a November release date because even though it is, as the title suggests, a collection of pauses, its five tracks cohere as a weighty statement of just what Ambarchi is about.

The Australian guitarist/percussionist has one of those discographies that is challenging to track. Higher-profile solo releases, mostly on the Touch label, alternate with limited edition efforts, some vinyl-only, some revised from iteration to iteration. Ambarchi is also an inveterate collaborator who is even harder to pin down in communal mode; heard back to back in a blindfold test, not many newcomers would be likely to locate the same musician’s presence on records by Sunn O))), Sun, the Menstruation Sisters, Four Gentlemen Of The Guitar, and Lasse Marhaug. But you ignore these permutations at your peril, since Ambarchi’s on-the-side activities often match or exceed his top of the line solo releases. You might easily have missed Intermission’s contents since they come from the lower-profile side of his work.

First comes “Intimidator,” which vinyl partisans may recognize as the fourth-side bonus track from the Southern Lord version of In The Pendulum’s Embrace. There it maintained an ambivalent relationship with the rest the record’s material, since the metallic (but not at all Metal) sonorities of guest Antony Pateras’s prepared piano kept it from mixing easily with the original Touch CD’s music. But despite the afterthought status apparently conferred by virtue of being the added-on track for a boutique format, it summed up Pendulum’s main point, which is also one driven home by Intermission; that the physical presence of sound, more than any given instrument or tone, is Ambarchi’s real material. You don’t just hear the strike of hammer on strings, it seems to lightly brush your collarbone; wavering sine waves seem to dance between your ears; bass notes weigh upon you like the water at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The pressure of each sound is enormous, and yet as soothing as a Zen garden.

The previously unreleased “Iron Waves” is an anomaly in Ambarchi’s catalog. It’s a remix of “Parasail,” a tune from Texan singer-songwriter Paul Duncan’s Above The Seas CD. But despite the presence of Duncan’s dolorous voice delivering comprehensible lyrics, generally a rarity for Ambarchi (even when he sings with Sun, the vocals are so diffident and negligible that it’s hard to remember them), it’s a natural extension of “Intimidator.” Whining e-bowed guitars and tolling cymbals roll out of the speakers, and if they don’t have the time to press you as strongly as the previous track’s tones they still enshroud you like a weighty jacket. “Moving Violation” previously appeared on Touch 25, a compilation celebrating a significant label birthday. The sounds Ambarchi wields here recall those on Suspension, plump, rounded tones that sound more like the work of an electric piano filtered through the digital effects favored by Clicks & Cuts perpetrators than a guitar. But he coats them in a fine patina of sonic grit, then blows it loose at the end with a rising electronic buzz; once more, the music climaxes with an exertion of pressure. The oldest track here, “The Strouhal Number,” is a live recording from 2000 that previously appeared on a Preservation compilation called Live & Direct. Once more the faux-piano notes fall like a slow-motion rain that gently splashes between the thuds of Ambarchi’s thunderous bass reports. The mastering job on this CD does a fantastic job of rendering Ambarchi’s intended impact and decisively refutes haters who think a compact disc can never match vinyl’s physical sensations.

The album ends with “A Final Kiss On Poison Cheeks,” which aside from some overdubbed bells and cymbals is another live track. Previously issued as a one-sided picture disc by Table Of The Elements, this is where the bathyspheric calm Ambarchi has spent so much time attaining gives way to palpable thrills. Bursts of static and torn high-frequency fragments blow across the rising drones like airborne debris before a gale, building and thickening and blackening for the better part of twenty minutes; if you’ve ever wanted Ambarchi to just rock the fuck out, your wish is granted here. Then the music opens into a plateau of bell and sine tones, serene and gorgeous. The lighter they get, the more distant the tolling bass, the more you feel the pressure remit. Bob Seger sang quite persuasively about “Heavy Music”; Ambarchi makes it. - Dusted

http://www.mediafire.com/?ya63scnflhey39r

Tangerine Dream - Rubycon (1975)

2011-11-19T14:41:00.003-08:00

Rubycon
Style: Ambient / Kosmische
Label: Virgin

The members of Tangerine Dream continued to hone their craft as pioneers of the early days of electronica, and the mid-'70s proved to be a time of prosperity and musical growth for the trio of Chris Franke, early member Peter Baumann, and permanent frontman Edgar Froese. The three of them had been delivering mysterious space records on a regular basis, and their growing confidence with early synthesizers (the best that money could buy at the time) made them virtuosos of the genre, even as they kept things organic and unpredictable with gongs, prepared piano, and electric guitar. Rubycon has aged gracefully for the most part, making it a solid companion (and follow-up) to their 1974 album, Phaedra. The somewhat dated palette of sounds here never overshadow the mood: eerie psychedelia without the paisleys -- Pink Floyd without the rock. "Rubycon, Pt. 1" ebbs and flows through tense washes of echo and Mellotron choirs, as primitive sequencer lines bubble to the surface. "Pt. 2" opens in a wonderfully haunted way, like air-raid sirens at the lowest possible pitch, joined in unison by several male voices (someone in the band must have heard György Ligeti's work for 2001).

Rising out of the murkiness, the synthesizer arpeggios return to drive things along, and Froese weaves his backwards-recorded guitar through the web without really calling too much attention to himself. The piece evolves through varying degrees of tension, takes a pit stop on the shoreline of some faraway beach, then ever so gradually unravels a cluster of free-form strings and flutes. The rest are vapors, your ears are sweating under your headphones, and the smoke has cleared from your bedroom. This is a satisfying ambient record from the pre-ambient era, too dark for meditation, and too good to be forgotten. - AMG

http://www.mediafire.com/?qp8op1rxdltac5l

Edgar Froese - Epsilon in Malaysian Pale (1975)

2011-11-19T14:40:00.000-08:00

Epsilon in Malaysian Pale
Style: Synth / Ambient
Label: Blue Plate

Epsilon in Malaysian Pale? What could that mean? Epsilon is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet. It's also what the ze Germans use for the letter "y". Even with that knowledge I can't begin to fathom what exactly the title could possibly mean. Hey, that's not a problem, though. It certainly sounds lushly exotic, like a neon blue beach bathed in the light of multiple suns and moons which is really what it's all about anyway. Am I right?

This half hour long opus (give 4 or 5 minutes) is a wonderful fever dream as dreamt by visionary Berlinite Edgar Froese, the main brain behind by Tangerine Dream's best; he's also directly responsible for their dreadful but inevitable fall from grace (which oddly occured not too long after this album's release). It's a virtual jungle night flight over computer generated vistas and pixelized waves. It would make a great soundtrack for those hallucinatory Matrix adventures in William Gibson's Neuromancer and Count Zero. I'm dead serious. Think about it. Corespond the two. Cool, iddinit?

As indicated in the subject header, this was released in 1975 right around the time Tangerine Dream was about to plummet into the depths of suckbucket new age (I still think Stratosfear is fairly decent in a nondemanding breakfast eating soundtrack kind of way). In sound alone it's highly similar to Rubycon, which TD made around the same time: very relaxed, at the time-"modern", gentle without being dickless. Know what I mean? In other words it's great to crank this up on the stereo, take a few puffs, close the old peepers and just envision those neon blue tropical soundscapes which I mentioned above. Just don't expect to have your fragile minds snapped in half. After all there can be only one Electronic Meditation, one Alpha Centauri and one Zeit. It's better that way. Trust me.
Epsilon In Malaysian Pale is two seventeen minute long tracks: the title track and "Maroubra Bay". Both have their distinct characters, but ubiquitous is mood. The title track is the more organic of the two. Froese paints the his magic landscape with a synthesized flute and strings underlining the chord structures in a very uplifting manner. It rises and falls just like the mountains which I'm sure Edgar had in mind during the writing process (or perhaps improvisatory process). The music soothes and coos, but then comes silence and, of course, a second movement of sorts. This time the phasing enters with the requisite arpegiated bass to simulate the ceaseless ocean waves (remember, it's Malaysia). The flute keeps crafting melodies, changing moods and keeping things interesting. The third and final movement of the title track looses the arpegiated bass and calms things down with those signature TD string pads. The flute keeps working wonders. Over all a great track.

Maroubra Bay is my favorite. This is where the gold is on this album. Here's where the trance is finally induced, that old TD style transcen-DANCE. As soon as those discordant horn synths come in, I know I'm in good hands. I just sit back. Tune in. Turn on. Drop out. (Etc. etc. ad nauseum) The real magic happens when the said synths lay into the two chord pattern (which I'm almost positive DJ Shadow sampled at some point) while bubble bass sprouts wings and takes off into the hazy sky. It lulls me into a beautiful coma each and every time. When all is said and done, Froese takes us down for a nice landing on the coast. The soul has been uplifited, mind relaxed. It's just like a mini vacation.

You know it still boggles my mind that Tangerine Dream did the soundtrack for Risky Business. To be quite honest I have never pursued any of their work post Stratosfear. I simply wouldn't be able to keep a straight face. When I think about their older catalog it's only natural to assume that they had no other direction to go but downwards. This makes their great stuff all that greater. You know? I do recommend Epsilon In Malaysian Pale for fans of Phaedra and Rubycon, as well as Micheal Hoenig's Departure From The Northern Wasteland. Take this album for what it is, though: a gorgeous piece of impressionism. Don't expect to have your life changed. - Head Heritage

http://www.mediafire.com/?7nb62wjbd6en9a4

Cluster - Cluster (1971)

2011-11-19T14:09:00.003-08:00

Cluster
Style: Kosmische / Experimental
Label: Sky

Cluster 71 is Cluster's debut album -- after Conrad Schnitzler left the trio known as Kluster to go solo -- and it's a strange and mercurial wonder. Issued by Philips, it is a Krautrock record with no rock. There is precious little to hold onto here. Using a pair of organs with a boatload of effects pedals, audio-generators (the kind used by electricians), an electronically treated cello, a Hawaiian guitar, and some other sundry items, Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius (along with producer Conny Planck, who functioned, in essence, as a third member) created a dislocating, disorienting meld of random space music, industrial noise, proto-ambient atmospherics, feedback, and soundwash that walked some crooked line between musique concrete, improvisation, and raw unmusical terrorism. There is no regular beat, though there is, at times, a very pronounced rhythm. The terrifying ending in the final third of "15:33" is one of many examples; so too, with the quiet yet creepy commencement of "7:38," with its hushed approximation of a heartbeat that escalates into a wall of clash and clang rather quickly, with the pulse of an organ emanating deliriously from the background before it slows to the point of silence -- not fadeout, but collapse. The final work here, "21:17," also oozes an irregular rhythmic pulse at the beginning, courtesy of a lone guitar chord played with a wah wah pedal and looped on a tape recorder. But it is displaced by random whirrs and whizzes from the generators in tandem. So many of the sounds here cannot be readily identified, and that lends this recording its sense of timelessness. Of all the pieces here, this last one, with its varying dynamics and textures -- all of them rather sparse but multi-dimensional nonetheless -- is at once utterly magical and nearly completely forbidding. Cluster 71 is a masterwork, not because it set out to be, but in spite of itself. It's one of those moments in music history where all bets were off and everyone involved -- except perhaps the record label -- found it liberating. - AMG

http://www.mediafire.com/?9h455du2l7qmplx

Eliane Radigue - Trilogie de la Mort (1998)

2011-11-19T13:57:00.002-08:00

Trilogie de la Mort
Style: Drone / Minimalism
Label: Xi

One of the 20th century's great fanatics, Radigue spent eight years handcreafting this three-hour, three-disc, Tibetan-inspired, death-transcending elegy for her son, and if you're not a deep listener, all you'll hear is a hum. Overtones of gently pulsing drones are Radigue's themes, but her sweep is symphonic. Biooming bass tones test the limits of your loudspeakers, and withing them string orchestras and bagpipes seem to play dirgesbut everything is analogue electronics. When the music goes from sweet to sad, or from roaring climax to pure quiet in the final half-hour, the change is so imperceptibly gradual that it sweeps you along all the more. You have to slow your day way down just to begin appreciating this, and that's not a bad idea."- The Village Voice

Taken separately, "Songs of Milarepa" and "Trilogie de la Mort" stand as landmarks of minimalism; together, they confirm Eliane Radigue as a unique and major voice in contemporary music.... "Trilogie De La Mort," an extended sonic meditation on death and birth, is arguably still more impressive. "Kailasha," the second part, traces a turbulent imaginary journey around the most sacred mountain in the Himalayas, a route reputed to lead into other spheres of being. Radigue's notes to "Koum," the final part, affirm doctrines of rebirth through Christian references, but the soundworld is entirely consistent with the earlier sections. Parallels with other music may assist the uninitiated, but Radigue's work really is unique. The singularity of her achievement only enhances its magnitude." - The Wire

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XM74LM3N

Taj Majal Travellers - August 1974 (1974)

2011-11-19T13:57:00.001-08:00

August 1974
Style: Drone / Improv / Experimental
Label: Columbia

This double CD reissues the legendary Tokyo improvisational group's Columbia LP from 1974. Like European experimental ensembles A.M.M. and M.E.V., Taj Mahal Travellers were dedicated to sonic experiments beyond categories of free jazz or avant-garde, and throughout the '60s and early '70s challenged musical norms the world over. Lead by Fluxus member and avant-garde composer Takehisa Kosugi, the ensemble featured instrumentalists Kyo Koike, Yukio Tsuchiya, Beiji Nagai, Tokio Hasegaw, Kinji Hayashi, and Hirokeszu Sato. The group adapted traditional instruments and electronics, yet saw no hierarchy in what could and couldn't be adapted into their battery of experimental instruments. Any number of devices were employed in making this massive and noisy drone piece. Recorded live in the studio, this music adapts methods from avant-garde, electro-acoustic, and ethnic music, and often takes the form of magnificent clouds of treated acoustic sound. The double-CD length is a compelling and thorough retrospective of the group, who recorded just two albums in the '70s. A vital and influential document of the Japanese avant-garde this was a hallowed artifact of the underground for many years. Made available in retrospect, it gives an insight into the early beginnings of an improvisational style which would be of incredible significance to the experimental music of later years. - AMG

Even weirder than their first LP, this is an essential listen for fans of outer-limits krautrock, improv, and space music. Brain frying.

http://www.mediafire.com/?5q9uhb51hv08ipu

Klaus Schulze - Irrlicht (1972)

2011-11-19T13:56:00.000-08:00

Irrlicht
Style: Kosmische / Drone
Label: Thunderbolt

The year was 1972 when former Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel member Klaus Schulze embarked on his lengthy solo career which continues to this day.

Although it is considered to be a pioneering classic in Electronic music today, Schulze's solo debut "Irrlicht" was not well received when it was first released 34 years ago. Many listeners (as well as members of the orchestra which Klaus used on the album) didn't quite know what to think at the time. However, the listening public finally caught up with Klaus's crazy ideas and the album has since become a blueprint for the ambient/drone genre.

Although Klaus Schulze has long been regarded as a pioneer of synthesizers, "Irrlicht" was actually created without any synths whatsoever as Klaus did not own one yet. The instruments and tools that were used were the above-mentioned orchestra as well as a primitive electric organ, a broken guitar amplifier, echo and effect devices as well as other miscellaneous objects.
"Irrlicht" is essentially an album-length piece divided into three distinct movements. The opening 23-minute movement "Ebene" opens with a giant orchestra rush which leads into a low-end organ drone centered around D-minor. As the organ drone shifts and pulsates, the orchestra creates and intense cinematic atmosphere around it. After about 10-minutes, the mood becomes more intense as Klaus brings in a dark chord sequence which builds with suspense. The panning effect as well as the shrieking background noises used towards the end of the movement add further intensity until it's all washed away by loud gong-like crash.
The crash begins the short second movement, "Gewitter". While it sounds like there is a primitive synthesizer being used on this track, it actually is Klaus using a broken-down amplifier and a rewired organ. The intense organ theme of the first movement is pushed to the backround while strange sound effects as well as various percussive sounds (which sound like cymbals, gongs and trash cans being hit while being drenched with echo) come to the forefront.

The last movement, "Exil Sils Maria", is probably the most experimental movement of the three. It begins with a dark orchestral/organ theme similar to the first movement only more forboding. This leads into an extremely avant-garde section consisting of a droning collage of backward-sounding noises and what sounds like a car motor being amplified. This section is a real treat to be heard with headphones. Afterward, the movement shifts back to how it began with its dark organ theme.

The newly remastered edition includes a highly informative essay from Klaus Schulze himself as well as a never before released bonus track. "Dungeon" was supposedly recorded in 1976 (although there is speculation that it could have been recorded earlier in the liner notes) but is very much in the same style as the original "Irrlicht" album with its long held chords and drones.
With this said, if you've never heard Klaus Schulze's "Irrlicht" before, now's the time to do so especially since it has been given pristine treatment on this reissue. - HFS 400000

http://www.mediafire.com/?f2oc6v8b2hy7f8o

Manuel Gottsching - E2 E4 (1984)

2011-11-19T13:55:00.000-08:00

E2 E4
Style: Electronic / Minimalist
Label: Spalax

An epochal classic, printed here quite beautifully in a digital format in a definitive edition. In essence most readers of these pages will know the story, but to indulge you with a recap, Gottsching emerged from the midst of electronic krautrock heroes Ashra tempel and in 1981, off the back of a Klaus Schulze tour, sat down one evening and dropped a continuous piece of music which was eerily to predicate the arc of dance music for a quarter of a century. Early adopters in the Chicago and Detroit warehouses and mediterranean pleasure palaces must have thrilled to the balanced and continuous surging flow of the hour long piece - even over two sides the mix is perfect for building a club atmosphere and suggesting avenues for mixing, whilst using merely two chords throughout. the minimalism offsets the percussive splendour perfectly - several years later the tune was rediscovered and co-opted into the huge italo house smash Sueno Latino, which cemented its foundation in the burgeoning balearic scene of the time and proceeded through several spells of rapturous revival throughout the nineties, not least when figures like Carl Craig and basic Channel issued their own radically different reshapes and remakes of the piece. Very satisfying then to have this Gottsching sanctioned edition, where the game might truly be said to have begun in earnest. - Boomkat

Reminded of this one recently by the excellent piece in the Wire this month. Insanely influential and undeniably beautiful, E2 E4 deserves to be heard by all.

http://www.mediafire.com/?yka2bbfcfabp257

James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual (2011)

2011-11-06T14:00:00.000-08:00

Far Side Virtual
Style: Retro-Futurist Synth Pop
Label: Hippos in Tanks

The last few years have shown James Ferraro to be a prolific music maker with unfathomable capacity, reeling off a copious amount of albums since just 2008 — most of which came through his own New Age Tapes label — not to mention his VHS via Hundebiss Records. Even so, Far Side Virtual comes at the end of a relatively restrained year for him, which makes it all the more treasurable. Having released a preface in the form of the Condo Pets EP, this is Ferraro’s debut full-length for label Hippos In Tanks — the proceeds from which, he claims, will go toward facial reconstructive plastic surgery: “My new face will be fashioned after CCTV’s satellite queen, Princess Diana, and you will be able to see it live in concert on the Far Side Virtual World Tour… Always Coca-Cola.”

On the surface, Far Side Virtual’s cheerful exterior provides just the life-affirmations I welcome through these ever-so-gray days in my seemingly ever-so-limited corner of northern Europe; the modulated synth lines on “Google Poeises” are particularly uplifting, as is the playfully buoyant opener “Linden Dollars.” Beneath that exterior, though, lies something much more pointed and engrossing; indeed, Ferraro’s illumination regarding his facial reconstruction plan runs deeper than mere witticism.

Listening on my iPod, the immediacy of its relevance is striking. I realize that what I’m listening to is, in fact, actually listening to me, in turn listening to it, listening to me, etc. etc. and, all the while, simultaneously representing this dynamic as some technotranscendental utopian cosmos. More to the point, Far Side Virtual highlights developments in the ways that we consumers interact with our technological limbs (e.g., my iPod) and, in particular, the advancement toward a ‘post-human’ dynamic.

In a paper entitled “Reframing the Embodied Consumer as Cyborg: A Posthumanist Epistemology of Consumption,” Markus Giesler argues that “consumer culture should be epistemized as posthuman, a ‘hybrid marketplace matrix’ that no longer distinguishes between humans and technologies.” James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual perfectly illustrates, as Giesler asserts, that “technology consumption is, with Heidegger (1962), a fundamental ‘mode of revealing,’ that determines its ‘being-in-the-world’ rather than mere ‘tool consumption’ or ‘humaninteraction’ with the external world of bodies and objects.”

