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Luminamenti is a wonderful collusion & brain melting sonic stew of musical elements, noise matter and jagged electro-acoustic elements. Through-out the album switchers rather nicely from searing yet playful noise battering down to damaged harmonic wonderings, and everywhere else in-between.
Black Sea finds Fennesz in a contemplative, somewhat more experimental mood than his last two studio albums. His last album, Venice, took the melodic approach of his ground-breaking 2001 album Endless Summer down a notch, while evoking the mystery revolving around the city for which it was named. Despite the fact that many may consider Black Sea a departure for Christian Fennesz because of his choice to employ a less song oriented approach, it still bears his unmistakable hand print. If you listen carefully, and peer into the murky drones, there's actually a great degree of structure and musicianship hidden within much of the album. As always, his penchant for artful detail and masterful pacing is evident, even more so with repeated exposure.
The FREEhoudini deluxe is the first Themselves full length album since their 02’s The No Music & its surrealistic and dense reinventing of rap & Hip- Hop genre. But instead of pushing the envelope further FREEhoudini sees the collective returning to theirs & Anticon's roots to make a more straight-up Rap & Hip-hop record; though it still has more than a few creative and classic Anticon twists.
This disk brings together a two part 1956 radio play of Aldous Huxley’s classic sci-fi tale of future totalitarian and social engineered state, with narration by the author and musically cues by Bernard Herrmann.
Blue Sabbath Black Cheer started making their murderous and sleazy mix of blacked noise, grim power electronics & sicken clanking ambience back in 2005 & have racking up so far an impressive 30 plus release taking in cdr’s, tapes, split's and ltd vinyl pressing- the wonderfully titled Crows Eat The Eyes From The Leviathans Carcass is their first proper cd releases.
The Norwegian jazz scene since very long has proven to be one to be reckoned with as well as being a typical addition to the worldwide jazz canon. Conic Folded by saxophoneplayer Torben Snekkestad is yet another record to confirm this.
Likely to be named after Eric Dolphy's album of the name Outward Bound this Greek duo Outward Bound takes a different, more ambient approach. A bit different from what we're used to from Triple Bath as well, more traditional and less experimental.
This is a reissue of Jim O’Rourke's classic ‘laptop’ album which offers up the original masterpiece of felt and creative laptop manipulations along with an second equal marvellous disk of unreleased laptop material.
Regression is the new solo album from Wolf eyes founding member Nate Young and it finds him offering up seven tracks of grim and analogue bound Sonics that for the most part stay away from noisy territory and focus more on horrify and bleak mood setting vibe.
This is TUSKS first release. It's either a brief album or a long EP, as it is under thirty minutes long. The band refers to themselves in all caps, and in "singular". Sound a touch pompous? Well if you read the remainder of their press release, which also describes them as "mature" and "collegiate" since they all met post pubescence, than, yeah, ok, it kind of is. Press releases often misrepresent bands somewhat, so take that into the equation; they're usually not written by, and in many cases even run by the band prior to dispersal to the media. But the reason for bringing it up in relation to TUSKS is because the music this band makes matches up with the expectations one might derive from the previously mentioned characterization.
A Deeper Silence sees seasoned ambient explorer Steve Roach stripping his sound down to its darkest,most haunted and hypnotic form for a near on 75 minute journey into revolving gloomy yet soothing ambient expanse.
Basement Echo is the often searing & at times atmospheric sonic meeting of two Japanese underground most respected guitarists: Kawabata Makoto, leader of The Acid Mothers Temple, and Michishita Shinsuke, leader of LSD March.
French black metal band Diamatregon make speedy and grim blacked metal with dips into blacked post-rock and punk edger’s along its way. The bands sound is both tied to the tradition of true black metal yet it’s progressive, it’s memorable yet never safe & experimental but never too much so. Crossroad is the bands third album and it’s a highly consistent, grimly memorable slice of blacked metal craft.
Thunderwheel is the new project from Vadim Gusis who is the sonic mastermind behind the wonderful Russian music meets ambient and folk of Agnivolok & respected ethic industrial ambient collective Chaos as a Shelter. And through Thunderwheel shows Gusis usual flair for varied and exotic instrumentation this is quite different sounding from either project.
In two 3" cdr's we get to see two different sides of the Seattle-based musician Kgra, or Kristian Garrard. A nice little package, with nice music as well.
A Minority of One’s sound is very difficult to pin down, describe or put into any genre bracket, which in itself is reason alone to check them out. They mix up a very earthy, organic & often primal sound that often takes in percussive elements, natural based field recordings, droning horn work, dramatic male singing and drone textures.
Fabrikation von Konsens(Production of Consent) offers up a very heady, dense and murky collection of lo-fi electronic mood scapes and dark electroinca that weave in elements of bent and cut piano music, aged soundtrack matter and general effective/ atmospherics noise texture. All to create a series of pieces that feel like they’ve come from some strange and bent nocturnal world just beyond our normal vision.
The Bad Statistics make stumbling, droning and sleazed grange rock that’s rich with jagged discordant edger’s, haphazard sonic slumps and a rather appealing seedy atmosphere but the strangest and most unique element of the bands sound is the madden and manic vocals of lead singer Thebis Mutante; who gives one of the most unhinged and unbalance vocal performer I’ve ever heard.
Hammemit is the new strange post-black metal project from the dammed uk based souls who carved out the strange discordant and off-kilter blacked metal fruits of Emit. Hammemit sound drifts even further away from Black metal origins than Emit to conjure up an album that’s dank with the damned air of Mediaeval monastery’s that have turned to evil.
My Horns Are A Flame To Draw Down The Truth is the second album from grim & ritual ambient endeavour Tenhornedbeast that’s the project solo Christopher Walton one half of the now defunct ocultic dark ambient, neo-classical & ritual percussion project Endvra.
The Last Supper sees Zorn just using the human voice and percussion to create this compelling and surprisingly varied soundtrack for French director Arno Bouchard’s science fiction art and semi erotic film of the same name.
Noisy Pig’s boisterous, manic, daygloy and often dementedly memorable sound is a mixture of hypoactive and additive high Perrey & Kingsley quirkiness, jabbing synth punk /new-wave vibe, off-centre electro pop and careering lo-if toy based electronics.
This is the first volume of Merzbow’s biggest sonic project since the Merzbox in total there will be 13 discs in the Japanese Bird series, with one disc released each month until early 2010. Also when all 13 discs are out a very special hand made bamboo box to store all the disks is going to made available featuring a painting by Merzbow himself; so as you can see this stands as one of biggest works undertaken yet by the Japanese noise master.
Rarely if ever will I go out of the realm of the critic into the sphere of the "fan", but in order to make my point as apparent as a blow from a hammer to the head I will begin this review with the advice that you should do whatever is necessary to get your hands on Generic Flipper. From there you may want to venture on to their next couple albums. I suspect most adventurous listeners will be inclined to do so. I say this with the caveat that Flipper are not for everybody. Some may even find them over-rated. Others may think Flipper were (and in fact, still are) lazy and self indulgent. The fact is, the band themselves have admitted as much, but that doesn't mean their first couple of records aren't great.