Track names like “Palm Trees, Wi-Fi and Dream Sushi,” “Google Poeises,” and “Solar Panel Smile” portray an egalitarian world in which life, and items of life’s consumption, are indistinguishably intertwined. So too, software applications uphold themselves with artistic potency, as in “Global Lunch,” which is composed in part with Skype login tones. Interestingly though, Ferraro’s portrayal of 21st-century reality masquerades under a synthetic cloak of retro drum machines and pad sounds, typically adding an element of nostalgia. Nevertheless, besides adhering to his familiar sonic longings and rather than dampening the message, Far Side Virtual succeeds in exciting the collective memory of that generation now so conjoined to its technological appendages. - TMT

A delightfully sincere collection of goofy synth and guitar sketches that manage to hit the pleasure center while simultaneously providing an unsettling critique of our technologically saturated existence. This is your life as a Sim.

http://www.mediafire.com/?vl816c06j65pu51

Richard Youngs - Amplifying Host (2011)

2011-10-25T09:20:00.001-07:00

Amplifying Host
Style: Experimental Folk
Label: Jagjaguwar

On his countless CD-Rs, 12-inches, and cassettes, as well as collaborations with the likes of Matthew Bower of Skullflower, Neil Campbell of Vibracathedral Orchestra, and the telepathic Simon Wickham-Smith, Richard Youngs has helped to provide what The Wire described as “the map co-ordinates for much of what passed for a post-punk UK underground during much of the 80’s and 90’s.” He can do achingly beautiful mantras of loss, as on Sapphie; chromium space odes to Jack Kirby, as on his mid-2000s Jagjaguwar releases; windy electroacoustic improvisations; obscurefaux-airs; and, most recently, Residents-style weirdo-pop on his last Jagjaguwar album, Beyond the Valley of the Ultrahits. He played bass with Jandek at the legendary recluse’s first-ever live performances, on the confident and sensitive Glasgows Sunday and Monday, and on Newcastle Sunday. On his latest for Jagjaguwar, Amplifying Host, Youngs takes yet another stylistic turn, this time into hermetic outsider folk-rock.

Youngs’ music sounds broken here, but as with Jandek’s utterly unique take on rock ‘n’ roll, its brokeness creates a sound that is thrillingly expressive in its difficulty. Alongside Youngs’ anxious, distracted acoustic guitar picking, the most characteristic sound of this album is a damaged electric guitar, pealing its mournful, inarticulate song again and again. While the electric guitar on his last recording, the limited-edition Inceptor, produced torrents of magnificent, lacerating noise, the guitar on Amplifying Host sounds either seriously broken or has undergone some profound trauma, as if it has been left with a single twisted string, able to produce only one note at a time, ambivalent and bent, bouncing away like a broken spring. This bend in the guitar string, this shape in time, is a motion Youngs seems compelled to repeat. Is it perhaps a meditation? Or a compulsion born of trauma?

Youngs also seems to be in hiding. He obscures his modest voice through multitracking, turning his lyrics into shivering x-rays of themselves. His words are refracted into their constituent sound-colors, each delicate whispered syllable intoned simultaneously, given deliberate space horizontally, but layered and obscured vertically. His manipulated words sometimes sync up over the length of long, open vowel noises, but then veer apart, ending on different consonants as different words or shooting off and disappearing entirely. This editing has the effect of lending an incredible expressive and syntactic tentativeness to Youngs’ voice. It sounds like he is learning to sing again.

The snatches of lyrics you can make out here and there overlap across the songs. Not many words can be distinguished, and those that do — “I know,” “feel,” “return, return,” “days” — scramble in the unconscious like scraps of text in a collage. Paired with that blurry, intermittent guitar, Youngs’ latest songs truly fuck you up. The 13-minute “Too Strong for the Power,” especially, is a swamp in the middle of this album, passively sucking all the other songs into itself. The album does contain some relatively lucid moments, such as “Tesselations,” which incorporates beautiful processed flute alongside that busted guitar and a riveting, wordless, open-mouthed chant at its center; and “Holding on to the Sea” which features a bass guitar thudding tunelessly like a dropped book. A special pleasure on many of the tracks is the deeply sympathetic drumming and percussion from Damon Krukowski (Damon & Naomi), composed mostly of exquisitely restrained percussion accents and ambient cymbal washes.

Perhaps it’s a fallacy to ascribe the meaning of these sophisticated compositions to psychological distress. After all, I’ve been burned before. In the late 90s, suffering from a depression that seemed more than a few notches above everyday teen angst, I sent a check to Corwood industries to buy a box of Jandek’s CDs. I included a letter to Jandek telling him that I was worried that I connected so much to his music, because his songs have been so deeply tortured over so many years. His only reply was to send me back my check, which I had neglected to sign. In retrospect, I was the only one who was a mess. Jandek’s triumphant emergence as a frequent live performer and his comfortable engagement with the free-improv scene make me confident that though the songs on Youngs’ latest may sound beyond repair, they are not, ultimately, broken. - TMT

http://www.mediafire.com/?xyvnxc9mg7kvqih

Charalambides - Exile (2011)

2011-10-25T09:15:00.001-07:00

Exile
Style: Psych-Folk / Experimental
Label: Kranky

In two decades together, Charalambides have never come up with music so specific as the eight songs on Exile. Tom and Christina Carter (once married, forever united in music) have made double albums in a night; this one took four years, and it shows. Every note is placed just so, every sound is just right, and even though half of the tunes last over 10 minutes, there’s nothing extra. They sound like they have been pared to the core; there are long passages where you only hear one or two guitars and a single voice. Christina has indulged in some high-flying vocal maneuvers over the years, but here every word, every quiver, every crack and rise in her voice is absolutely necessary. The way she sings and the melodies that Tom plays dovetail into a multifaceted examination of loss.

There’s no point on Exile where the Carters employ a blues form, and only on the wasted-life dirge “Immovable” do they play anything resembling a blues lick, but they’re playing the blues nonetheless. They recount a myriad of sorrows without sugarcoating them, but they also transcend them. On “Desecrated,” Christina delivers incantations confirming the inescapability of death — and the inevitable accrual of guilt by those who traffic in it — over guitar fuzztones that toll like a church bell. But the leads, which leap out of the song like flames from a heap of ignited logs, feel like escapes, and when the Carters turn to the inevitability of interment on “Into The Earth,” the music is once more full of release, even compassion.

On the band’s last album, Likeness, Charalambides used old American folk lyrics like mirrors to both reflect the stains upon the country’s soul and burn them away. The Carters are just as cognizant of these afflictions on Exile, but the struggles they recount are individual ones, and the tongues they speak in now are their own. This is a heavy record, and yet, a reassuring one. Take it with you when you go. - Dusted

http://www.mediafire.com/?m3qcc2u52zq9fhw

Rothko - Eleven Stages of Intervention (2007)

2011-10-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

Eleven Stages of Intervention
Style: Ambient / Post-Rock
Label: Bip Hop

Rothko are one of those bands that whenever I play their albums I wonder why I don't play them more often. They have a very specific, very unique sound - probably coming from the fact that they have two bassists, and now on their fifth full-length they have honed this sound into a quiet perfection. We all had a real soft spot for the incredible collaboration with vocalist Caroline Ross a few years back, and this is the band's next step and takes their sound into deeper and darker places. There's something almost religious about the band's take on music - there are hints of post rock in there, hints of modern classical, hints of classic soundtrack music, but it feels like the London-based band are playing the whole thing in a church, with all the sounds reverberating and swirling into a reverential haze. It's like a more melancholy, more muted Godspeed You! Black Emperor, without the hint of post-rock cliché, or at times even like Southern Lord's slow rockers Earth without the metallic subtext - this is cinematic and evocative music in the best possible way. Okay so the band might not be doing anything particularly new, especially in regards to their already bumper catalogue of quality releases, but what they have done here is hone their sound and keep it gloriously economic. There's little fat or filler on offer here, just forty minutes of low-slung, bass heavy instrumental goodness - and what more can we ask than that? Fans of Deaf Center should also take a closer look here, Rothko share a similar taste for the dark and the surreal, and frame it in a beautiful mist of graceful, measured restraint. Quite hauntingly beautiful... recommended! - BK

http://www.mediafire.com/?jw66mbd9wbettt8

Mark Mcguire - Get Lost (2011)

2011-10-24T21:35:00.001-07:00

Get Lost
Style: Kosmische / Ambient
Label: Editions Mego

I'd wager even Mark McGuire's mama can't keep up with the Emeralds' guitarist. Outside the collective endeavors of the Cleveland experimental trio with whom he made his name, McGuire's issued countless albums of serene, sun-dizzy guitar explorations on limited edition CD-Rs and cassettes on labels like Wagon, High Spirits, and eMego over the past four years. Following a collaborative album with Trouble Books, McGuire returns to eMego for Get Lost. Though set around McGuire's vagabond guitarscapes on both electric and acoustic guitar and sly morning-dew beds of guitar-synthesizer, Get Lost stands out from the rest of McGuire's stout discography with its more prominent use of his own voice. Along with added textural moans and hums, on tracks like "Alma" and "Alma (reprise)/Chances Are," McGuire's multi-tracked voice is used in repeated refrains that take on an almost mantra-like quality within these thick, loop-oriented drifts.

This shouldn't imply that McGuire's entered the realm of vocal-based psych pop, but the addition certainly rounds these tracks out with hooks and entry points that make Get Lost McGuire's most accessible album to date. Those seeking the audio comfort-food we've come to expect from McGuire will find that beside this new wrinkle, Get Lost is a fitting companion piece for last year's Living with Yourself. Gone are the more direct allusions to memory and nostalgia, replaced with the kind of sonic wistfulness and warmth that nestle alongside that very sentimentality.

The opening guitar strumming of "When You're Somewhere" for example, sits atop a hush of ambient wash and feels, somehow, both distant and soothing at once, like embracing the new cold of fall by overlayering until you're so cozy you drowse. Opener "Get Lost" begins with a ringing synthesizer melody before McGuire's slow, open-handed guitar begins to trace finger patterns in the sand, and eventually giving way to thick, distorted guitar fuzz. "Another Dead End" buries this same distant squall in several arcing guitar lines and a central refrain that feels as open-ended and horizon-pitched as the level prairies of McGuire's Midwest.

Alongside these short-form pieces lies "Firefly Constellations," a shimmering 20 minute side-long bit of ambient drone that recalls his work on Tidings/Amethyst Waves. Slow to awaken and uncurl, slight synthesizer burbles slowly evolve into more of several first-morning guitar lines. As the guitars withdraw and the synthesizers chatter almost manically around the edges, it's still the most restrained and refined piece here, a cloudy haze of sonic bliss that alludes to the man McGuire's always been RIYL'd with, Manuel Gottsching. Even if flat-on-your-back summer has faded, Get Lost arrives just in time for that next stage of seasonal pastimes: days tumbling in piles of leaves and shut-in fireside nights. - RA

http://www.mediafire.com/?ssrmlk5uahbc366

Valet - Naked Acid (2008)

2011-10-24T20:46:00.001-07:00

Naked Acid
Style: Psych / Drone
Label: Kranky

Valet is Honey Owens and she did something pretty cool on her debut, Blood is Clean – she approximated the response time of how brief she could be within the normally loose-fitting confines of drone/drug/stoner/cosmic ambient psychedelia. As such, ideas were played slowly, just enough times for a pattern to emerge, which she’d then mess with until it was time to try a new part. All of these tracks were clustered right in the middle of that album and continue to ripple through my headphones months after the fact, conjuring a blue-black forest clearing at night, lit by the moon, which I as a listener have to sleepwalk through blindfolded. There have been a lot of releases bearing the Kranky name since the label’s inception, but here was one that reminded me of the best things about its earliest releases: the packed-in, substantive synaesthetic of Labradford; the woozy, sunburnt madness of Dadamah; the lucid, walled-off trance of Dissolve. It was one of the best albums to be released last year … and if you like the new one, Naked Acid, I strongly recommend you check out Blood is Clean.

To miss out on that one would be to deny Owens the chance to develop, to let her sound molt in a cocoon of blues experiments, channeling both Jennifer Herrema and Hope Sandoval through the Ouija board between her pedals and effects boxes. Her guitar playing provides a meaty psychedelic backbone to minimalist strokes, illustrating the points between Loren MazzaCane Connors and Eddie Hazel on “Fuck It” as if she was a DJ, transitioning some quick cuts to cover more ground. Elsewhere, she plays uneasily over a chopped up “Drum Movie,” torches us on the beach (“Fire,”) even starts the dance party with the 8-bit boom bap and housefly soliloquy of “Streets.”

Without the earlier, more sedate grounding, with a sound close enough to sit next to you, Naked Acid’s significantly expanded palette might be a little too distracting. Yet Owens plays that same trick in the spaces in the opening tracks – presenting and manually shifting a tableau of meditative ideas that unite in a cold, clinging symmetry of higher-than-high, chiller-than-chill movements. These sounds favor the album over the song, and pull your attention inward, in a predetermined display of pillowriff-writing righteousness. It’s a really clever trick, and she puts it to great use, but it wouldn’t be there without her varied musical gifts. That it is there belies an attention seldom expected from such billowing, free-natured material. - Dusted

http://www.mediafire.com/?r1j3xl3j7jc12po

Tim Hecker - Dropped Pianos (2011)

2011-10-24T20:45:00.002-07:00

Dropped Pianos
Style: Ambient
Label: Kranky

Jacques Derrida once wrote that Literature — with a capital “L”: the Work, the Opus — is that which “transforms the field.” He was thinking of Kafka’s The Trial. And his point was that after its publication in 1925, everything was different. Literature, as a field, was otherwise. The rules of the game had changed. Ravedeath 1972, Tim Hecker’s last release, is Literature. It’s Music, with a capital “M.” Sure, it has precursors, a lineage. There are elements of “drone” and “noise” to it, as well as passages that come pretty close to being “ambient.” But it’s at once all of these things and none of them. As Derrida might have put it, Ravedeath 1972 is “irreducible to the laws of genre.”

I’m not the only one who thinks so either. Over at the mnml ssgs blog, PC calls the record “purposefully enigmatic.” With Ravedeath, he argues, Hecker somehow found a way to “suspend time.” “Yeah,” he writes, “it’s that good.” In his formidable review right here on Tiny Mix Tapes, DNC talks about the music inducing a feeling of a “weightlessness.” And Hecker himself has said that he’s aiming for a kind of secular “church music”: the sacred in the profane. I know what they mean. Ravedeath’s throbbing slowness overwhelms you. Is it possible for music to feel both weightless and incredibly profound? Apparently so. Ravedeath comes in waves: at turns totally serene and utterly devastating, its effects feel physiological. Listening to Ravedeath involves a kind of surrendering, a form of active passivity.

In that sense, the invocation of neither Rave nor God is completely incongruous. There may be no beat to speak of, but there’s certainly a pulse. And its effects bore right on in to your center. This is sound as neurobiology, then, vibration as “virology,” as Steve Goodman might have put it. With Ravedeath, Hecker’s inviting you to give in to the anti-rave, to let it go to work on your body and your (godless) soul.

Dropped Pianos is not as good as Ravedeath. It doesn’t have the same sense of importance to it. It’s lighter, less intense: it doesn’t “transform the field.” But that’s very far from saying that it’s not worthy of your attention. It is, and very much so.

The record’s being pitched by both Hecker and his label Kranky as a series of “sketch pieces recorded in 2010 in preparation for [Ravedeath].” As if to say: that was the Work; this is just the work that got him there. None of the tracks are titled, just the word “sketch” and a number. And that’s a shame, I think. Or at least potentially so, because as provisional as these nine recordings may have seemed to Hecker when he made them, they do have something to say in their own right. And it’s a pity that we’re being invited so explicitly to listen to them disinterestedly, as it were — to not expect too much. If you take the record’s title seriously, after all, these are the piano sketches quite literally “dropped” in favor of a church organ on Ravedeath (though these are not the only “dropped pianos” being referenced, it’s true).

Sure, a couple of “sketches” do sound vaguely unfinished, but Dropped Pianos is an absorbing listening if you allow it to be. It may be “minimal,” and if you’ve spent a lot of time with Ravedeath, you may find it hard to resist the urge to hear it as a younger, slightly less fully-developed sibling, but it deserves not to be reduced to ‘mere’ ambience: the soundtrack to your next novel or conversation with friends over a bowl of pasta. Tim Hecker makes slow music for slow listening, and Dropped Pianos is absolutely worth the investment. - TMT

http://www.mediafire.com/?ldnrjcvcjgcnr94

Sun Araw - Ancient Romans (2011)

2011-10-24T20:44:00.002-07:00

Ancient Romans
Style: Psychedelic
Label: Sun Ark

Two poets, two definitions of ecstasy. For Anais Nïn, ecstasy was “the moment of exaltation from wholeness”; for Juan Ramón Jiménez, ecstasy was dynamic and progressive — transition being “a complete present which unites the past and the future in a momentary progressive eternity.” In both cases, unity is the precondition of ecstasy. Cameron Stallones, contra Jimenez, aims at such ecstatic unity through stasis: so crucial is repetition to these apparently inchoate rambling no-fi jams that they resemble nothing less than a shopworn systems music that aggregates hook upon hook in a noodlesprawl of freeform psych rock that channels John Berberian’s acid-fried psych ragas, The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, and, to an extent, the dubwise industrial beatscapes of Mick Harris’ Scorn project, only with champagne-squiffy effervescence in place of brow-furrowed weed psychosis. The end product is one of maximum investment for minimal release: pay attention as Stallones tries out noodle after noodle, shuffling, annexing, and discarding ideastems, arriving at a groove almost by a process of erosion. The redress is cerebral rather than somatic.

Drone achieved by other means, it’s no surprise to anyone who has read M. Hugh Steeply’s 2009 interview with Stallones (a self-proclaimed “searcher”; a sincere man in an ironic world) that these tonal frameworks for composition and improvisation have found a narrative hook in the atomist bacchanalia of Ancient Rome. “Lucretius” is a supine expanse of overloaded Farfisa whorl, glissandi weaving in and out of the red; “Lute and Lyre” and “Crete” are ecstatic processionals, New Orleans funeral dirges led by Spacemen 3, kindred genealogists of toporific swamp music. Both balance smudgewave strategies of piecemeal accumulation, chafing at weird-sigged rhythms cranked out of dime store percussion and hand-me-down drum machines, with a sozzled tendency toward overelaboration that buckles decoration into distortion.

Less H-pop, more hysteresive hypnagogia, Ancient Romans maps a circuit whereby the scavenger tendencies of bored and restless OECD youth, submerged in a surfeit of post-scarcity pop-cultural data, connect to the Epicurean prioritization of private over public virtue. On its own, this opening gesture figures the crucial shift in register that marks the emergence of H-pop: while noise, at its least nuanced, aims at mental overload by playing with eviscerating blasts of often-physical force, Stallones overwhelms the senses with an often-sickly glut of magpied details.

Despite these compelling, fidgety positives, those who bugged out to last year’s On Patrol (i.e., everyone) will be forgiven for experiencing a sense of deja entendu. In this context, album closer “Impluvium” seems like an intriguing step sideways: a 15-minute mudbath of overdriven slomo disco squelch; like Hype Williams’ One Nation, it negotiates an ecstatic upheaval of 4/4 muso pretensions in a Balearic furor of opiate euphoria. One of the few moments when you’re not listening to On Patrol Volume 2, it trades on body music’s death wish — its flirtation with limit states, blank exhaustion, and brain damage — in order to sustain a continuum of elation. Just as On Patrol grew out of “All Night Long,” the last track on 2009’s Heavy Deeds, it’s tempting to imagine that “Impluvium” tracks the lineaments of a future blueprint. - TMT

http://www.mediafire.com/?0j7c34qngwbo1j1

Plastikman - Consumed (1998)

2011-09-21T10:17:00.000-07:00

Consumed
Style: Ambient Techno
Label: Novamute

The third in the series of Plastikman albums produced by Richie Hawtin, Consumed is a turn away from the high-bpm, drum-machine mania that characterized much of his its two predecessors, Sheet One (1993) and Musik (1994). The acid techno motifs remain in place, and Consumed is structurally similar to Musik: it commences and concludes with standout epic tracks while its mid-section tends to be experimental in nature, filled with shorter Ping-Pong-ing tracks that aim to disorient. However, this is an ambient techno album, make no mistake, driven largely by deep, rumbling basslines and accentuated with shimmering synth washes and almost subliminal microsound ticks -- and not only is it ambient, but it's dark and mysterious in tone. Moreover, Consumed plays like a continuous album rather than a collection of tracks; individual tracks stand out only when memorable moments arise, the opening build of the title track, for instance. It's easy to be drawn in by Consumed, which makes the title all too fitting, for the ambient mood and dark tone are inviting while the mammoth basslines and synth washes are enveloping. All of this makes Consumed Hawtin's most listenable album to date. His previous Plastikman albums are remarkable achievements, for sure, and are filled with plenty of astounding tracks; likewise, his Concept album has its own share of highlights. But none of those albums is as thoroughly excellent as this one, even if it's fully removed from the dancefloor, best enjoyed at home rather than in a danceclub context. - AMG

Bleak and immersive techno for late-night listening.

http://www.mediafire.com/?w8q4s22xa24hind

Porter Ricks - Biokinetics (1996)

2011-09-21T10:13:00.000-07:00

Biokinetics
Style: Dub Techno / Ambient
Label: Chain Reaction

Basic Channel, the reclusive Berlin organization founded by producers Moritz von Oswald (Maurizio) and Mark Ernestus, has been responsible for some of the world's finest minimal techno. The label formally ceased operation in the mid-'90s, succeeded by several offshoots, most notably the experimental Chain Reaction and Imbalance Computer Music imprints. But the Porter Ricks story begins earlier, with the fractal electronica of Andy Mellwig (Async Sense) and the zero-below Antarctic ambient and gong experiments of Thomas Koener. Then Mellwig met Koener, the duo recorded several Chain Reaction 12-inches, and the axis of underground techno shifted forever toward depth and digital dub.

Porter Ricks' algorithm is simple but sublime--a further compression of Basic Channel's already extreme minimalization of Detroit techno's rhythmic grid and house music's cyclical beat. Relying on dub-like effects that homogenize and hypnotize, Porter Ricks makes music that is chasmic and multi-tiered--low-level melodic radiance layered above sonar bass pulses, 4/4 thumps submerged beneath briny fathoms. BIOKINETICS is by turns relentless and boundless. Propulsive rhythm tracks like "Port of Call," "Port Gentil," and "Port Nuba" are the immediate grabbers, but it's the subtler pleasures of "Nautical Dub" or "Biokinetics 2" that cast the disc's unbreakable and unforgettable spell.

http://www.mediafire.com/?jnnoe34otkjchfe

Taj Mahal Travellers - July 15, 1972 (1972)

2011-09-15T14:15:00.000-07:00

July 15, 1972
Style: Drone / Psych / Experimental
Label: CBS

The Taj Mahal Travellers were a legendary improvisational group out of Tokyo, who combined Eastern and Western instruments, electronics and vocal chants, and used heavy post-production processing to create unique long flowing jams, with deep organic droning and pulsing, similar to some of the cosmic electronic stuff out of Germany at the same time, though filtered through a Japanese sensibility. Their music is considered one of the pinnacles of Asian psychedelic music of the late 1960s and early 1970s. - AMG

The Japanese equivalent of krautrock. Wonderful drones

http://www.mediafire.com/?3ffpxbjaa1xci9y

Tony Conrad with Faust - Outside the Dream Syndicate (1972)

2011-09-15T14:07:00.000-07:00

Outside the Dream Syndicate
Style: Drone / Krautrock / Psych
Label: EG

An old Zen koan comes to mind; delivered through the lesser hands of seekers and compilers, beats and Deadheads, the New Age-- but surely, I imagine, of wise and noble provenance somewhere back. A flag flapping in the gale sparks an argument between two monks on the nature of things. The first declares that the flag is surely moving. The flag is still, counters the other, it is the wind that is moving. Sure enough, where an insoluble paradox appears, the wandering master is not far behind. Which is it, ask the monks, is the flag moving or is the wind moving? Neither, replies the master; mind is moving.

Fair enough. Take it, like any wisdom, with a grain of salt, but it springs to mind. Not because Tony Conrad sees still air and a flapping flag, or because Faust occupy a world of volatile weather, but just because, for a moment in Outside the Dream Syndicate, one forgets what exactly is moving and what is standing still.

Here's what we know: in October 1972, at a hippie commune in Wümme in southwestern Hamburg, a German art-rock collective bred on the stringent drone and skag-pop of the Velvet Underground hooked up with the young composer who gave that band its name-- or rather, who handed Lou Reed the sadomasochism exposé whence the band derived its name. Tony Conrad and the members of Faust collaborated for three days on an album that would be released the following year in England and would tank immediately thereafter. The musicians did not communicate or collaborate throughout the following two decades.

Minimalism is unquestionably the wrong word; I prefer asceticism. Anyone familiar with the Zappa-like hysteria of Faust's first album or the searing kosmische of IV must imagine the sheer force of self-denial at work in implementing Conrad's vision: to have a deep base note tuned to the tonic on Conrad's violin and to have the drummer "tuned" to a rhythm that corresponded to the vibrations. Minimal in design, I suppose, but catastrophically huge in execution.

"From the Side of Man and Womankind" opens in dead motorik, the usually nimble percussive battery of bass guitarist Jean-Hervé Peron and drummer "Zappi" Diermaier, stalled out to a hollow thud-- like the heartbeat of a machine. Conrad's violin bleats mournfully, endlessly; rising, breathing, sighing, screaming, but without ceasing: relentless. Faust resisted. Peron's second bass note, inserted against Conrad's wishes, adds a spring and thrust to the proceedings. Zappi's odd cymbal crash shatters like punctuation in a prayer. Faust producer Uwe Nettelbeck dulled the serrated violence of Conrad's violin, somehow rendering slow murder into long caresses. "The Side of Man and Womankind" runs like a conveyor belt through fog: going without moving, advancing, standing still.

"From the Side of the Machine" is oddly less mechanical than its counterpart. A half-hour in length, like "Man and Womankind", the "Machine" side ruminates with muted psychedelia: serpentine bass, ceremonial percussion, the purr and roar of Rudolf Sosna's humming synthesizer, Conrad's violin passing high above like an electrical storm in the upper air. There is a predatory quality to the "Side of the Machine": an encircling peril, a certain restlessness above and behind. Mind moves, as if hunted.

The Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of Outside the Dream Syndicate adds a second disc of material. Two brief tracks-- both named with the young death of former Dream Syndicate comrade Angus Maclise in mind-- offer the remaining fragments of those three days at the abandoned schoolhouse studio at Wümme. Both the slow burning "The Pyre of Angus was in Kathmandu" and the tremulous "The Death of the Composer Was in 1962" reveal a looser agenda in the sessions. In the latter piece, Conrad abandons the impassive drone of the first disc for an almost celebratory psych-rock. The second disc is rounded out by an alternate production of "From the Side of Man and Womankind", lacking the overdubbed violin lines of the album version.

So perhaps a little Zen, perhaps a little cataclysm. After all, as Lou Reed said, "It's the beginning of the New Age." And a few decades before that, a poet ended his long flirtation with Buddhism by joining the Church of England. In his conversion poem, however, he continued to pray with eastern paradoxes. "Teach us to care and not to care," T.S. Eliot intoned, "teach us to sit still." And this album finally begins to show us how. - PFM

http://www.mediafire.com/?r0h0hy9zxqcu9g4

Boris - Feedbacker (2005)

2011-09-15T13:58:00.000-07:00

Feedbacker
Style: Drone Metal / Psych / Doom
Label: Diwphalanx

Boris are the only living band (with the possible exception of Electric Wizard) who have mastered the art of out-Sabbathing Black Sabbath. Obviously, a ton of groups play in that crushing, occult style, and many do it quite competently, but only Boris have been able to consistently break on through that wall of rock into the experimental wasteland that lies beyond. And, once there, they thrive.

Of course, like the inescapable Melvins allusion of their band name, Boris are never more than a power chord away from heavy ’70s sludge fuzz, and that’s important to remember because their elemental intensity has a lot more to do with presentation and execution than writing the perfect riff, a point driven home with electric clarity on their latest slab of magma music, Boris At Last - Feedbacker.

A single 43-minute composition (broken into five tracks for easier access), Feedbacker begins at the core, with ambient waves of Earth-like drones rippling across an otherwise silent nine minute expanse before Atsuo spills into his cymbals, commencing a funereal march. Bassist/vocalist Takeshi drawls up and down his double-necked bass while Wata (the femme fatale guitarist) curls out little tongues of blue flame, the band awash in anticipatory shimmer.

Vocals are always a “less is more” matter with Boris, so when Takeshi finally howls out a few stanzas in long, mournful wails 23 minutes into the recording, it’s a sign the fuse is lit. Wata arcs her echoing feedback up and holds it in a piercing squeal, the drums go half time, the bass grinds like a bulldozer (loosening the tectonic plates), and then, at last, they all explode into a thrashing frenzy of power and white fire. The song churns and burns like lava until, abruptly, the drums stutter, crash, and everything dissolves into a lonely, fluttering screech, like loud amps left on and abandoned. This is the sound of Boris basking in the wreckage of their rock.

Fans of Boris’ metal mayhem won’t be disappointed, but in truth Feedbacker is a more pensive, reflective release, closer to Flood than Amplifier Worship, and a step further away from their rock heritage. They pray at different electric altars than they once did, moving from Ozzy to Keiji, and they have no reason to look back. Here’s to hoping they never do. - Dusted

Tied with Heavy Rocks as the best Boris album for me. Mind melting, earth-shattering music.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sxqd9c9st5k2h64

Yellow Swans - Psychic Secession (2005)

2011-09-15T13:27:00.000-07:00

Psychic Secession
Style: Noise / Drone
Label: Load

First released in Australia and then in a slightly remastered version in the States, Psychic Secession finds the Yellow Swans further occupying the space between dark, glowering metal and hypnotic modern drone, aided and abetted by performers like Christina Carter and Adam Forkner. The core duo of Gabriel Mindel Saloman and Pete Swanson still leads the way, though, and that the album starts with a high-pitched feedback whine that rapidly increases in volume is as perfect a declaration of principles as any -- why cause tinnitus when the experience can be replicated on disc? Consisting of four lengthy tracks with either short, cryptic lyrics or none at all, Psychic Secession is well named, feeling like a disorienting divorce from a calmer state of mind, as tones mix and match in ways little heard outside of early Main albums. That the first track is called "True Union" might be a slight irony, but in a way it's as much a recapitulation as anything else, a buried slow rhythm and low circular tones providing the base for the key trebly electronic parts. Yet the tune itself evolves into an even richer and more unsettling collage as it progresses before settling down into one final fading drone. With that as a start the remaining three pieces cover related but distinctly different ground, the title track itself containing some of the most violent guitar playing on the record, but mixed to sound almost (though hardly entirely) like a comforting wash. "I Woke Up," the one song on the disc produced by Forkner (the rest are handled by Daniel Voss), takes a comparatively subtler approach, with more space and background details as the drum machine (with real drums appearing later) and synth (?) bass move up to the front. "Velocity of the Yolk," meanwhile, ends the album at its quietest, with Carter's instantly recognizable vocals ghosting through the mix of echoed beeps and distant guitar moans. - AMG

http://www.mediafire.com/?m37oev5es9qve56

Birchville Cat Motel - Chi Vampires (2005)

2011-09-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

Chi Vampires
Style: Drone
Label: Celebrate Psi Phenomenon

To say Campbell Kneale is a drone master is kind of an understatement. No project in recent memory has produced the kind of ethereal spew that Kneale concocts in his electronic laboratory. Over the courses of too many releases to remember, he has constructed a sonic arsenal to match any threats that may arise. "Chi Vampires" is his latest opus. While this isn't the final chapter in his neverending tale, it feels like the epic conclusion that every great novel needs. It is simply that good.

"Chi Vampires" opens with sun light eclipsing the farthest reaches of the heavens. As the pristine white marble buildings are bathed in an irridescent golden glow, the angels open their sleepy eyes to a new dawn. This is the magic of "Blonde Moth Burial." The entire journey this mini-epic takes you on pulsates with warmth, energy, and beauty. If you have a happy place, this dense electronic whitewash is what should always be playing in the background there. It's impossible to hear this and not feel good.

"Cold Herds Travel" traverses similar territory as "Blonde Moth Burial," though the former actually has more of a funeral feeling to it. It's not melancholy per s?, but an underriding since that something has been lost that isn't coming back. There is a subtle tension happening that suggests people aren't sure whether or not this is a bad thing, but the question is always in the back of everyone's minds. Listening to "Cold Herds Travel" is examining how groupthink and death work in conjunction. It's slightly disturbing and you often feel as though you don't want to witness any of this, but there's always a sinister beauty that goes along with self-destruction, and this piece embodies it on every level.

However, despite the magnificence of these two tracks, it's the other two that make up "Chi Vampires" which push it over the top. The sprawling 30 minute epic, "Buckling Metal Snowflakes," showcases Kneale at his absolute best. Twisting pieces of sheet metal flail against each other during a night storm, crackling and buckling in a musical reverie. Kneale drops layers of dense, bright drones on top that slowly build into a stacked wall of sound. It's like a slowly unfolding utopian dream where everything you perceive is perfect is lined-up beside you in a row. There's a constant struggle between structure and chaos in the first half of "Buckling Metal Snowflakes," but that's why this is so good. Dense electronic squawls eventually gain momentum, like your alarm clock creeping into your nocturnal rainbow reminding you that reality is at the door and it's about to come in. This is where Kneale shows off his considerable skill. The shift to dark desolation highlights the dichotomy that ravages between joy and fear. One minute you're inside this perfect sound world and the next your'e awake in your post-apocolyptic nightmare. It's a harsh pill to swallow, but you do so with ease, accept it and move in. The way nothing seems out of place from one moment to the next is astounding. Kneale just glides through with ease.

But in the end, it is the end that makes "Chi Vampires" the best Birchville Cat Motel album to date. Kneale has made his love for metal well-known recently with the introduction of his all-metal Battlecruiser imprint. On the title track, however, he brilliantly melts his love for doom metal and drone into one solid piece of shimmering genius. "Chi Vampires" is dense and organic. It is feeling of reaching the summit of a majestic mountain, looking out over hundreds of square miles. This is music that will conquer as all. The repetitive nature is an asset as it just constantly pounds itself into your skull until you have to hear it over and over again. Sunn0))) eat your heart out.

Birchville Cat Motel continues pushing forward, stronger and stronger Campbell Kneale is showing no signs of slowing down and if "Chi Vampires" is any indication, the future is only going to be better than the past. This is the best Kneale has offered to date, but I am confident it won't remain as such for long. With many new projects in the works, my excitement for Birchville Cat Motel is at an all-time high. This is a mindfuck of epic proportions. Highly recommended and totally essential - Foxy Digitalis

A towering achievement of modern drone.

http://www.mediafire.com/?ufc4x03cy0elt34

Geoff Mullen - Bongo Closet (2010)

2011-09-15T12:59:00.000-07:00

Bongo Closet
Style: Drone / Ambient
Label: Type

Geoff Mullen is a hugely respected member of the New England experimental/improv scene, often found in the same circles as Keith Fullerton Whitman. He makes his Type debut with an utterly bewitching, secretive set of sounds which were originally heard on a cassette released by the 'Razors And Medicine' label earlier this year, containing six tracks of personal, heavy and undeniably magical drone music. He uses a modest setup of treated guitar together with the Yamaha CS50 synthesizer (a baby sibling of the CS80 used so definitively in Blade Runner), plus mottled FX and loops to create fascinating music which gracefully darts away from any clear pigeonholing. Over the course of this album he vividly evokes the spirit of some towering avant-garde/drone figures but consistently holds his own with a unique sense of arrangement and innate inner movements. This is evident from the first track, with its subterranean core of symphonic movement shyly guarded with layers of tape hiss and stray drones, followed by a loop-based piece of reversed rustic drums and bloopy '60s electronics. As we wind deeper in, he continues to change discipline, conjuring cavernous ambient scapes and darker skylines, but there's a distinct, silvery thread of positive emotion flowing through his ferric silt which makes writing about these sounds an almost fruitless task as they continue to shift focus and beguile at every turn. Ultimately, Mullen has an uncanny grasp of melody, mood and harmony which should be ignored at your peril. - Boomkat

http://www.mediafire.com/?4end2y5nzqesox1

Deaf Center - Pale Ravine (2005)

2011-09-14T14:23:00.001-07:00

Pale Ravine
Style: Ambient
Label: Type

After the critical acclaim of their ‘Neon City’ EP, ‘Pale Ravine’ is the long awaited full-length realization of Erik Skodvin and Otto Totland’s musical ideals. Taking up where ‘Neon City’ left off with its epic sound collages and textural soundscapes, ‘Pale Ravine’ manages to provide a sound altogether more Lynchian and grimly cinematic. Using influences from further back in their lives, the two Norwegian musicians have looked deep into their own family histories to piece together a dusty and nostalgic epic.

Inspired by old silent 8mm film reels, the historical architecture around them and the call of the alluring Norwegian landscape, the duo set out armed with microphones to record whatever they could to capture these feelings. Sounds from battered old records, cash registers, broken machines and a half-dead piano were all blended into the mix to add a warm, homely depth to the recordings. These sounds are most evident in the track ‘Loft’, where knocks and wooden creaks give an almost claustrophobic feel to the music. Again on ‘The Clearing’ a subtle field recording gives the track a rich and involving background and helps build up the mysterious aura before launching a skewed 1930s circus-waltz.

One of the most stand-out influences on ‘Pale Ravine’ is theatre, or at least the romance of all things theatrical. Not so much theatre in all its pretentious excesses, but the childhood apprehensiveness and the sinister undercurrents. From the muffled ticket booth ambience of ‘Lobby’ to the solemn dance of ‘White Lake’ it all appears draped in thick billowing velvet. The dense narrative technique the duo employs is almost like a reverse to a silent film and the soundtrack is provided to be accompanied by the imaginative visuals of the listener.

‘Pale Ravine’ is an album which again manages to blend elements of classical music with electronic music, yet there is something decidedly different which sets it apart from the competition. While there are elements that can be compared with contemporaries such as Max Richter, Marsen Jules or Ryan Teague – Deaf Center is altogether more other-worldly, darker and ultimately very rewarding. - Type Records

http://www.mediafire.com/?8e21fcn4c2rktpn

Mist - House (2011)

2011-09-07T09:30:00.000-07:00

House
Style: Kosmische / Synth / Drone
Label: Spectrum Spools

Call it affect, the way music makes a physical, emotional impact on your senses, unfolding emotions, moods, and feelings over quick successive minutes in a manner unparalleled in the other arts. Or call it a bodily relationship to sound, a physical and emotional giving-in to the transformative power of the sonic caress. Such features are evident to some extent in all music, but some styles foreground them more than others. Metal follows Wagner’s lead in its brutal, all-consuming attack. Dub and its derivatives pull rugs from under listeners’ feet, destabilizing and deterritorializing. Then there’s the kind of cosmic electronic music — drawing on Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk and Harmonia and Eno, and finding its contemporary outlet in the swirling visions of Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds, and Dolphins Into The Future — that tends to favor innervisions.

When this video to Emeralds' "Genetic" was posted up on the internet, it captured something vital about the music of these and other electronic artists. The sight of cells growing, splitting, and mutating, of growth and decay, flows and pulses, the rhythms of life, frantic activity and ambient stillness, anticipated, albeit on a more modest scale, the notorious “creation/evolution” section of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. Importantly, it reasserted the slipperiness of the organ/machine split too often connected to electronic music in the wake of Kraftwerkian robots. More than just affect, the video seemed to suggest, this music was the very soundtrack to your existence.

So we should not be overly surprised that the duo Mist (comprising John Elliott of Emeralds and Sam Goldberg of Radio People) should opt for a similar life-soundtracking strategy with House, their superb album for Elliott’s Spectrum Spools imprint. Here is a beautifully wrought work of plateaus, peaks, valleys, dips, and troughs, streams flowing into tributaries, reservoirs gathering and emptying, suns exploding, a less operatic, less classical, still awe-inspired Tree of Life. As the great American poet Jim Harrison wrote in "The Theory and Practice of Rivers," "It is not so much that I got/ there from here, which is everyone’s/ story: but the shape/ of the voyage.” That’s a bit how these recordings feel, like shapes of journeys you can sense but not see.

Imagination runs riot while connected to House. The anticipation of approach, the dream of Utopia, a passing, an elegy for something lost. What is omitted is what comes between the anticipation of Utopia and the fall of Eden: violence, rape, plunder, betrayal, the violence of colonization and empire. These are empty empires, fantasy lands, moving forward into the imaginary, backward into memory, which, after all, is also imaginary. There is a vast emptiness at the heart of this music, an emptiness covered over with warm mist, the hazy comfort of forgetfulness. Or so it seems at first.

The teeming and activity to be found in much of Emeralds' music finds itself simulated in the first two tracks of House. The frenetic opening track, the Kraftwerk-friendly "Twin Lanes,, comes at you with motoric insistence, its pistons and gears gleaming in the sun. "I Can Still Hear You Voice" has a similarly persistent undertow, but it’s already become clear by this point that the chugging arpeggios are mere engines undergirding glacial, drifting sound clouds that slip, slide, and glide toward more ephemeral modes of bliss. It’s a bliss that could be aligned to religious awe (cue Malick again, perhaps), the calm drone of "Daydream" suggesting itself as electronica's answer to Gregorian chant, or, perhaps more accurately, the eerie permanence of the church organ.

However, there are more secular, earthier textures on offer here. As well as taking us on a tour around the cosmos and our heads, Elliott and Goldberg also seem to want to take us on a tour of their equipment (mainly vintage synthiana from Moog, Roland, Korg, and DSI). It's like spending a day at the electro-spa and getting the benefit of all the treatments on offer. Perhaps, ultimately, that's what this music does for us: allow us to bathe in the amniotic luxury, pamper ourselves with sound, and take guilty pleasure in sonic purification rituals.

Saturation is at work on various levels here. There’s the feeling of being soaked, of floating through liquid, but also of being showered by spent fireworks or soft rain. Then there’s the way the instruments bleed into each other, saturating each other and changing the color of particular sounds. To hear "I Can Still Hear Your Voice" is to hear-feel the way one shape emerges out of another, to imagine trippy animations and mutating organisms. But, more than that, it’s a whole synesthesia, an envelopment and confusion of all the senses.

Elliott and Goldberg’s virtuosity, taste, and control of their equipment are what ultimately persuade one that there’s more on offer here than "mere" pleasure, more than just laying back, soaking it up, and forgetting the world. There’s a sense of one's relationship to what’s going on, an awareness of the trickery and seduction, of the Sirenic pull of the synths. There’s the knowledge of wanting-to, of giving-in, and in that knowledge resides one’s non-passivity. Ultimately, there’s a sense of meeting oneself on the way back from some revelatory experience, of being pushed and pulled and asked to take note of music’s affect, of the awe it inspires. - TMT

http://www.mediafire.com/?2wk64iyha84ko9z

Thundercat - The Golden Age of Apocalypse (2011)

2011-09-03T19:03:00.000-07:00

The Golden Age of Apocalypse
Style: Electronic / Beats / Funk
Label: Brainfeeder

As far as debut albums go, the The Golden Age of Apocalypse is definitely a head-spinner, precisely the sort of improbable hybrid from an almost-unknown artist that the Brainfeeder crew has come to specialize in over the last couple years. After all, it's not every day that you find a record that simultaneously recalls the laid-back sprawl of Erykah Badu's Return of the Ankh and the bustling mania of Mouse on Mars' Iaora Tahiti, the slick jazz futurism of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters and the gentle homespun soul of Bill Withers' Just As I Am. This is the sort of densely layered, expertly played, genre-crossing marvel that could easily turn bloated or excessive, or come off like a display of pure skill with little heart behind it. But Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner seems more interested in using his well-honed chops to turn out sunny (if bogglingly detailed) ear-candy than he is in crafting big statements (despite the album's portentous title).

Co-produced with Brainfeeder major domo (and Thundercat pal) Flying Lotus, Apocalypse has the digital sheen of many FlyLo productions. But Bruner’s experience as an in-demand rock and soul bassist gives the album a live band's freedom of movement, one that's closer to the fusion records that reared him than the sequenced rhythms that have come to define dance music, even at its most out-there. After a silly and nostalgia-inducing sample from the 1980s cartoon that gave Bruner his pseudonym, "Daylight" is the album's true opener, another in Brainfeeder’s line of shouldn't-work-but-does experimental beat confections. It merges the bustling energy of 21st-century left-field electronic music (crunchy mutant techno rhythms, a mix saturated with whimsical sound effects) with the floating-on-a-cloud airiness of 1970s soul (vaporous falsetto vocals, bright-but-wistful melodies). It really does feel like a long lost Mouse on Mars track, as if that most playful of German electronic acts had called up a member of the Soulquarians camp at the same time that Common decided to collaborate with Stereolab.

That's all a bit of bait-and-switch, though. There's no doubt plenty of Brainfeeder's psychedelic and IDM-like attention to sonic detail at various points on Apocalypse, along with nods to the fractured rhythms of London's broken beat scene and the earlier West Coast post-rap experimentation of Stones Throw. But like the latter L.A. pioneers, Thundercat takes avant electronic music's futuristic sound-sculpting and reconnects it with the history of African-American pop. He's particularly smitten with that moment in the 70s when soul music got looser and smoother and more electronic, and electric jazz started taming the wildness of improvisation with the slickness and structure of the pop song. Bruner's not beholden to the days of fusion past, of course. He takes detours into smoothly gliding 80s synth-funk ("Walkin'") and queasy prog ambience ("Mystery Machine [The Golden Age of Apocalypse]"). But still, know that this is more of a jazz album than an electronic music album, and more of a soul album than either.

And it's on the third track, "Fleer Ultra", that Bruner's true loves finally leaps to the fore, because that's the first time the bass really goes bananas. Bruner is undoubtedly what was once called a "musician's musician," a practice-space hound who reveres good playing. He's unashamed of his talent, but he also knows it's better put to use making hooks. And throughout Apocalypse it's Bruner’s exceptionally fluid bass work that ties together the new millennium computer madness and the cuts that feel like they could have been laid down in the analog days of 1974. Even the drowsiest songs here pop with super-animated basslines. His already justly lauded cover of George Duke’s "For Love I Come" turns the tempo of the original down a few notches, letting most the of song play out as an amorphous but silky swirl of electric keyboard and his echo-warped voice-- he makes sure to bring out those bass chops for the climax. As a singer, Bruner is much better than he has to be, considering his musical inventiveness is already plenty attention-grabbing, but while his fluttery, heartsick vocals lend Apocalypse much of its charm and memorability, it's those basslines that are the real earworms.

So this isn't really a song album, at least not in the sense that it’ll give rock or even R&B fans looking for verse-chorus-verse much to chew on. As with FlyLo, it's still best to approach Apocalypse as instrumental head-trip, albeit one that's occasionally got tunes you can hum. But like his fusion heroes, Bruner wants it all: the future shock of electronics, the tightly edited pleasures of pop, the love-sick opulence of quiet-storm soul, and the show-stopper instrumental breaks of jazz. The fact that he's mostly pulled it off, with a record that's serious in intent while playful in execution, is pretty astounding. - PFM

Blown away by this one. Fly-Lo meets Dam-Funk meets jazz fusion? Snatch it while you can...

- removed by request-

Shlohmo - Bad Vibes (2011)

2011-09-03T18:55:00.000-07:00

Bad Vibes
Style: Electronic / Beats
Label: Friends of Friends

Shlohmo is the alias of Henry Laufer, a 21-year old beatmaker who is one of the founders of the Wedidit collective, another branch of L.A.’s burgeoning Low End scene “who make shit and want to give you the shit we make”. Building on the buzz around last year’s Shlomoshun Deluxe mini-album and edits of Burial, Gucci Mane and Kelis, Shlohmo has delivered a deep and rewarding debut album.

The 14 tracks of Bad Vibes (13 if you don’t buy vinyl) explore downtempo, often melancholic territory at the junction of abstract hip-hop, dubstep, shoegaze and funky psychedelic rock. Soundwise, it’s a very coherent album: tracks flow into each other naturally, creating a sense of being on a musical journey but without the theoretical baggage of “imaginary soundtracks” or other such concepts. Yes, it’s a trip, but one of you can take in your own way.

The album kicks off with ‘Big Feelings’, a melange of nature sounds, Middle Eastern vocals, distortion and off-kilter beats. The vocal sample brings to mind the fourth-world voyages of Holger Czukay or DJ Cam, filtered through an appreciation of Flying Lotus and Nosaj Thing. ‘Places’ has already been released as a single, and there are two versions here (a ‘Shlohmo Remix’ of the track closes out the vinyl version of Bad Vibes). Either way, it’s a beautiful track – the original shuffles a hand of tape hiss, wordless sweet ’70s soul balladry, modern funk synths and head-nodding beats like some hip young kid shredding scenes from Shaft. The remix starts off more like the lo-fi outsider experimentation of A Grave with No Name or Kramer, until the most delicious oriental synth line starts picking its way through the debris.

One of the most surprising, yet enjoyable things about this album is the sheer variety of influences and resemblances in the music: from Ike Hayes to Keith Hudson, Tokimonsta to Sleepy Sun, it’s a far richer and more rewarding tapestry that most comparable hip-hop records. ‘It Was Whatever’, for instance, ventures over similar terrain to Ultramarine on their joyous canoe trip across the States, Every Man and Woman is a Star, whilst ‘Parties’ takes the social angst of a misfit kid and turns it into a bittersweet instrumental, built on what sounds like a faux-Malian field recording, and reaching a peak of mouth organ-led melancholia before being led home by beats stumbling into oblivion.

There are no real weak spots on the album, but certain tracks do stand out as being that little bit better than the rest. ‘Just Us’ starts off like rinky-dink Korean answer phone music, adds a vocal line straight out of the Porcelain Raft playbook, lets the beat loose and bathes the whole thing in reverb before repeating with a twist. ‘Sink’ is built around plangent lo-fi guitar loops with just the merest smudge of rhythm: it’s barely hip-hop at all at first, until a loping drum pattern and pure wave synthesis overwhelm you with emotion.

Best of all are ‘Get Out’ and ‘Your Stupid Face’, a pair of linked tracks that build over a combined nine minutes. Starting with layers of falsetto and ominous percussive noises, ‘Get Out’ adds fuzztone bass and harmonica as the track builds and swells like something from a Mountain or Mandrill album. The Fender bass gets even dirtier and nastier with the transition to ‘Your Stupid Face’, where the darkness of Black Sabbath meets the majestic sadness of Eddie Hazel. When the beat drops midway through the track, it’s truly an awesome thing – heavy, heavy music.

All in all, Bad Vibes is a great debut album, with a potential appeal far beyond the L.A. beat scene that spawned it. - FACT

Tapestries of rhythmic diffusion and skittering ambience. A new world to explore.

http://www.mediafire.com/?ww8e2ww6plqpm5a

Tomasz Stanko Quartet - Lontano (2006)

2011-08-22T20:49:00.000-07:00

Lontano
Style: Modal Jazz
Label: ECM

Lontano is the third album by 64-year-old Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko to team him with a trio of exceptionally talented young countrymen who started playing with him while still in their teens: pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michal Miskiewicz. Yes, the trio, which has recorded on its own, pushes him with its fresh energy and ideas. But the support team is no less inspired by Stanko's spare, intensely understated approach to melody and harmony, which draws generously from Miles Davis, and his elastic sense of time. More dependent on spatial constructs and free form improvising than its richly atmospheric previous effort, Suspended Night (which some critics called Stanko's Kind of Blue), Lontano doesn't always deliver on the risks it takes. The music sometimes loses momentum. But the trumpeter's pensive lyrical authority and Wasilewski's controlled abandon make for a good combination, especially on a pair of Stanko tunes first recorded in 1965 and 1975, respectively. - AMZ

http://www.mediafire.com/?avvvm84fqrsgbzv

Matthew Halsall - Colour Yes (2009)

2011-08-22T20:41:00.000-07:00

Colour Yes
Style: Modal Jazz
Label: Gondwana Records

Just gorgeous. Manchester-based trumpeter Matthew Halsall's second album ploughs the same delicate, acoustic, modal jazz furrow as his debut, Sending My Love (Gondwana, 2008). The lineup of fellow Mancunians is much the same too, with flautist Roger Wickham replaced by harpist Rachael Gladwin on three of the six tracks. Just so there's no mistaking where Halsall is coming from, the cover art is also a near-clone of that used on the first disc.

Colour Yes will delight fans of the dreamy astral jazz played by pianist/harpist Alice Coltrane, and that of saxophonists John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders in their more reflective moments. Above all, it will bring a warm glow to enthusiasts for trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Bill Evans circa Kind Of Blue (Columbia, 1959). They may also be grateful that Halsall does not, at this point in his career anyway, feel the need to adopt Davis' dictum: "I always gotta change, it's like a curse." In the case of Colour Yes, more of the same, lovely, gently swinging, uncomplicated beauty is a blessing.

Halsall is the possessor of a singularly bright trumpet tone, which shimmers throughout the album free of mutes or any noticeable post-production electronic manipulation. The six tunes, all of them originals, range from the leisurely to the slow, the pace and intensity heating up only on the bouncy dance track "Mudita." On the first three tracks, Halsall sits out the first three minutes or so, allowing saxophonist Nat Birchall to state the theme and set the mood. Birchall is another joy; his soprano is pretty and nimble, and so too is his tenor, on which he favors the upper register approached from much the same direction.

It's sometimes said of a post-Bill Evans pianist that he or she places as much importance on the space between notes as on the notes themselves, and this is abundantly true of Halsall's pianist, Adam Fairhall, and his less-is-more style. It's also true of Gladwin. Avoiding the temptation simply to reprise Alice Coltrane's approach to the instrument, Gladwin replaces Coltrane's cascading waterfalls of sound with carefully picked single note phrases punctuated by block-chorded comping. Her solos on "Together" and, in particular, on the album's 13-minute centerpiece, "I've Been Here Before," are highlights of the set.

Bassist Gavin Barras and drummers Gaz Hughes (four tracks) and Marek Dorcik (two) provide unobtrusive but softly pulsing rhythms, while Hughes uses his sticks more emphatically to propel the aforementioned "Mudita" forward.

Late-night listening par excellence, Colour Yes also has depth, focus and integrity. It doesn't waste words, and it says a lot. - Allaboutjazz

Stunning and meditative jazz in the vein of Miles Davis and Bill Evans.

http://www.mediafire.com/?kyfdfzlaofol389

Basic Channel - BCD (1995)

2011-08-16T18:24:00.000-07:00

BCD
Style: Dub Techno
Label: Basic Channel

The Basic Channel CD, originally crept in and out of racks worldwide in 1995, released with stealth in a plain cardboard envelope, with photocopied, smudgy artwork, encouraging the prospective customer to 'Buy vinyl'! After this initial run, the release achieved some notoriety, as it appeared in the by now infamous metal box, packaging perfection, if not entirely practical. These versions have been unavailable for a good while, languishing, criminally out of print, but still heading many a wants list, as the digital retrospective of classic period berlin, ninety three to ninety four, cavernous deep techno, dubwise. From today's perspective, this open sound laid the groundwork for much of the later Rhythm & Sound output, with its echo-heavy atmospheric density. For this writer, this disc pretty well opened the door to this amazing music, and yet it never quite pretends to be exhaustive.

Specific edits from classic, classic twelve inches like 'Radiance' [BC 08], the two Quadrant pieces [BC 04 and BC 06], the abstract ambience of Cyrus' 'Presence' from the awesome 'Inversion' [BC 05] all consistently overpower. Clubby jawdroppers like 'Phylyps Trak' parts one and two are surprisingly absent, yet the awesome remix of the 'Lyot' anthem from the Maurizio series by Rene Lowe aka Vainqueur, goes some way towards compensating. The thrust of this disc is something approaching an unmade statement, made spacious and quite reserved for the digital environment, rather than the more imperative, vinyl flavoured club weapons. Add to this, an opening which fairly transports the listener, the unreleased 'Q loop' into Mark and Mauritz' 'e2e4 basic reshape', later sighted by Planet E fanciers on Paperclip People's 'Throw' followed up with the static, billowing intricacies of 'Mutism', again prime, unreleased business. This cd works on so many levels, as atmospherics, or simply building up an epic submerged groove, or even, as if further encouragement were needed, to 'Buy vinyl' and check out those missing numbers - those omitted, but still priceless b-sides and extended versions and dubs: playing frequently in an attempt to wear it out, challenge the digital fixity. This is an absolute must. - Boomkat

The beginning of dub techno and probably its most compelling statement to this day. Spacious worlds of repetition and echo.

-256 kbs-
http://www.mediafire.com/?mcj27qrinv1dzgi

Arve Henriksen - Cartography (2008)

2011-08-15T19:21:00.000-07:00

Cartography
Style: Trumpet Improv / Ambient
Label: ECM

Arve Henriksen came at jazz sideways, honing his singular voice as a session player-- with David Sylvian's Nine Horses, Christian Wallumrød, Supersilent, and many others-- and through a series of fine, ambient-tinged albums for the Rune Grammofon label. These were tricky, seductively spare works that got at jazz by outlining jazz-shaped holes. They were most notable for Henriksen's adventurous, curiously-phrased style as a trumpeter. He made his instrument sound like a woodwind, a flock of birds, a Japanese flute, a punctured helium balloon. His strangled yet fluent tone is marked by a vivacious Scandinavian melancholy and a hint of noir. His meditations for trumpet and electronics expand the warm, alien landscape that Jon Hassell initially revealed, and populate it with Olivier Messiaen's avian familiars.

Cartography, Henriksen's first album for the serious-business jazz label ECM, is an ambitious showcase for his exotic syntax: Notes float on cushions of air or clang like lead; they sigh, squeak in distress, bleat, and taper off into thin shrieks. When ravishingly full tones break out from the baroque constraints, the effect is devastating. Henriksen plays the way Ian Curtis sang: A rough-and-ready yet wounded voice, always on the verge of cracking with emotion. On "Migration", he unrolls a gaseous theme that periodically dissipates into the merest pinched tones-- minimalism's pervasive mark is not omitted here. The climactic swells of "Migration" have chafed edges, as if Henriksen's trumpet had a sore throat. He spits rapidly through the mouthpiece on "Ouija" to create a richly-textured, telegraphic stutter. But he's a focused, patient player, who miraculously condenses breathtaking themes from this almost-zoological diversity.

Cartography differs from prior albums in that it was cobbled together from structured improv sessions with a variety of collaborators, both live and in-studio, over a three-year span. But it plays seamlessly, owing to Henriksen's highly-developed style, as well as to smart, immersive post-production by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré, who enrich the live instrumentation with samples, field recordings, synthesizers, and programmed beats. While Henriksen's plaintive motifs are still central, pacing the development, there's a lot more going on around them than before.

"Poverty and Its Opposite" sets Henriksen's trumpet against a distant shimmer and intensifying abstract percussion; it's like a forest coming to life as night falls. "Recording Angel", with its scratchy textures, haunting Trio Mediaeval vocal samples, and founts of drenching melody, is a jazz answer to Nico Muhly's Mothertongue. From the distressed orchestral samples on "Loved One" to the staticky piano of "Sorrow and Its Opposite", the invention never flags, and never veers away from the service of severe beauty. No matter how many times I hear the two pieces that feature spoken-word poetry by David Sylvian, I can never hold onto the narrative thread for very long before I slip into the sounds of the words and the timbre of Sylvain's calming voice. That's how deep an enchantment Henriksen casts on Cartography, which maps an impressionistic world where sound is meaning. - PFM

Gorgeously hazy trumpet improvisations from one of the finest contemporary players layered on top of minimal electronics and field recordings. Essential for fans of Supersilent and those who enjoy the more ambient side of jazz ("In a Silent Way" etc.)

http://www.mediafire.com/?k27jrslwz3jkj2a

Antena - Camino Del Sol (1982)

2011-08-15T19:09:00.001-07:00

Camino Del Sol
Style: Retro-Futurist Pop / Bossanova
Label: Factory Benelux

Jacques Brel, the most famous pop culture Belgian who never made a direct-to-video kickboxing feature about clones, sang in his nostalgic, sardonic paean to his Grandparents' romance, "Bruxelles":

C`était au temps oú Bruxelles r\xEAvait
C`était au temps du cinéma muet
C`était au temps oú Bruxelles chantait
C`était au temps oú Bruxelles bruxellait

or,

It was the time when Brussels dreamed
It was the time of silent film
It was the time when Brussels sang
It was the time when Brussels... bruxellait.

Bruxellait. A word that Babelfish and online translation engines fail to process. Brel, unable to better describe his hometown, simply uttered, "When Brussels was Brussels, when Brussels... brusseled." Camden hipsters may be more familiar with Belgo, the Chalk Farm eatery where servers in monks' habits serve mussels, frites, and trappist ale in a cold, aluminum, industrial loft, than the Belgian stepsister of Factory Records, Factory Benelux, and its Brussels-based sister label Les Disques du Crepuscule. Though the label served as a continental dumping ground for the tour-support one-offs of major players-- like A Certain Ratio's inaugural "Shack Up" seven-inch, and later, New Order's "Touched by the Hand of God" and "Everything's Gone Green" singles-- it cultivated its own indigenous roster with groups like The Names, Minny Pops, and the massively overlooked Antena.

The Names waded in slowed Peter Hook bassline facsimiles and faux-Morrissey moaning on their Swimming LP. Minny Pops ventured into colder electro-Teutonic territory. Antena, however, macheted into theretofore (and heretofore) unexplored territory for post-punk-- namely the oddball psychedelic scene of South America. Recorded with echoing minimalism, Antena's major release, Camino del Sol, evokes dreaming, singing, charmingly off-the-mark sci-fi futurism, and the black-and-white nostalgia of Brel's Brussels. It's as beautifully outdated, yet strikingly mind-boggling and timeless, as the towering Atomium over the Expo '58 grounds.

The newly formed vinyl junkie reissue label, Numero, sniffed this truffle, and has released it between more traditional reissues of a rare soul compilation and a power-pop box set. Camino del Sol was originally a five-song twelve-inch from 1980, but was later expanded to a full-length by Crepuscule in 1982 with added singles. This reissue further expands the release with the "Seaside Weekend" single, two unreleased tracks ("Frantz" and "Ingenuous"), and new artwork. With any justice, it will bring new light to a lost gem, as similar reissues did for Os Mutantes, whose adolescent dementia influences this record's tropicalia songs ("The Boy from Ipanema", "Sissexa"), and Shuggie Otis, whose piquantly primitive drum machines propel each track. So much hidden influence lies in these songs. The wonderful opening punch of "To Climb the Cliff" and the title track predate Stereolab's Gainsbourg-gone-Kraftwerk by over a decade, and Air's cool, Parisian sex by nearly two. Tortoise directly lifted the syncopated synthetic funk of "To Climb the Cliff" on their equally rare seven-inch, "Madison Ave/Madison Area".

Stuttering kick drums, icicle synths, and robotic bass jerks the listener through "Spiral Staircase" with better effect than a handful of contemporary NY revivalists. Limited to the use of the above ingredients and the occasional dry electric guitar, Antena relied on vast amounts of space for haunting texture. Each member sounds isolated in far corners of an airport hangar, allowing coke-bottle percussion, sound effects, and Isabelle Antena's detached, seductive voice to float. The more propulsive tracks are offset by opiated cocktail numbers like "Silly Things", "Bye Bye Papaye", and "Noelle A Hawaii". Yet, the faint echo of Antena's label cousins Joy Division keeps things perversely intoxicating. Only on "Les Demoiselles de Rochefort", a cover of Michel Legrand's theme to the Catherine Deneuve film, do Antena sound positively retro-minded. Even then, the strings and horns seemingly waft from a wormhole.

The band fell apart soon after this release, and carried on into goofy plastic jazz before Isabella turned it all into a solo vehicle. These days, Isabelle Antena still rides the stereotypical "Big in Japan" wave, touring the country and releasing smooth adult albums in some cruel approximation of Lost in Translation's Sausalito. Yet she'll always have this document of inspired originality in her past, which, with this reissue, could very well make her a rediscovered figure. As this album proves, she was much more akin to Beck and Björk than her dour trend-following contemporaries. So unique perhaps only Jacques Brel found the verb for it. - PFM

Delightful and bizarre gem of retro-futurist-electro-latin-lounge-pop from Belgium. Proto-Stereolab shit.

http://www.mediafire.com/?udq6sy9axqij6sl

Glenn Branca - Symphony No. 5 - Describing Planes of an Expanding Hypersphere (1984)

2011-08-15T19:02:00.001-07:00

Symphony No. 5
Style: Microtonal Guitar / Noise
Label: Atavistic

Recordings of Branca's music cannot fail but do it an injustice. The purely visceral punch of his sound and the extreme effects that the overtones generate deep within one's ear (which can sound like a microscopic, though incredibly intense, devil's choir) are impossible to duplicate in recording media. Nonetheless, the listener can get something of a taste of its power through a recording such as the one at hand.

Though he once again includes a subtitle that is imbued with matters arcane ("Describing Planes of an Expanding Hypersphere"), Symphony No. 5 actually harkens back more to Branca's earlier rock-based compositions than to more diffuse works like Symphony No. 3. Stefan Wischerth's steady drumming, which might sound leaden in other contexts, is featured prominently here and propels the 11-piece ensemble dramatically through each movement. The final section -- filled with dense, industrial thrashings and a fractured rhythm -- breaks character somewhat, bringing the piece to an unsettling close. As with several prior works, the "guitars" in question appear to be homemade models consisting of guitar strings and pickups attached to wooden planks, laid in tiers horizontally and played with mallets or sticks.

By using several different tunings (all, knowing Branca's methodology, presumably related in some obscure mathematical fashion), the chords created are both complex and ambiguous, and virtually always fascinating. If there's a complaint to be lodged with this composition, perhaps it is that it comes across more as a series of individual movements and less as a whole, organic form. But those movements offer more than enough pleasures to highly recommend the album both to Branca fans and to newcomers seeking to learn about his music. - AMG

Massive clouds of humming microtonal complexity. Not as accessible as some of his other material, but quite rewarding if you turn it up loud and lose yourself.

http://www.mediafire.com/?x33w97v661sh588

Rhys Chatham - An Angel Moves Too Fast To See: Selected Works 1971-1989 (2003)

2011-08-13T12:06:00.001-07:00

An Angel Moves Too Fast to See
Style: Guitar Minimalism / Drone / No-Wave
Label: Table of the Elements

There can be only one King of New York. Ask Christopher Walken. Even when Dubya visited the smoking holes at Ground Zero, he deferred to then-King Rudy Guiliani. So it goes in the art world: who else but Matthew Barney could command the entire Guggenheim and have Björk sire his child?

New York sets up more of a duality in its music worlds: there's always contention and tension in the air of premieres, the two lords evenly matched and equally powerful, landing formidable punches with each new expression. In jazz you have John Zorn and William Parker; way back when, it was Bird and Diz blowing, first together, then at crosswinds. Unearthed tapes from folks like Tony Conrad, John Cale, and Charlemagne Palestine continually contest the supposed reign of minimalist La Monte Young; into the seventies, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass were upping the inverse ante with their ensemble sizes (6 marimbas to 12 Parts to 18 Musicians).

In the eighties, it was the rock muck of Sonic Youth and Swans, exchanging asphalt-hard blows on audiences' ears like long-banged champs. Further underground, there was the guitar-symphony battle for supremacy between avid pupil Glenn Branca and teacher Rhys Chatham, an arms race of detuned six-strings building up to Hundred Guitar Armies the likes of which Tommy Garrett never imagined during the cold war-- Branca even marched them through the World Trade Plaza way back in the early 21st Century. While leaner Branca has released ten symphonies on disc, master Chatham has been neglected.

Consider this the Equalizer. The Bomb. Chatham's got The Box.

"Two Gongs" opens this set, a piece composed in 1971 but appearing here as documented in 1988. It seems simple, even in the hazy dawn of American Minimalism; less concerned with the piano patterns of Terry Riley and La Monte, and more with the pure physicality of sine waves pursued by Maryann Amacher and Charlemagne Palestine in their electronic work, Chatham found as much kif-kin in each hit of Chinese gongs as he did in his work with the early Buchla synthesizer (the cornerstone technology of the Intermedia Center at NYU in the late sixties). The resulting investigation of these gongs sounds not so much like an idealized Music of the Spheres as it is a "Music of Two Enormous Fucking Ball Bearings the Size of Jupiter Grinding Together like Electric Teenagers". Heavenly, yes, but with enough sharp metal shavings and distorted sparks as to spray in your eyes over its sixty minutes.

For those who won't find an hour's worth of gong vibration invigorating, head directly to disc two. Buzzing and bursting forth with six guitars on "Die Donnergötter", Chatham's motley crew-- featuring future Illbient-blower Ben Neill, ex-Modern Lover Ernie Brooks, Susan Stenger from Band of Susans, and the Dictators' drummer-- plows down a speedy superhighway of black tar rock and roll, paving the space between Television's ascendant Marquee Moon and Neu!'s motorik downbeat. The overlapping dust storms of tones kicked up by way of the guitar stretch far over the horizon of detuned, droning rock, a point reiterated over and over again as the set continues.

Aside from the Lee Renaldo-penned epiphany from 1977, wedged into the 140-page booklet, "Guitar Trio" succinctly lays out the career trajectory for Sonic Youth in eight sustaining minutes. With David Linton providing a kicked-kit push on drums, three open-tuned guitars let flow pure, humming-head streams that quickly become a current of cascading electrified overtones and sheer delight. From this body of sonic wash came all other noisy guitars for the next thirty years, to fill their respective canteens: Mars, Theoretical Girls, Band of Susans, Ut, Swans, and the aforementioned Youth, even latter day practitioners of sonic overload ranging from My Bloody Valentine to the Trail of Dead. No matter who it inspired, the piece proves that no one quite had the vessel-- the distillation process-- much less quenched any thirst for tone overload quite like Rhys during those hectic times. The fact that the third guitarist on this piece (Branca) would explore the same ideas to even greater success reveals the wellspring Chatham had loosed in New York City.

"Drastic Classicism" is far more fast and furious than its "minimal" tag would lead you to believe. Four chariots roll on fiery Brimstone tires in a savage Drive Like Jehu drag race; the noise on these tracks is more than most ensembles could ever hope to hit, but not even Jehu could keep up with these gear changes, flowing and grinding until the wheels fall off, even burning through the re-entry that "Eliminator Jr." brought at the end of Daydream Nation.

Variables focused on in previous works-- volume, trajectory, velocity-- culminate in Rhys' final revelation of electric guitar with the title work, "An Angel Moves Too Fast to See". Scored for one hundred guitars and toured throughout Europe, it's the only one of three such pieces that has ever been documented, premiering here. Despite the sheer impossibility of recording one hundred guitars and accurately conveying that force, there are huge movements from the group, roving from Chatham's classic colossal bustle into "Interstellar Overdrive"-like drift, even into a curious place that resembles...a hundred dudes playing the opening punches of "Eye of the Tiger."

Dump out his peripheral role-playing: the work with Morton Subotnick in the sixties, his time tuning harpsichords and pianos for the likes of Glenn Gould and La Monte Young, founding venerated music outlet The Kitchen and introducing Canal Street bludgeonings of electric guitar to academic minimal marks. Even if you're feeling Spartan, cutting out all the non-guitar works here (as most of his focus these days lies in brass), you'd still have a huge reckoning with one of the downtown greats looming larger than the Federal Reserve building. Chatham is huge, and that the box grasps so much of that significance makes it a crowning achievement. - PFM

Absolutely revelatory box set of Rhys Chatham's impossible-to-find early works. The first piece "Two Gongs" is excellent but its hour-long duration requires quite a commitment and might not be the best introduction for the newcomer. The second two discs are where the real gold is at: "Die Donnergotter" and "An Angel Moves..." are mind-blowing journeys of distorted minimalist propulsion. Some of the finest guitar compositions I've ever heard.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=T7WSNVSI

Jürgen Müller - Science of the Sea (2011)

2011-08-08T09:16:00.000-07:00

Science of the Sea
Style: Ambient / New Age / Synth
Label: Digitalis

A skeptic might cast aspersions on the tale behind Jürgen Müller's Science of the Sea. The story begins at the University of Kiel in Germany, where the self-taught composer was studying oceanic science in the late 1970s. Müller purchased some electronic instruments and set them up on his houseboat in the town of Heikendorf, where he began crafting instrumental pieces that reflected his love of undersea life. His dream of selling those compositions to film and TV companies for use in documentaries never transpired. But Müller did press fewer than 100 vinyl copies of the recordings in the early 80s and titled them Science of the Sea, giving most of the albums away to friends and family. Fast forward three decades and a copy of the record ends up in the hands of Digitalis Recordings, just as a resurgence of interest in the type of new age recordings Müller was practicing is taking place.

So it's reasonable to wonder if the backstory was constructed as part of a larger concept, the way people continue to wonder about Ursula Bogner or Endless House. One intrepid blog commenter even claims to have contacted the University of Kiel and found no trace of Müller's presence. Either way it doesn't really matter, because the music on Science of the Sea continues that superior strain of contemplative elegance records such as Emeralds' Does It Look Like I'm Here? and Oneohtrix Point Never's Rifts have touched on in recent times. Like those releases, the relation Science of the Sea has to actual new age music is tangential at best. There are no Gheorghe Zamfir-esque pan flute solos or anything that will drive you to join a local color therapy group. Instead it's an uncomplicated series of recordings, mostly based around gently unfolding synth arpeggios set to faintly pulsing rhythms.

The tracks are short-- only five of the 12 here make it over the three-minute mark-- although Science of the Sea doesn't really make sense when broken down into its component parts. Instead each song works as a natural evolution of the theme set out in the opening "Beyond the Tide", where great washes of cleansing synth are interrupted by spiky twists of becalming noise that were presumably conceived to mimic dolphin chirps. It's not hard to see why this might have been thought of as a perfect soundtrack to a Jacques Cousteau-style undersea documentary. The following "Sea Bed Meditation" is full of rippling loops tied down by globs of tenderly resonating bass frequencies, not far removed from Klaus Schulze's contemplative solo ventures. Müller also shares Schulze's fondness for vaguely humorous song titles ("Dream Sequence For a Jellyfish", "The Elusive Seahorse").

What's remarkable about this album is how acutely it reflects and comments on the environment that served as its inspiration. "Waterworld" doesn't travel far beyond the coiling melody that ebbs and flows throughout the track, but it feels like the musical equivalent of a trail of oxygen bubbles arcing to the surface as a scuba diver peacefully plunges to the depths. Similarly, "Marine Technology" is all digital interference and signal jams, with zaps of synth noise pinging back and forth across the surface as though an urgent piece of undersea communication were being transmitted. Once you get deep into Science of the Sea, especially on headphones, it feels like Müller is simultaneously replicating that world and conveying his chimerical dreams about what it epitomizes. "Coral Fantasy" and "Vast Worlds Beneath" function as utopian fantasies about the great unknown, with Müller utilizing slowly disentangling sounds to give a sense of scale, wonder, and a natural curiosity about all the things that lay undiscovered down there.

The way Science of the Sea subtly shifts in theme, from then-current meditations on the ocean to quixotic impressions about its unexplored expanses, is its masterstroke. It feels like you're on a journey alongside Müller, carefully mapping out the thoughts and fears the murky depths have come to represent, all laid out in a way that your brain would naturally process if you were immersed in that world. The closing "Lonely Voyage" even feels like a warning of sorts, with its foreboding timbre suggesting that you can plunge a little too deeply into yourself if you spend too much time down there. That's where this album disconnects from anything that could perfunctorily be tagged as "new age." This isn't simple relaxation music, although much of it could easily perform that function. Instead the beautifully uncomplicated surface structures are used to prize open a boundless amount of feelings that are every bit as complex and unfathomable as the ocean itself. - PFM

Just as good as the history behind it would have you hope. Emeralds meets The Life Aquatic...

http://www.mediafire.com/?4262wu64r9wbgr3

John Tejada - Parabolas (2011)

2011-08-07T19:44:00.000-07:00

Parabolas
Style: Tech House / Minimal
Label: Kompakt

It's surprising that John Tejada hasn't hooked up with Kompakt before. The twitchy grooves of Parabolas, the L.A. transplant's debut LP for the Cologne, Germany-based label, fit right into founder Wolfgang Voigt's minimal techno aesthetic. What binds Tejada's eclectic decade-plus of work is an approach where it seems like every instrumental tweak and glitch has been studiously labored over for great stretches of time. Parabolas feels that way, too. It's a collection of 12 tech-house instrumentals, pitched somewhere between the visceral punch of classic Detroit techno and the headphone-oriented approach of 1990s electronica like Black Dog Production's Bytes and Autechre's Incunabula.

That's some daunting company to keep, but Tejada has the skills to transform his pilfering into something greater than the sum of its influences. Opener "Farther and Fainter" is a case in point. The opening bars initially sound like they're pushing into the kind of densely packed prettiness Aphex Twin was obsessing over on Selected Ambient Works 85–92. But then the deadened bass drum beat kicks in, joined by a series of bell-like samples, and the song stretches to a close via low-end synth noise wrapped around a fading hi-hat. Blanketed in a pensive quality that most bedroom techno shares, the track is a good indication of what to expect from much of Parabolas, which essentially acts like a form of comedown comfort food.

Occasionally Tejada strays close to a full-on ambient sound ("The Dream", "The Honest Man"), but for the most part Parobalas is deliberately stunted at birth. Tracks like "Subdivided" juxtapose zesty synth rolls with stabs of murky bass and rarely deviate from that path. Occasionally the trance-like state Tejada favors can be a little monotonous, but he usually works in unexpected twists just before the music settles into a rut. For example, a few corkscrewing samples light up "Timeless Space", while "The Living Night" tempers its house-y piano stabs by heading somewhere far darker and then frittering into ambience.

The doomy tone that briefly surfaces in "The Living Night" recurs across much of Parabolas' later tracks, neatly contrasting with the airy material that opened the album. On "Unstable Condition", Tejada even heads close to the kind of relentless downer vibe LFO toyed with on "Tied Up" albeit with all the dissonance scraped away to fit with this record's late-night mood. The convergence of light and dark helps make Parobalas work well as a self-contained piece, while the album's sense of focus elevates it above some of Tejada's typical lurches in style. - PFM

Crisp Kompaktian pleasure. Somewhere between Pantha Du Prince, Claro Intelecto, and Efdemin...

http://www.mediafire.com/?3xwb2695ri7nu65

Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer - Re: ECM (2011)

2011-08-05T11:09:00.000-07:00

Re: ECM
Style: Experimental / Post-Jazz / Post-Classical
Label: ECM

Munich-based label ECM has been mining a rich seem of sounds on the fringes of jazz, contemporary classical and world music since 1969. To mark the label’s 40th anniversary, founder and driving force Manfred Eicher commissioned two notable German-based musicians (not to mention long-term fans of the label) from two generations of electronica – minimal superstar Villalobos and Max Lodebauer, a man perhaps best known for his time in ambient duo Sun Electric – to deliver a remix project with a difference.

Re: ECM is an attempt to use electronics to build “sound structures” with reference to modern jazz productions, using the ECM back catalogue as source material. Given the circumstances, it could have been all too easy for Villalobos and Lodebauer’s venture to sink under the weight of four decades of musical history and the expectations of an informed and very particular “ECM audience”. That they manage to deliver a double CD (total running time two-and-a-quarter hours) that is both respectful of the label’s past and pushes its traditions in new and unexpected directions, is something to applaud.

Fittingly for a label that promises “the most beautiful sound next to silence”, the album begins with the contemplative ‘Reblop’, a reworking of a Christian Wallumrød track that pieces together frosty piano fragments and electronic insect atmospherics for nigh on five minutes before a delightful harp motif takes centre stage. ‘Recat’ is even more charming, an improvisation around Wallumrød’s ‘Music for one Cat’ that melds an intricate web of brushed drums with a delightful aquatic string melody, significantly sped up from the original.

‘Resvete’ draws hitherto unperceived parallels between the quiet and unsettling iconoclasm of Russian composer Alexander Knaifel and the glitchier end of ambient electronica personified by the likes of Oval. By contrast, the 1974 John Abercrombie track ‘Timeless’ is transformed from sun-drenched jazz rock into uncanny avant-hip-hop – more nervous breakdown in a tanning salon than blissful adventure on a tropical beach.

The next track, ‘Reemergence’, is, if anything, an even more radical gesture, stitching together the resonances of Miroslav Vitous’s double bass playing rather than the melodies to build a fascinating textural piece. Beats come to the fore for the first time on ‘Reblazhenstva’, which, together with its Russian choir, brings to mind a strange take on the airbrushed new age club vibe of Enigma’s ‘Sadeness’. Rhythm is even more prominent on the fabulous fourth world sounds of ‘Reannounce’. Ululating tribal vocals meld into sinister clarinet over a mesh of exotic, organic percussion – a personal highlight of CD1.

CD2 continues this fine work and shows how much thought has gone into the sequencing of these tracks, beginning with a reworking of the same source materials as album opener ‘Reblop’, but offering a shorter, sharper reprise with reverse elements. This is followed by the much longer acoustic glitch of ‘Reshadub’ and the sepia toned ‘Rebird’, a naif music box melody buried beneath a wall of shortwave interference.

Perhaps the most impressive pieces in the second half of the album are the cathedral of sound constructed from Arvo Pärt’s ‘Kondakion’ and the Bennie Maupin deconstruction, ‘Rensenada’, a slowly evolving hybrid of pellucid astro-jazz and off-kilter beats. Finally, ‘Redetach’ brings a real sense of closure to this audio journey with its slowly resolving 6am chords building on and taking over an earlier skittering rhythm; afterwards, you feel drained, cleansed and eager to start the journey again. This album is both a celebration of and a worthy addition to the ECM legacy. And, Villalobos watchers may be surprised to learn, not a techno beat to speak of. - FACT

134 minutes of quiet, patient beauty. A fitting tribute to a great label.

-320 kbs-

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SFR1RM54

Mark Fell - Multistability (2010)

2011-08-04T20:49:00.001-07:00

Multistability
Style: Glitch / Microsound
Label: Raster Noton

As snd, Mark Fell and his collaborator Matt Steel have over a decade of releases to their name, deconstructing the smallest fragments of garage, Chicago house and Detroit techno. The pair have patiently evolved their sound, from humble beginnings in subtleties of repetition, rhythmic interplay and adjustments of detail, into a wild subgenre of super-textural music that is quite simply unique. Multistability is a continuation of the pair’s strikingly beautiful aesthetic, this time applying Fell’s own self interests of further stripped down material and a more conceptual approach to composition.

The release is described as an exploration of rhythmic and thematic ambiguity, its contents actually presented twice as two different versions of the same source material. A useful comparison sited by Raster-Noton is the Necker cube – the unsolvable uncertainty that comes from looking at a wireframe cube and trying to decide which way it is facing. The results of this give the record a slightly obtuse structure; although presented in a particular track arrangement, as a long-player it is not always convincing in the way it moves between material. To treat it as abrupt chapters, even playing partnering tracks as pairs in comparison, may be a more rewarding experience for some.

Sonically, the hallmarks of snd are present – hyper-clean digital synthesis paired with analogue percussion, manipulated through extremes of computer timing, sparkling with pristine mixing and mastering. The result is often similar for the ear what sunlight flashing quickly between tree branches is to the eye. What makes the album inherently exciting, however, is the new timbral territory explored by Fell: ‘Multistability 6-B’ provides flutters of thick synth flutes and piccolos with whirring hit hats; ‘Multistability 7-A’ is a rotating and stuttering square wave riff with claps, heavily reminiscent of grime; ‘Multistability 1-B’ introduces thick, soft Detroit horn woofing over a typical snd stutter. There are also unmistakable tinges and blurs of Fell’s explorations of previous work: ‘Multistability 2-A’ whips as a fight between growling resonant distortion and crystaline harmonic rhodes sweeps; ‘Multistability 9′ is an extended drum solo of splashing partials; ‘Multistability 10-B’ a cyclic, string-plucked, rotationally panned arpeggiation at breakneck speed.

At times, however, this brilliant content is made frustrating in Fell’s refusal to deviate from his singular path. Sometimes the material is far too long, sometimes too short, or amazing potential left inexplicably undeveloped. Although Multistability is simply two sets of outcomes from one starting point, Fell’s way of steering us through them can feel restrictive, occasionally misjudged. However, possessing genuine, dazzling originality, this record is highly recommended listening. - FACT

Mind-scramblingly complex audio sculptures beamed in from another dimension.

http://www.mediafire.com/?1elsmw3earn6vx0

Biosphere - Substrata (1997)

2011-08-01T12:42:00.000-07:00

Substrata
Style: Ambient / Electronic
Label: Touch

Ambient albums don't come much more highly respected than 'Substrata'; it's a veritable milestone in electronic music. Geir Jenssen, better known to most as Biosphere, managed to compile his grand statement in 'Substrata' - a collection of tracks which best sum up his music and grand vision. Electronic drones, lightly plucked guitar, field recordings and haunting film samples are all thrown into the mix to create something which is less like listening to an album and more like watching a film. I think I can safely say that without this album ambient electronic music would look totally different. Jenssen was the first artist to incorporate all these peculiar elements into his music so successfully and without a hint of cynicism or the stench of new age, and when it was released back in 1997 of course it made waves in the music scene. A true classic. - BK

Definitely in the top tier of contemporary ambient albums, "Substrata" deserves to be heard by everyone. Music for mental drift...

http://www.mediafire.com/?41zr478py09jz1m

Monolake - Hongkong (1997)

2011-08-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

Hongkong
Style: Dub Techno / Ambient
Label: Chain Reaction

Following on from the re-issued version of Monolake's classic "Interstate' album, Robert Henke delves further back into his archives and at long last offers up the hugely sought-after 'Hong Kong', re-packaged, re-compiled and re-mastered from the original recordings. Hong Kong was first released back in 1997 and brought together some mighty 12" tracks that Henke recorded together with Gerhard Behles (who was at the time part of the project) for Basic Channel's Chain Reaction label. Following a trip to Hong Kong the pair captured several hours worth of field recordings and incorporated them into the album sequence, seeping in and out of the original versions. Because it's been unavailable for so many years it's been a good while since we've heard these tracks here - and it's such a pleasure to hear them again in all their deep, widescreen glory.

More sparse and less metallic than much of the material that would shape the Monolake sound in years to come, "Hong Kong' captures the late night city scape perfectly and evolves through lengthy sequences, with most of the tracks here clocking in at around or above the 10 minute mark. Of all the tracks here, 'Occam' is perhaps the most revered, with a classic Chain Reaction style dub-chord forming the spine of the track, and klangy, panning percussion providing the obligatory hypnosis. The album closes with the sublime "Mass Transit Railway", built around an extended field recording made on the Hong Kong subway, with harmonious pads and layered synths making for an emotive, heady close to an exceptional album. - BK

Next to the Basic Channel material, this is probably my favorite Chain Reaction LP. Narcotic dub techno that never ceases to amaze.

-320 kbs - Remastered Edition
http://www.mediafire.com/?xexvavgcb54hd9c

Steve Reich - Octet / Music for a Large Ensemble / Violin Phase (1980)

2011-08-01T12:13:00.001-07:00

Music for a Large Ensemble
Style: Classical Minimalism
Label: ECM

Have you ever repeated a word over and over again until it loses meaning? Cognitive science calls this “semantic satiation.” Now imagine that someone could do the same thing for instruments and you’ll have a clear idea of the power of a Steve Reich composition. In this selection of three longer examples, we get exactly that: an unraveling of music’s genetic code, transformed from within. It is for this more than any other reason that I’ve always been wary to use the word “minimal” in reference to Reich’s music, which is endlessly complex and never fails to engender new discoveries with every listen.

The instruments in Music For A Large Ensemble fit perfectly in a vast sequence of aural DNA, as logical as it is mystifying. Every voice is given ample breathing room in a piece that, while densely layered, is as airy and ordered as a puff of windblown dandelion. Strings waver with the unrelenting heat of a desert sun, horns ebb and flow in a brassy wash of equilibrium, and a vibraphone rings out like magic over all. Although the music moves mechanically, its feel is decidedly organic. This earthiness is maintained in the Violin Phase, which consists of a repeated motif that, as with all of Reich’s “phase” pieces, is knocked just slightly out of alignment by the doubling voice, like two turn signals rhythmically staggering and realigning. This is the most localized of Reich’s phases, clearly rooted as it is in the bluegrass fiddling tradition. The violin grinds like dirt or sand, small particles swirling and separating yet holding fast to some invisible predictability. After two such strikingly different pieces, the Octet somehow comes across as the most intimate. The inclusion of wind instruments, and in particular the clarinet and flute, adds a crystalline contrast in texture and melodic shifts, bringing us to a glorious and sudden silence.

Albums like this and Music for 18 Musicians will easily make one lose track of time. I am so often taken aback when this music ends, for it pulsates with such a robust sense of perpetual motion that its effect always seems to linger somewhere inside me. It is a tessellation in sound, each image shifting through time and space like an Escher print, so that what begins as a diamond ends up a bird in flight.

Naturally, the sheer precision required to play Reich’s music is a feat in and of itself. That such a synergistic cast of musicians could arise out of the work of one composer is by all turns spectacular, and when so lovingly recorded their cumulative effect is all the more heightened. This is music that finds its expansiveness internally, charting the endless waters of our biological oceans until we come to our beginnings anew. - ECM reviews

One of my favorite Reich recordings. Endlessly shifting waves of colorful sound.

-320 kbs-

http://www.mediafire.com/?hptmrpjx3t56t16

Akira Rabelais - Eisoptrophobia (2001)

2011-07-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

Eisoptrophobia
Style: Glitch / Piano / Ambient
Label: Mille Plateaux

An intellectual pioneer as much as anything else, Akira Rabelais issued forth musical creations and inventions from his perch at CalArts. Born and raised in South Texas, one of his childhood pastimes involved shooting metal plates with bb guns so that he could experience the unique sound that it caused. That fascination with sound, combined with a philosophical and literary bent (his favorite surreal and magical realist snippets of literature are on his website, www.akirarabelais.com) helped lay the path for the musical creations he has been issuing since 1990 -- he describes himself as a "composer writing software, not an engineer making music." The software that Rabelais made reference to in that quote, or at least the most famous among his inventions was the Argeïphontes Lyre. With functions like Eviscerator Reanimator, Time Domain Mutation, Morphological Disintegration, Verwechslung Kaffeetass and The Lobster Quadrille, the Lyre was a program that allowed the user to make a number of alterations to a piece of pre-recorded sound. The program quickly became a favorite of electronic music composers such as Terre Thaemitz and Scanner, who used it to create disorientating sound shifts. Rabelais' own cd, Elongated Pentagonal Pyramid (Ritornell, 1999) showed the stamp of the Lyre, with its multiple layers of gently wavering sound . Eisotrophobia followed in spring 2001. - AMG

Piano pieces by Satie, Bartok and Carte, manipulated and processed through the Argeiphontes Lyre to incredible effect.

http://www.mediafire.com/?htw41pg5i4iccwx

Shed - The Traveller (2010)

2011-07-26T11:59:00.001-07:00

The Traveller
Style: Minimal / Dub Techno
Label: Ostgut Ton

For such a well-respected artist, Rene Pawlowitz seems extraordinarily unfussy. While other producers tool around in the studio for hours trying to find the right tones and timbres, Pawlowitz says he just gets an idea in his head, sits down and executes it. His swift approach is not lost on the final product; listening to The Traveller you don't picture him second guessing himself very much, belaboring the placement of a snare or the curve of an envelope. Each song, though very intricate, is clear, concise and unembellished, doing just what it needs to do and then ending.

Intentional or not, The Traveller is a fitting title: the album never stays in one place for long. With most records, you reach a point a few tracks in where the artist has more or less revealed his hand, making what's to come, at least stylistically, fairly clear. Pawlowitz doesn't let this happen. In fact, for the first part of the album it's like he's deliberately faking out his audience: a heavy momentum gets going early with "Keep Time," the record's clubbiest song, then abruptly drops off with "The Bot," a slow, atmospheric piece with a syncopated beat that takes four minutes to kick in. Pawlowitz keeps up this non-linear narrative for the rest of the album, skipping through tempos, moods and time signatures without much issue, until eventually arriving at "Leave Things," a 160 BPM drum & bass indulgence.

At first pass the album might not sound as rich as Shedding the Past, Pawlowitz's excellent debut album from 2008, but really it's just a bit less flashy. That long player was packed with lush imagery and emotive chords, but The Traveller has more to offer in the way of subtle detail. That said, the record is by no means cold and emotionless: the title track provides a nice dose of soothing ambiance, "No Way!" breaks things up with its carefree, slightly delirious mood and "Atmo – Action" evokes the epic melancholy of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works. Then there's "44A (Hardwax Forever!)," the unabashed ode to Berlin's most well-loved record shop, whose euphoric arpeggios betray just how important the place really is to Shed.

In the three years or so since his last album, Pawlowitz has garnered a lot of acclaim for his WAX and EQD series, through which he releases expertly crafted club tracks. Listening to The Traveller, it seems like he used these channels to get all the bangers out of his system, leaving the more exploratory work to be done as Shed. The aforementioned club tunes are great, but Pawlowitz is most innovative within the open framework of the long-player—where WAX and EQD attempt to perfect an already established formula, Shed transcends the formulas altogether, and more so on his new album than ever before. He's gone on record saying he finds most techno today boring and too structurally rigid. On The Traveller, he presents a very convincing alternative. - Resident Advisor

Another brilliantly textured and paced album from Shed. Techno for the head.

http://www.mediafire.com/?zpfjp5w74z3pz82

Zomby - Dedication (2011)

2011-07-26T11:54:00.000-07:00

Dedication
Style: Electronic / Experimental
Label: 4AD

I want to say that Zomby's Dedication confounds expectations, but when "surprising" is par for the course, how does one deal with expectations? Dedication arrives not on previous homes Hyperdub or RAMP but indie mega 4AD. Nonetheless, it's similar to past material, a resumption of his penchant for cheekily brief tracks and hyperactive loops.

The titular Dedication is apparently aimed towards Zomby's deceased father, and the entire album carries a solemn and sepulchral quality previously unheard from Zomby. The tracks are unforgivingly excoriated of excessive detail or nuance, with many merely sounding like simple loops cycling and writhing in a predetermined path before fading away (particularly the seeming Salem send-ups of "Witch Hunt" and "Lucifer"). There's something starkly naked about these rawer textures, and even at their simplest Zomby's timbres are uncharacteristically and heartbreakingly funereal, especially the 8-bit cathedral survey "Black Orchid" or the staid, piano-driven "Basquait." Where previous work like "Godzilla" or "Gloop" felt like densely intertwined, mischievous snippets of arpeggio mayhem, here they're unwound and laid bare.

The result could have been an album so mournful as to lose itself in self-serious introspection, but Dedication's brief track lengths mean the album is breezy in a manner unbefitting of its ostensibly grave subject matter. As one track flows into the next—again a reversal of the usual Zomby ethos of all jarring, all the time—Dedication ceases to be a jittery collection of sketches. Even so, there are highlights: Pre-album single "Natalia's Song" chops up a Russian singer into alien intonations that feel like they're being ripped apart in mid-gasp. And lowlights: Panda Bear shows up to sing over "Things Fall Apart," an unnecessary cameo on top of the already distracting stray bits of synth shrapnel that break off from the beat.

Dedication also finally divorces Zomby from the dubstep-centered UK soundsystem culture, because while he might be indebted to 'ardkore, it's hard to find much of anything—except maybe the DMZ dread tones on the classical-tinged "A Devil Lay Here"—that even feels close to the hardcore continuum here. In fact, the only real predecessors you're likely to find are other Zomby records. Which says a lot about the kind of talent we're dealing with. Dedication on 4AD makes sense, because it's exactly the place where Zomby belongs right now. He's not a dance producer nor does he fit into any narrative aside from his own. With Dedication Zomby has crafted a deeply idiosyncratic work of art with all the flaws, eccentricities and moments of brilliance that come with such creative freedom. - Resident Advisor

Surprisingly dark and pensive new LP from one of the most interesting producers working today. Definitely a grower.

http://www.mediafire.com/?bv1qo722777vgf3

Snowman - Absence (2011)

2011-07-22T22:26:00.000-07:00

Absence
Style: Avant-Rock / Dream Pop / Psych
Label: Dot Dash

The last time we checked in with Snowman they were creating a mutated cacophony of jagged psychobilly guitars and colossal primordial drums that sounded born from some hellish gothic insane asylum. Their 2008 sophomore record The Horse, The Rat, and The Swan was a document of unrelenting tension and violent release. Over the giant tribal thudding with a darkly atmospheric reach, the vocals ranged from a Jim Reid croon to a Frank Black shriek, caught in blackly lit reverberation. If things weren’t collapsing into syncopated metallic guitar noise, it was biding its time behind a veil of quietly evil vocal harmonies, waiting to aurally destroy whatever prey it had set its sites on. The record was a near full sensory experience – the copper scent of blood an almost permeable part of the ride. The Horse went largely unnoticed by the larger indie landscape and the group has since disbanded.

Snowman moved from their home of Perth, Australia to London quickly following the release of The Horse and they did what hard working bands do: travel the continent and play show after show until you can’t anymore. The group’s third record, Absence, has reportedly been in the works since around the time of their immigration, and despite its posthumous 2011 release, it brings Snowman sharply back into focus as one of the most compelling experimental-psychedelic-whatever rock groups to have made a stand in the past ten or so years.

Absence takes on the ethereal and unconscious where its predecessor was immediate and visceral. The primeval mainstays are just as stolidly in place, if not more so, but things have receded into the distance, letting a starlit atmosphere take precedence. Vocally, no one really takes the lead, letting a myriad of voices waft together in an elemental amalgam of harmonized whispers and chants, joining an array of softly affected guitars and gigantically physical synthesizers. It’s no less powerful or earnest than previous material from this group. In a lot of ways Absence feels like the deeply troubled dream following The Horse‘s bloody massacre.

Snowman still manages to capture a palpable sense of tension, but here it exists beneath a more abstracted and obscured surface. One of the centerpieces, “Seance,” marches around an intricately scattered rhythm and a haunting, chiming almost-not-there melody that floats in to punctuate the imminent imprisonment of a pervading nightmare. The vocals seem to dance hand-in-hand around a solitary wavering flame – angelic voices whispering ghost stories and chanting dangerously untended desires. By the end, the whole track loses any ground on which to stand as the vocals and synths stretch out in lulling vertical waves as if to give in to bodily transcendence.

“Seance” is followed by “A.” The instrumental, based around a repeating synth sequence and a bent descending piano melody, gives voice to another ceaseless aspect of Absence. Snowman is still invested in tribal percussion dynamics, but here the drums don’t so much pound as they malevolently gestate, building toward an abrasive crescendo that never quite arrives. “Hyena” rides along a chopsticks-on-jars sounding rhythm while a piano exhales solitary notes at odd intervals and the group chants “hyena” in various syllabic exaggerations. The drums are as textural in some cases as the vocals or guitars. The more detailed percussive flourishes find their way into the corners of the sound while the deep thrum of the toms remain the most immediate part of the whole record.

“A” is followed by standout “Memory Lost,” which might be the only track where one solitary voice takes the vocal reigns. It is an oddity, though not unwelcome, to find Snowman completely changing gears in the vocal department after the scream/sing dynamic on The Horse helped them create even more distinction for themselves. But Absence makes it pretty clear Snowman is (or was) a group who approaches a record as a whole and there’s obviously a conscious sonic thesis at work. On “Memory Lost” the ghostly falsetto is drenched in gobs of reverb. Initially, it quavers softly as the menacing drum and bass steadily climb, but by the time the determinable beat has dropped out, the beautiful high-pitched croon is gliding right alongside the mountainous synths.

It’s really a shame knowing this is Snowman’s swan song. They were never a group that managed any type of indie-wide anticipation, remaining tangled in the categorical sub-sub-indie culture of “experimental rock” (which people seem to have a declining patience for in 2011). They were easily one of the most matured and consistently captivating rock groups to pass us by, and Absence ends their short run on a very high note. - 130BPM

Creepy and enveloping choral psychedelia with tribal drumming... akin to the Liars' dreamier moments, or maybe This Heat. One of the standouts of the year so far for me.

http://www.mediafire.com/?fs93m3naibmzsja

Ulrich Schnauss - A Strangely Isolated Place (2003)

2011-07-22T22:16:00.000-07:00

A Strangely Isolated Place
Style: Shoegaze / Electronic
Label: Domino

Ulrich Schnauss's A Strangely Isolated Place was released in Europe during May of 2003, but fans had to wait over a year for it to arrive on these shores. The Berliner's follow-up to Far Away Trains Passing By is another gentle and fascinating record, similarly drunk with melody. Schnauss has augmented his electro-synth sound with tsunamis of huge, arching major chords that rival M83's over-the-top lushness. Shoegazer influences show up in the Slowdive-esque "Gone Forever," as well as the My Bloody Valentine buzz in "Clear Day". Despite Place's ethereal sheen, the bones of solid dance-ability are also here, as several clever DJs have already noted (see Sasha's use of "On My Own" for Involver). The record could use a few well-placed batches of noise to act as counterpoint, but long-suffering fans of early Cocteau Twins looking for a fix of dreamy songcraft should find much to love. --Matthew Cooke

One of the best shoegaze records of the last decade. Falls somewhere between M83, Seefeel, Boards of Canada, and MBV in terms of overall sound, but Schnauss's take on the genre is unique and quite refreshing for jaded ears. Essential late night listening.

http://www.mediafire.com/?3njkwrg0jjvy385

The Hospitals - Hairdryer Peace (2009)

2011-07-19T07:19:00.001-07:00

Hairdryer Peace
Style: Noise / Psych / Garage Rock
Label: Meds

Whenever the underground coughs up an album that pushes the boundaries of how truly deranged rock music can actually be, the battle lines between "genius" and "unlistenable" are immediately drawn. White Light/White Heat, Half Machine Lips Move, Twin Infinitives, The Wigmaker In Eighteenth Century Williamsburg – they all have legions of haters among the handful of listeners that claim they can actually sit through the entire album. Sure, "noise rock" may have become a household term in the indie press and blogosphere of the aughties, and yes, industrial and harsh noise artists have regularly explored the extremities of music's dark side since the '70s. But there's still room in my record collection for a mindfuck, and San Francisco duo The Hospitals deliver it unapologetically with their third full-length, Hairdryer Peace.

In the three years since their last release, I've Visited the Island of Jocks and Jazz, drummer/vocalist Adam Stonehouse and guitarist Rod Meyer have dismantled what resemblance they had to a garage rock band, replacing somewhat stable riffs with cut-and-paste tape techniques and dumptruck noise aesthetics. The appearance of song structure was obscured by distortion and amplifier hiss before, but Stonehouse and Co. (expanded here to include contributions from Chris Gunn and Rob Enbom) have amped the disorientation levels to the max, leaving traces of bedroom tunes to gasp for air beneath a wash of static and squalor. The fidelity nosedives into nightmarish psychedelia at the hands of Stonehouse, who recorded and spliced the tracks with sadistic intent. It may sound like a trainwreck, but it's definitely premeditated.

Though the murky production renders the instrumentation downright unrecognizable at times, Stonehouse's lyrics emerge clearer than they've ever been. It's still a challenge to decipher a hefty portion of the vocals, which sound like a mix between Jennifer Herrerma's junkie drawl and Tom Smith's maniacal yelps, but Stonehouse's lines shine throughout. Hairdryer Peace's sentiments are best conveyed through the band's tribute to vertigo, "BPPV," as Stonehouse howls among the sweeping feedback, "I feel dizzy / I feel stoked." His confession is immediately followed by a woozy cymbal crash, abandoning the rhythm like the aural simulation of a faceplant.

"Animals Act Natural" is the record's rock anthem, building from Meyer's haphazard guitar riff that inevitably gets lost among the clutter. Stonehouse's voice emerges from the mess unaccompanied about halfway through to slur: "They make it look easy / animals act natural. / It's all been so hard (fun??) for me." The terror then descends like a shrieking tilt-a-whirl in a low-budget horror film; the potential soundtrack to a Rob Zombie remake of Cannibal Holocaust. Ceaselessly unsettling though it is, Hairdryer Peace is completely successful for moments like these, when the ever-present uneasiness suddenly collapses on itself in a fit of catharsis.

Along with fellow lo-fi demolitionists Sic Alps (of which Stonehouse was an original member), the San Fran scene is currently pumping out some of the most disorderly, analog-oriented psychedelia on the market; which makes sense, considering the city's lysergic history. These aren't your daddy's paisley-painted simulations though - the subterranean tape enthusiasts make no compromises for accessibility, and they sold their rose-colored glasses for smack a long time ago. Like-minded trash rockers in Columbus, like Times New Viking and Psychedelic Horseshit, may be making their own headway in no-frills overload, but if you want to talk sheer rock and roll deconstruction and hallucinatory innovation, the conversation stops with The Hospitals and their Bay Area contemporaries.

Underground classic, unlistenable mess - it all depends on whom you ask. But one thing's for sure: Hairdryer Peace has set the new benchmark for aural insanity, creating one of the most brilliantly demented records in some time. - Dusted

This record will eat your brain and spit it back out.

http://www.mediafire.com/?dk441fxkmfjnedl

Zs - New Slaves (2010)

2011-07-18T22:20:00.002-07:00

New Slaves
Style: Avant-Garde / Experimental / Noise
Label: The Social Registry

Who in our teeming modern underground can honestly claim to make a joyful noise? It’s a shame that so many listeners are turning their backs on genuinely experimental music, because on their way to the neon beach, they will most likely miss out on Zs, a group dealing in some ferocious pleasures if you’ll give them the time of day.

I first came across Zs in 2002, back when they were a double trio. At that point, the academy still held obvious sway over the group: their lineup consisted of two identically matched groups of tenor sax, electric guitar and drums, set up mirroring each other in a line, separated by music stands. The image called to mind some kind of antagonistic face off, but, in their simple uniforms of dark blue shirts and pants, also gave them an aura of factory precision. The music sure as hell was precise, with each member darting around the others in a high-wire act that few rock bands could even imagine, no less execute.

Since that time, the group has cut its size down to half, but the music has grown by leaps and bounds. Whereas Zs once spoke a specific, specialized language, on New Slaves they find themselves in the primordial waters of sound. Replacing constant change with a brutal reading of minimalism, they repurpose each musical component (melody, rhythm etc…) into blocks, building imposing Rothko-like masses and holding them longer than most would dare. The effect is a strange, frantic stillness, everything moving and nothing much happening. It’s a trick that dates back at least to the 1960s, but their application of it feels new, or at least unique.

Opening track "Concert Black" gets things going with some genuine fanfare, the guitar suggesting church bells and (I presume) saxophonist Sam Hilmer electronically tweaking his horn to resemble swelling strings. The music is joyful, but it’s definitely noisy, too. Zs bear down on you quite hard, turning harmonious chimes into distorted clangs, turning pulsing backbeat into a shuddering wave, but it’s not exactly a power move. Surrender to their vibe and suddenly their music reveals itself to be wonderfully enveloping, swinging and full of life. Seamlessly transitioning into the industrial romp of "Acres of Skin," these opening tracks work as an introduction to Zs’ world, suggesting what lies ahead while also perhaps weeding out the less-game listeners.

A series of solo pieces follow, which some might find less essential than the full group work. Personally, I’m not sure how necessary the squealing drones of "Gentleman Amateur" are, although there is a humorous side to its caveman-stomp drums, all but inaudible beneath the roar. Overall, this middle section seems to flesh out the component parts of the group’s language, allowing for some individual clarification outside of the higher-stakes ensemble writing. "Masonry," in particular, stands out, not only for its mellow relief from the stormier waters that had preceded, but also for its weird, jazzy flecks tossed around in an otherwise airy haze.

Still, I was psyched to arrive at the title track, a 20-minute frenzy of stilted rhythms, proggy asides, phase patterned percussion and harmonized, primal-scream-therapy screed. Sounding like an industrial strength Master Musicians of Jajouka, Zs burn through the track as though performing an exorcism. Like fellow travelers Orthrelm, they take rock instruments and rock dynamics and turn them into something far-removed from that world’s boozy party, something transformative. "New Slaves" eats the listener, its formations evoking mastication, or perhaps that startling, panicked feeling from one’s youth when a wave at the beach swept you under. Playing by their own rules, Zs demand that you stick with unforgiving sounds longer than might be comfortable, yet at the end, after all the brutality, the feeling is one of looseness and freedom. Their battery serves not to pummel but to uplift, not to degrade but to rejoice.

All that said, it was very kind and considerate of them to offer up a dessert of sorts, or perhaps a downer, in the form of the two closing "Black Crown Ceremony" tracks. Now whispering, the group shifts the hues from sun-blinded to a muted gray, with tape collage, background sounds and an overarching creaking, moody ambience. There are even clips of conversation from what sounds like a police drama interspersed. It’s a welcome change and much calmer point of exit, while at the same time throwing the heavier fare in a different light. The unease and discomfort that Zs spun into gleaming gold is in abundance, but without the forceful delivery, it now simply sits still.

Ending so ambiguously, rather than on a classic, cymbals-crashing finale may mean forgoing a little bombast, but it rings true. What is a new slave? Does the language we’ve inherited speak to the fullness of our lives, or must we fashion our own? How much emancipation can a record truly offer us? Zs’ music may be joyful, but it is full of questions, too. It is the power of their incandescent playing that shines through, though, as gleaming and white-hot as it is unruly and sharp. - Dusted

Took me a while to really appreciate this one, but it's worth the effort. Beauty through ugliness.

http://www.mediafire.com/?a1wn8qhh6hk0c84

MoHa! - One Way Ticket to Candyland (2008)

2011-07-18T20:05:00.001-07:00

One Way Ticket to Candyland
Style: Noise Rock / Skronk / Improv
Label: Rune Grammofon

Following up the dense mesh of noise improv, outrageous electronics, angry rock rhythms, and occasional ambient relief of Norwegianism (Rune Grammofon, 2007), Norwegian duo MoHa! shifts gears on the more structured One Way Ticket to Candyland.

Anders Hana and Morten J. Olsen—who, between the two of them, create a joyous noise on conventional instruments like guitar, keyboards, and drums but take them to sonic extremes with all manner of electronic manipulation—may have created music with some basis in form this time, but it's still not for the faint-at-heart. The irregularly metered, hypnotically repeated techno beat of "Sopp Pa Kugen" even sports a primitive melody, but everything suddenly stops and a more spacious—but still industrial sounding—collage of textures takes over, with the duo heading into more open-ended improvisational territory. It's not exactly calming, but it is a respite from some of One-Way Ticket to Candyland's more relentless aural assaults.

Still, as a more considered alternative to Norwegianism's reckless abandon, tracks like "Prog-o-Rama" demonstrate just how far a concept can be taken. A complex confluence of rhythm, staggered melody, and extravagant sounds—even coalescing, briefly, around something resembling the theme to the 1960s Batman television show—progressive rock may be a part of MoHa!'s DNA, but it's been filtered through such a thick lens that it's barely recognizable, even to the hardest of the hardcore. "Aids of Space" even resolves into a four-on-the-floor pulse, but Olsen's turbulent drumming and the duo's overall harsh soundscapes turn even the most form-based tracks into visceral, near-cathartic experiences.

Prismatically refracting sound through electronic devices means that even if there are distinct rhythms, melodies, and structured sections, there remains a pervasive sense of adventure—danger, even—throughout One Way Ticket to Candyland's relatively short 37 minutes. Hana and Olsen's control of the mad scientist-like laboratory they use to shape these nine pieces—almost all longer than the 16 brief, improvised miniatures on Norwegianism—makes certain that, despite no shortage of unpredictability, One Way Ticket to Candyland feels more cogent than its predecessor.

The tracks don't actually segue into one another, but listening to the album in its entirety—truly the only way to really experience it—feels otherwise. MoHa!'s music evokes the rawest, roughest of emotions. Even it's at its sparest, One-Way Ticket to Candyland is a harrowing experience that's not for everyday listening. Still, its unfettered imagination, sonic experimentation, and skewing of recognizable constructs into something new makes it an album that doesn't just bear repeated listens, it commands them. - AAJ

http://www.mediafire.com/?t6d9u3qc28wz77d

Zu - Carboniferous (2009)

2011-07-18T19:46:00.000-07:00

Carboniferous
Style: Noise / Math / Doom
Label: Ipecac

Mongrel means one of mixed ancestry. Usually used in reference to canines, the word describes those whose parentage is unknown and who lack traits specific to one single breed. Instead, a melange of genetic influences create a creature who typically displays what is known as hybrid vigor, the opposite of the classic problem of pure-breed genetic defects, such as hip dysplasia. There is certainly the possibility that a hybrid will inherit mostly undesirable traits from its parents -- known as outbreeding depression -- but it is more likely that the mongrel will show traits consistent with outbreeding enhancement, taking desirable traits from the parents and producing a more robust and long-lasting creature.

Enter Zu, a Roman jazz trio who are poised to pickup steam as one of the most notable purveyors of mongrel jazz since Sun City Girls. The trio often combine lurching and debilitating sludge (bassist Massimo Pupillo), ecstatic squawking (alto/baritone saxophonist Luca T. Mai), and crazed drumming (Jacopo Battiglia) with ease and finesse, the output defying its antecedents. Indeed, even if we knew who Zu’s parents were (Last Exit? James Chance? Can? John Zorn?), it probably wouldn’t help us explain what we find on Carboniferous, the group's 14th album.

Zu have always employed improvisation as a means more than an end, but their collaborations have also become a signature aspect of their output, with each successive album more or less defined by a guest musician: Fred Lonberg-Holm (Chicago free jazz heavyweight on cello) created highly aggressive textures befitting of Zu’s penchant for dropping metal’s bombast into the crazed melee of improv jazz on The Way of the Animal Powers; saxophonist Mats Gustafsson helped create a visceral dual sax sound that bludgeoned listeners on How to Raise an Ox; and veritable Japanese artist Nobukazu Takemura added brooding electronic textures on Identification with the Enemy. The tension could be found in the wild outbursts of improv that would obliterate the structures, certainly a long way from their album of cover songs done alongside Eugene Chadbourne (an outing fit for fans of the truly bizarre).

This time around, they work so well with collaborators Mike Patton (Mr. Bungle, Fantomas) and King Buzzo (the Melvins) that you have to wonder if Zu really deserves to be called a trio, given that they are so often working (and working well) outside of a triangular space. Patton owns Ipecac (on which this album is released), toured with Zu pretty much all last year, and curated the 2008 ATP, where the band happened to perform. It seems to be a beneficial relationship, to say the least.

Despite the title referring to a period of glaciation (perhaps signifying slow-moving sounds and loose structure), Zu surprise their fans with an even more metal sound. A relentlessly heavy groove steers them along from strict free-jazz and avant-meandering into a world of reed-swamped, one-speed swamp buggy mud-bogging. That’s granny gear knee-deep in the sludge, and Zu is the monster truck of the jazz world. Rather than stringing together a litany of genres, this album takes big and little pieces of the heaviest shit out there and shoves it in a sack so tight that, when they pull it out, you’d think Mary Poppins was pulling these riffs out of her bottomless carpet bag.

"Orc," the album's closing track, is on the rhythm-less side of the scale, devoid of groove, but it works as a deflation after the pulse-pounding headache delivery that precedes it. There is no room for uneasy wiggling during this record: either you full-on accept the throbbing or you simply turn it off. There are only a few moments of noodling or contemplation to breakup what is otherwise good old-fashioned rocking-the-fuck-out, the kind of intensity that will simply be too much for weak listeners. The true insight here is that Zu’s prowess is growing and can't go unnoticed for much longer, especially with this caliber of material and their continual desire to try new things. - TMT

I haven't posted any heavy music for a while. Time to change that. This album is heavier than the mountain on its cover.

http://www.mediafire.com/?spbwdu4gjagnmsj

Emeralds - Solar Bridge (2008)

2011-07-18T19:18:00.000-07:00

Solar Bridge
Style: Drone / Kosmische
Label: Hanson

As those in attendance at this year’s No Fun Fest can attest to, the fresh-faced Ohio trio of Emeralds is one of the most exciting and refreshing things to come out of the post-millennial Midwest drone/noise scene. Their Saturday night performance in New York stood out amongst a flurry of acts, and though sets from Giffoni, Whitman, Demons, and Cluster were all synth-centric, no one’s sawtooths, sines, and other various waveforms were so beautifully sculpted and beamed out into the Plejades as Emeralds’. Even Cluster would by night’s end have been smoked at the very game they created.

Released on Aaron Dilloway’s Hanson imprint, Solar Bridge is Emeralds’ first “proper” release, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s the only thing they’ve put out. Like many of their Midwestern ilk, they have accrued a treasure trove of limited-edition tapes, CD-Rs, and a few split LPs that typically go as far as anything on Solar Bridge at capturing their spiritually moving live performances. Older releases like Allegory of Allergies and the comically titled Bullshit Boring Drone Band showcase a band that seemingly never had the need to evolve, as even these early entries into their discography showcase an innate sophistication, uncanny considering their youth. Other gems like Vaporizer and Dirt Weed Diaries show a penchant for heroic doses of perhaps the most important ingredient to the Emeralds’ alchemic brew, and while other local stoners may go for the full-on horror-tronics schlock, Emeralds take the gaseous creep of Detroit’s Hive Mind out of the sinkhole and send it deep into the cosmos, while musically narrating an obsession with the striving for and attainment of beauty and perfection shared by fellow Ohioan Burning Star Core.

Having played together since 2005, Emeralds currently employ the synth and guitar arrangement originally utilized by several of the boys’ German kosmische influences. On Solar Bridge, the tonal suspensions of Marc McGuire’s guitar works in symbiosis with the minuscule manipulations of John Elliot and Steve Hauschildt, who work their mojo on two hulking vintage analog synths, a Korg, and a Moog, respectively. Their interplay and mastery over their instruments bring to mind those graduates of the Berlin School of Electronic Music like Ash Ra Temple and Popol Vuh whose lush arrangements evoked something cold and robotic but still strongly humanistic.

Soaring sounds and eternally unfolding crescendos show a group who, like their older Berlin brethren, are always striving for new heights. This is evident on first track “Magic,” which opens the album like a gently blooming lotus. As a swath of sawtooth fills your head to its utmost cranial capacity, the gushing sonic warm tones massage your frontal lobe. By track’s end, you’ll probably find yourself needing a dribble cup, and don’t be too surprised if you’re levitating three inches above the ground. Where Ash Ra guitarist Manuel Gottsching and Popol Vuh slinger Conny Veit did their fair share of noodling, McGuire doesn’t really “play” the guitar in any standard sense, but rather diverts single sustained e-bowed notes into an f/x factory, softly shifting tonal modalities, more in line with the very early Ash Ra or Eruption jams than anything on Hosianna Mantra. Even the two “side long” jams (yes, I know it’s a CD) are apropos, as this format is reminiscent of the old kraut/kosmische records of yore from amazing labels like Ohr and Brain.

Like “Magic,” “The Quaking Mess” displays a masterful sense of control and restrained power. The flow never seems to gets away from Emeralds, as they consistently toe the line between subliminal ambience and direct sound-brain interaction. More cohesive and ordered than its title would suggest, “The Quaking Mess” has all the distant howls of exploding nebulae heard on Klaus Schulze masterpieces like Timewind or Irrlicht, while its high-pitched frequency arpeggiations and sequencing will have you thinking you’re hearing pan pipes from a Peruvian ayahuasca ritual.

I was tempted to give Solar Bridge a 5/5 rating, but with two pieces clocking in at 28 minutes, it’s almost criminally too short (especially considering that other, less available releases, like the Allegory of Allergies cassette, ran for 120 minutes). But it also reflects my hope that Emeralds will somehow find a way to improve their sound over the course of their still nascent existence. For now, we’ll just have to wait, and if Solar Bridge is not enough to whet your appetite, there is more on the horizon, as well as a back catalog just waiting to be discovered by loyal drone-heads worldwide. - TMT

DDDDDDDDRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNEEEEEEE

http://www.mediafire.com/?lu19o478jhswe5t

Maurizio - M-Series (1997)

2011-07-15T10:01:00.000-07:00

M-Series
Style: Dub Techno / Minimal
Label: M

Maurizio is the operating name of Moritz Von Oswald, the Berlin-based musician and entrepreneur who owns a half-share in Basic Channel Records and co-produced the label's various releases, a wildly influential series of fuzzy EPs with purposefully low production values recorded under the aliases Cyrus, Quadrant, Phylyps, and Radiance. Von Oswald reserved his solo work for the Basic Channel sublabel M, which issued a half-dozen Maurizio EPs during the mid-'90s. Understandably, the Maurizio sound is quite similar to Basic Channel's, though Von Oswald is often more taken with pounding dub basslines and a somewhat cleaner production style, which gives his EPs a better chance on dancefloors.

Concentrating on volumes four through seven in the M Records series, Maurizio collects edits of seven tracks, adding one original 12" mix and one unreleased mix. Each of the nine tracks layer heavy dub effects and synthwork over midtempo house rhythms with plenty of echo and reverb. Besides its necessity for collectors due to the unreleased track, the disc is also the best place to start for those unable or unwilling to use a turntable. Given the fact that the originals are so long and basically unchanging, the edits occasionally work better than the originals, although they aren't the versions that a vinyl-phile like Maurizio necessarily wanted listeners to hear. - AMG

Classic compilation of Moritz' hypnotic dub-tech wizardry. Just as influential as BCD.

-320 kbs-
http://www.mediafire.com/?abgh9xmrk4lr782

Fluxion - Vibrant Forms (1999)

2011-07-15T09:56:00.001-07:00

Vibrant Forms
Style: Dub Techno / Ambient
Label: Chain Reaction

Similar to many of the other artists surrounding the Hardwax-affiliated record labels in Berlin, the Greek artist known as Fluxion (Konstantinos Soublis) shrouded himself in anonymity despite releasing a handful of wonderful downtempo experimental techno releases on the Chain Reaction label. Epic in scope with a bit of the clicks + cuts approach synonymous with artists such as Vladislav Delay, much of Fluxion's best Chain Reaction work was compiled on two Vibrant Forms albums. He went silent for a few years but resurfaced with a somewhat bolder approach on 2009-2010 releases through Resopal and Echocord.
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A full-length album compiling Fluxion's first two Chain Reaction EPs -- Lark and Largo -- Vibrant Forms is a showcase for the artist's elegant application of the classic Basic Channel sound. Like those early-'90s releases, and also like the Maurizio and Vainqueur records, the tracks compiled on Vibrant Forms sound as if they are hollow; Fluxion emphasizes low dub basslines, the crackling of sparse high-hat loops, and nearly inaudible synth washes that ambiently hover in each song's exterior, leaving almost nothing in between. - AMG

A masterpiece of empty space. Recommended for fans of Wolfgang Voigt's GAS project.

-320 kbs-
http://www.mediafire.com/?bmejgafv87cd66s

Deadbeat - Radio Rothko (2010)

2011-07-11T18:15:00.000-07:00

Radio Rothko
Style: Dub Techno
Label: Agriculture

Dub-techno is a strange beast. Its dogmatic reduction to the simplest of elements, and the massage and manipulation thereof, is capable of inhspiring obsession among the Hard Wax pilgrims while leaving many cold. Its influence, however, is undeniable and more pronounced than ever with recent dialogues between dubstep and techno in the work of Scuba, xxxy, 2562 and the rest shaping some of the more interesting recent developments in electronic music. The perfect time then, for Montreal’s Deadbeat to provide a mix CD overview of the genre; to showcase its pioneers as well as its contemporary permutations.

As testament to the sound’s minimalist imperative, Radio Rothko begins in low key fashion with Deadbeat’s own ‘As We Conquer’ and Deepchord’s ‘Grandbend’ layering wisps of ambient sound with refracted synths as cold and translucent as frost on metal. Fittingly, it’s Basic Channel’s ‘Quadrant Dub’ that locks the groove in place, those vacillating keys and cavernous reverb – so evocative of Berlin’s empty spaces – going on to form the basic vocabulary for every record on here.

The fact that from these building blocks arise radically different interpretations is testament to the genre’s propensity towards renewal. Deadbeat has created a web of subtle mood shifts, from the metallic drum rolls of Marco Furstenburg’s ‘Site 312’ which seep into the rolling minimalism of Monolake’s ‘Static’, to the way the mix’s hypnotic ebb and flow is stemmed by 2562’s ‘Redux’.

Here that record’s crawling, stepping pace cleaves away any residual clutter of techno’s driving imperative by providing a moment of stasis, allowing the sparse clicks and chords to swim in its echo chamber. It also marks the beginning of one of Radio Rothko’s best sections, followed by the industrialised abstraction of Monolake’s ‘Sepia’ before culminating in the unreconstructed dub-reggae licks of Rhythm & Sound’s ‘Mango Drive’.

Listening to this CD, you get the impression that Deadbeat is going to great effort to craft a mix that feels dynamic in response to the almost dry, historical import that has since been loaded onto dub-techno. A sort of proof that the genre needn’t be fenced off by purists, that its immediacy shouldn’t be dulled by its opacity and depth.

The choice to end the mix with the straightforward, red-eyed Berghain whoop and punch of Deadbeat’s ‘Deep Structure’ re-establishes Rothko’s forward momentum, suggesting dub-techno’s course is long from exhausted and that its continual impact is rooted in its relevance to the here and now. - FACT

Flawlessly sequenced digital dub-worlds. Subwoofer required.

-320 kbs- (link fixed - track 15 now included!)

http://www.mediafire.com/?8yys8gat7tcomgc

Graham Lambkin - Softly Softly Copy Copy (2009)

2011-07-10T00:43:00.000-07:00

Softly Softly Copy Copy
Style: Collage / Musique Concrete
Label: Kye

Water flows all over Graham Lambkin’s Softly Softly Copy Copy. It’s the star of the album’s first track, and part of the supporting cast in the second, and remains one of the most clearly recognizable sounds within Lambkin’s mélange. In his collages, Lambkin obfuscates the ordinary and magnifies the incidental, creating new contexts with the sounds that surround him. Softly Softly Copy Copy may be all about symmetry in its title and organization (each of the two tracks runs exactly 20 minutes and 40 seconds), but the music lacks such obviously logical order. Birds intermingle with violins, and water is interrupted by a dam of electroacoustic gristle. You can never be sure what you’ll hear next, much less why you’re hearing it.

Lambkin’s use of environmental and animal sounds projects a back porch vibe, and though all the sounds weren’t collected in his upstate New York environs, it’s easy to imagine much of the disc as a documentation of Lambkin’s surroundings. Meditative moments feature calling birds, a bubbling stream, and wind chimes in the distance. Menace makes its appearances, too, whether in the form of a huffing, growling animal or the noisy ambience that Lambkin introduces into his menagerie. His sound sources were disparate in original location, but in Softly Softly Copy Copy‘s final mix, the whole spectrum seems to exist in a single setting. The more abstract ingredients, whether the mangling of tape, manipulation of microphone, or natural sounds recast in new light, both accompany the domestic and obliterate it outright. The incorporation of this wide array follows an erratic path, and while specific sound combinations and evolutions make sense, the larger trajectories of the album’s two tracks can be confusing. Intrusions can feel as brash as a bulldozer through a backyard, or a draft through an old window frame. As a whole, Lambkin’s lo-fi collage sounds more concerned with compilation than cohesion. This makes for some compelling and surprising music, as well as intermittent frustration.

Samara Lubelski’s somber violin opens the album’s second track, with various sounds packed into the spaces between the strokes of the bow. There’s little timbral or thematic continuity between the accompaniments, but the violin keeps things cohesively afloat. Softly Softly Copy Copy could use a bit more of such glue for the sake of the album’s unity. This disc puts the listener in some interesting spaces, and blurs the lines nicely between the familiar and mysterious, which makes the inscrutable arrangements on the disc all the more irksome when they arrive. The entire disc is steered via Lambkin’s enigmatic musical compass, and if one can resist the urge to play backseat navigator, the route is a fascinating one. - Dusted

Bewitching sonic surrealism.

http://www.mediafire.com/?avwrq27d3gpi3at

Peter Broderick - Float (2008)

2011-07-10T00:39:00.000-07:00

Float
Style: Ambient / Modern Classical
Label: Type

Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, multi-instrumentist Peter Broderick moved to Copenhagen in the second half of last year when Danish folksters extraordinaire Efterklang invited him to join their touring caravan following the release of their excellent Parades. Not one to miss a golden opportunity, Broderick dropped everything and took his quarters in the Danish capital, and has spent the last six months criss-crossing Europe as part of the band as well as alternating opening slots with Danish singer Anna Brønsted, aka Our Broken Garden.

Following Broderick’s debut single, released on Type last year, and a limited edition mini album of solo piano works, Docile, released last November on Swedish imprint Kning Disk, Float collects ten compositions which expands on the delicate pieces of Docile to incorporate voluptuous orchestral swathes and other instrumental textures. While Broderick only studied the violin during his formative years, he actually plays a wide variety of instruments, including piano, guitar, cello, celeste, drums, Theremin and musical saw, which allows him to give his music great depth and rich overtones. Broderick’s music shares with that of Max Richter, Sylvain Chauveau or Jóhann Jóhannsson a taste for melancholic flourishes and added textures, but the particular cinematic aspect of the music on offer here also brings to mind the work of Michael Nyman or, as on the beautiful opening piece A Snowflake, Yann Tiersen.

All the way through, Broderick crafts discreet recurring themes which come in and out of focus and occasionally echo from one piece to another. This gives the album a particular resonance and contributes to the overall mood of the record by linking the complete work in a traditional classical fashion. This process is perhaps best illustrated with the melancholic drapes and delicate piano drizzle of Something Has Changed, which are found again on closing piece A Beginning interpreted in a different form, or as Broderick reuses the elegant motif heard first on A Snowflake given a different sheen on the short and delicate A Simple Reminder.

On Another Glacier, Broderick adds to the soft instrumental brushes and crystal clear melodies found on the rest of the album by applying a gentle vocal layer. Indeed, while, so far, his releases have been pretty much exclusively instrumental, the man regularly performs songs on stage, and, as he hinted in a recent interview with this website, his next album is set to feature more vocal tracks. Here though, the voice appears as little more than a gossamer breeze over the music.

With this debut album, Peter Broderick has produced a truly enduring and beautiful record, full of substance and dramatic moments. Float very much delivers on the promises of Docile and is undoubtedly the first major step in this musician’s very long journey ahead. - TMF

Melancholic drift in a hazy space...

http://www.mediafire.com/?bompdoym748h3p2

Rafael Anton Irisarri - Daydreaming (2007)

2011-07-10T00:32:00.001-07:00

Daydreaming
Style: Ambient / Modern Classical
Label: Miasmah

Since Norwegian duo Deaf Center deployed their voluptuous blend of Gothic electronica back in 2004, there has been a pretty regular stream of associated releases related to Erik Skodvin, from his solo project (Svarte Greiner) to that of Miasmah, the imprint he set up (Greg Haines, Encre). Sound artist Rafael Anton Irisarri hails from Seattle, where he curates the Kupei Musika imprint. He has released minimal electronica as Luken, but this is his first album under his own name, and here, he explores radically different forms of music.

On Daydreaming, Irisarri paints incredibly subtle impressionist vignettes with sparse touches of piano and electronics. Each piece casts a particular light upon this effortlessly elegant suite, making it a beautiful and captivating record.

Unlike the claustrophobic formations found on Skodvin’s output as Svarte Greiner or the haunting spaces of Greg Haines’s recent Slumber Tides, Irisarri relies on gossamer drapes and carves wonderfully light and airy pieces. Traces of Brian Eno and Harold Budd are welcomed signposts in landscapes otherwise shrouded in fog. Waking Expectations, which opens, is a delicate reflective piece led by an omnipresent piano over which melancholic sound waves come crashing. When a guitar softly rains on the melody of A Thousand-Yard Stare, there is an echo of Budd’s collaboration with the Cocteau Twins. While treated sound debris cloud the opening moments of Wither, they are pushed aside by a particularly pure and sharp piano line. On Lumberton, Irisarri intensifies for a moment his execution for this surprisingly romantic piece, yet, here again, strips of Guthrie-esque guitar ornate the delicate melody until it fades away.

The piano is once again at the heart of Voigt-Kampf, but this time, in treated form. Lengthened and soften, each note becomes ethereal swathe, caught in a gentle breeze like a thought in a dream. Fractal displays a more ambitious series of soundscapes, with layers of fuzz and distortions slowly laid down over a muffled heartbeat-like rhythmic marker. Although the mood of the entire record lends itself to daydreaming, the title is especially relevant to these two particular tracks. Irisarri concludes with the haunting and contemplative A Glimpse.

Daydreaming is a haunting collection of stunning dreamscapes which not only allows for the mind to wander, but actively stimulates mental illusions and emotional attachment. Here, Irisarri assembles an incredibly consistent series of particularly elaborate and evocative ambient pieces which are likely to captivate for years to come. - TMF

http://www.mediafire.com/?8k3dpi6wgd8837l

Gui Boratto - Chromophobia (2007)

2011-07-10T00:26:00.001-07:00

Chromophobia
Style: Minimal Techno
Label: Kompakt

If the title of Gui Boratto's debut full-length isn't intended to be farcical, it would be reasonable to assume that the 33-year Sao Pãolo native has either confronted his Pantone demons and emerged unscathed or been the recipient of a chromatic intervention. Chromophobia is not so much conflicted by shades and hues as it is positively seething with them, a spiral dance of cascading colors given musical voice by a multitude of mouths. The vividness of Boratto's music tempts the listener to envy the 35mm camera, with its ability to capture and contain frozen moments of electromagnetic radiation. But on Chromophobia, there is no pausing for still shots—it's a continuous pan across thickly-clustered see-sawing melodies, impudently dynamic synth tones and subtle drum loops that are shifted, rearranged and altered incessantly. This is the sound of fractious textures being sensually woven into a tapestry of almost inspirational complexity, stubbornly insisting on a delicate balance of light and dark, transparent and opaque, yellow and magenta and cyan, oh my! It is the sound of mounting the sunset and dancing amongst stars, the very instant when lightning is electrically converted into life and Dr. Frankenstein shouts his two most infamous words.

The inability of most people to perceive this in Boratto's music can be understood, if not forgiven. Electronic music has always had the barrier of archaic (at least twenty years old or older is archaic by now) psychological resistance against it—electric guitars are “warm” and “human” but oscillating waveforms are just “cold,” man. The facts that the force driving both instruments can be measured in amperes and that both sound-generating devices would be impossible without mechanical and electrical engineering don't tend to disturb the burden of this prejudice. But for those without contempt for sine and sawtooth waves, rejoice! The long dark night of the soul has ended. Let there be light!

And what a light it is...a billion streaming ions of florid, penetrating lucidity—opener “Scene” is evocative enough to paint seven of them across your brow, disarming your perceptions with of a “warm” synth tone counterbalanced by a “cold” viola, cut loose to pursue alternate permutations of said tone across the bunched spines of a dozen wrinkly porcupines. Follow-up “Mr. Decay” could at first be one of those minimal workouts that fails to break a sweat, a simple shuffle of itchy, dry drum programming, but Boratto's polyphonic lines are too melodic to be austere, and a sensuous, dark undercurrent propels us towards a warm motion and a complex emotion. If trance weren't a dirty word nowadays it'd apply here—the meditative swirling of timbres placates the senses like a rapidly-melting fudge ripple tasted on the day of summer's first swelling. The progression of Chromophobia falling forward from this one-two punch develops as a small series of two-to-three song clusters, each one a suite of similar moods and tone colors building towards new plateaux.

Things get stranger, tougher, and almost fiercely mechanical real quick, within the nervous-funk triad of “Terminal,” “Gate 7” and “Shebang.” Incorporating tenser rhythmic tricks and noises approximating heavy industry into Boratto's ballet, we're led through the humming factory and into the techno sweatshop. Generators pulse, gears slowly grind, the circuit board comes alive and everywhere is the mingling of metallic parts interacting. "Gate 7" engages with a twitchy, slightly spooky plucked-string sound and a rubberized bassline that seems to be coming from inside your ear rather than simply bouncing against its surface. "Shebang" collects crystalline sound formations to the tune of a quick-tempoed drum break that all the quirky prettiness makes feel slower than it actually is. The genius is that all of this electrical frippery is teeming on the surface of a welcoming lake of complex, wavering melodies and joyous, meaty beats. These aren't distant, inhuman exercises in manipulated tones, but living, breathing structures—envelopes of tricky disco awaiting only your tongue to provide them with closure.

The interregnum is provided by “Chromophobia” and “The Blessing”—two dry, clean, almost clinical tracks that wield the techno-scalpel to get a peek at your innards, knowing they will expose musculature that pulsates with a lambent pink aura. "Chromophobia" serenades us with the pressure of the heartbeat thumping in the chest of the one who pilots the machine, and "The Blessing" goes even deeper into the bloodstream, sounding like a mysterious underwater journey in a well-manned submarine, alive with the opening and closing of ports and the rhythmic throb of the engines. “Mala Strana,” a gorgeous tone poem from which a simple piano line emerges like a leafy frond, initiates the complete descent from man-made accents to aqueous tones, the visceral and far-ranging thrills of the album's first half gradually giving way to more contemplative, earthy ones. If ambient weren't a dirty word nowadays it'd apply here—the organic, softly-tinted shadings of “Acrostico” and closer "The Verdict" are far from placid, but they lull the senses with arpeggiators draped in duskier tones and a revolving, serene sense of beauty.

Which isn't to say that Chromophobia evolves from motion into stasis—the action is slower at first, but the triumphant, deal-sealing trilogy of “Xilo,” the gloriously-buoyant “Beautiful Life” and the incandescent “Hera” blend both the sensitive sparkle and the frangible flush with the unkempt, joyous journeyings of Boratto's wilder (and more wide-eyed) side. If ambient trance wasn't a bad phrase nowadays… "Xilo" weaves a web of marimba-like notes across a twangy guitar-like sound that could be Duane Eddy in space, especially since we appear to be achieving some kind of lift-off as the song progresses. "Beautiful Life" and "Hera" actually take place beyond the stratosphere, the former a lush, loving epic that balances crunchy, compressed percussion with graceful broad melodic lines that can't decide whether they want to sound like strings or synths. "Hera" could be the ballroom dance on some other world, evoking visions of exotic, multicolored beings writhing in the strange light of a strange sun.

Usually a dance album of such breadth and poise is the result of a greatest-hits like repackaging of several years worth of vinyl sides. However, with the exception of “Gate 7” and the title track (released only on the 3-LP version of Total 7), nothing on Chromophobia has previously seen the light of day, despite the many 12” releases Boratto has accrued. Like his antipodean labelmate Axel Willner (The Field), his debut is almost entirely out of nowhere, coming dressed to kill in garments of an unfamiliar make. And while both albums share a joyous vitality and uniform brilliance, they have little sonically in common—Boratto escalates microstructures, while Willner immediatizes macrostructures. To put it another way, he's a sonic architect that specializes in clever micro-management of discrete moments, deftly harmonizing tiny tonal changes and rhythmic shifts to construct a bright, broad pattern that's in a state of constant flux. To put it another way—minimal + maximal = magical.

Stunning record and one of Kompakt's most enduring statements.

http://www.mediafire.com/?vy0133xk1oibmgn

Jan Jelinek - Loop Finding Jazz Records (2001)

2011-07-10T00:20:00.000-07:00

Loop Finding Jazz Records
Style: Electronic / Microsound
Label: Scape

Though he shares an interest in sonic byproduct with artists like SND, Sutekh, and Pole, Jan Jelinek sets himself apart by probing the warm and luminous corners of the digital landscape. So while his music may well be just as theory-based as his peers, Jelinek's work has a strong emotional component that at times verges on the sentimental. Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records is Jelinek's first full-length under his own name, but it's not far from his fine records as Farben and Gramm. The rhythms are more varied here, and Jelinek is working with a richer sound palette centered on warm, fuzzy chords and static. Leadoff track "Moiré," which is built around nervous, unsteady drones (possibly sampled from an organ) and a bed of slowly shifting noise, slowly undulates between dread and comfort. "Rock in the Video Age" reprises the gently insistent house thump featured more prominently on Gramm's Personal Rock, and undercuts the beat with surging chords and unpredictable percussive accents. "Do Dekor" is another highlight, with marked dub inflection, an aggressive, tearing bassline, and gentle tones modulating between three chords on top. Each listen to Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records reveals another intriguing layer, and this is certainly one of the more inviting records in the world of electronic listening music. - AMG

http://www.mediafire.com/?vb4icmbjafk6js8

Belong - October Language (2006)

2011-07-10T00:15:00.000-07:00

October Language
Style: Drone / Ambient / Shoegaze
Label: Carpark

If you've spent time tuned to a distant radio station, struggling to make music out of the scratch and hiss of static, then you know already what it's like to listen to Belong's October Language. Tense, expectant, on the verge of understanding, you submerge yourself in streams of long notes swathed in static, slow moving processions of sounds, each element disappearing just before you get a clear glimpse of it. The melancholic aura, the overtones, the fuzzy-edged mystery is reminiscent of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, and like them, October Language is meant to evoke decay, but it could just as easily represent birth, with nearly endless possibilities unfolding from each shape-shifting note.

Belong is a duo, whose members Turk Dietrich and Michael Jones nominally play instruments like guitar and synthesizers, but really reserve their creative energy for distorting and transforming those sounds in the recording process. Like Growing, they treat the notes as raw materials, the wherewithal to launch symphonic storms of altered tones. (Growing will, in fact, set down their instruments for extended periods during shows, while the two of them manipulate the sound coming out of the amplifiers.) So, there is an inhuman quality to cuts like "Who Told You This Room Exists"; it’s hard to decipher which instrument is emanating these ebbing clouds of vibrating sound or what was done to make them sound the way they do. Yet the cut is undeniably beautiful, oblique and evocative at the same time.

The title cut is perhaps the high point here, bright shards of melody slipping in and out of billowing hiss. You can hear a bit of steel guitar in the background here, played slowly and majestically against an oceanic hum. There, aided on this track by Joshua Eustis of Telefon Tel Aviv (Dietrich's partner in remixing NIN's "The Fragile"), Belong arches almost into the slow organic atmospherics of Friends of Dean Martinez. Yet this recognizable sound, too, disappears into the mysterious background, fading like a mirage that you're not sure you ever saw.

Much has been made of the fact that October Language was recorded in New Orleans almost exactly a year before the hurricane that engulfed that city. No doubt there's a sense of loss in these tracks, and no doubt it recalls the way that the ghosts of 9/11 permeated Basinski's Disintegration Loops. Still, it would be a mistake to tie its melancholy too closely to any specific historical event. These are lines that everyone can color in differently, depending on where they've been and what they've left behind along the way. - Dusted

http://www.mediafire.com/?cld0a8lja5s0cjc

Move D & Benjamin Brunn - Songs from the Beehive (2008)

2011-07-09T19:30:00.000-07:00

Songs from the Beehive
Style: Minimal Techno
Label: Smallville

David Moufang’s work as Move D is geometric, drafted with neat points, long curves, and straight lines. Benjamin Brunn’s sound signature, meanwhile, is closer to fluid mechanics, or the physics of how fluid moves. Together these two approaches harmonise wonderfully, with Moufang’s structures providing solid shapes for Brunn’s melodic whirlpools and rhythmic glidings to unwind through. That is to say, D builds the beehive, Brunn makes the honey.

The result of their labour is a work of buzzing sweetness, one that melds solid beats and liquid atmospheres into a musical substance that’s soothing, yielding, and almost therapeutically easy to listen to. At the same time, there’s great complexity here if you care to turn the volume dial clockwise: this is a record which opens up into a microscopic labyrinth of levels and layers full of thrumming, enthralling vibrations.

The album opens with ‘Love the One You’re With’, which sounds like the sun emerging from behind spring clouds, pouring twinkling light onto rain-washed concrete. Straight away, all the elements of the album are evident: layer upon layer of cycling sounds, some soft, all polished clean and arranged in such a way that their value is equally rhythmic, timbral and melodic. Such a blend could end up being sound soup, but there’s just enough separation of the elements for motivations to remain apparent, and for the flavours to remain distinct. Not only that, but, however abstracted, this is still groove music, still house – albeit a house made for and by another species.

So then (of course) there’s ‘Honey’, which is close to Isolée’s music, the Isolée of ‘Lost’. The commonality comes from the burbling gulp of the synth line, the epic length of the reverb-widened corridor it opens, and the way the whole arrangement chases itself down it. Then there’s also the visual connection, drawn (literally) by Stefan Marx, whose art has adorned other Smallville records, as well as select Playhouse and Mule releases.

Back to the source of the buzz, and to its ebb and flow in particular – another hallmark here is the way Moufang and Brunn take their foot off the ‘boom-click’ pedal and allow the soundfields they make to fill with loose-moving air. A sheer joy throughout is the massive undercurrent of floating tones – ‘Radar’, the last, largest and perhaps best track on the album, is the very definition of house in zero gravity. It’s a pleasure that’s only equalled by the way the whole thing eventually evaporates underneath, slowly bringing you back (safely, comfortably) to terra firma.

As a listening experience, Songs from the Beehive is captivating. As you can probably tell by now, I think the whole thing is magnificent. Incredulous readers should be mindful that I’m partial to this style, though – others might not find it so engaging. All the same, there’s something really special here, which is why Songs from the Beehive deserves an unconditional recommendation, and is my shoo-in for album of the year (so far). This is more than just entertainment, better than just well made. Good entertainment does what it should, and if it speaks, it speaks to you of other things, it reminds you of something else you enjoy. But great albums speak about themselves – they draw you in and suspend you in their own inimitable soundworld, from first note to last. Songs from the Beehive is just such an album – and it sings sweetly. - Resident Advisor

One of the most intoxicating and 3-dimensional techno albums I've ever heard. Get in the beehive.

http://www.mediafire.com/?3hsd8772spqrj5m