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The new trend in electronic music seems to be going acoustic and sometimes even start writing 'real songs'. Ferran Fages, a Catalan musician whose resume mentions, besides guitar, no-input mixer and turntables in Cremaster also took this step. On A cavall entre dos cavalls and this album it's just guitar.
Nihill’s debut album mixes together Death Spell Omega like occultic blacked riff craft with more stretched dark ambient, horrific soundtrack elements and slight doom edges, all topped off with grim theatrical and often downright chilling vocal performances.
This four disk set brings together unreleased tracks from between 1997 and 2007 by this uk guitar collective that fall some where between noise, drone, Psycho Ambience & grim cinematic. With well respected noise Surpremo Lea Cummings(Kylie Minoise, Burning Swallows, ect & kovorox sound label runner) as one of the key figures in the line-up.
Les Protorythmiques was originally intended to be presented by Luc Ferrari and erikM at the Musique Action Festival, which took place in France in May of 2005. Sadly, due to Luc Ferrari's deteriorating health, the collaboration never came about. Instead, Thomas Lehn was invited to perform the piece at the festival alongside erikM.
This is Australian guitarist/soundsmith Oren Ambarchi's sixth solo album & it finds him centering all the tracks around deep bass-like closed, airless & often sombre guitar revolution's. With melodic, emotional & warming elements appearing here & there, like flowers opening on the tracks' closed shoulders.
This Chicago two piece brew up a very demented mix of pop, new wave, electronica, jazz, weird-ness & electro rock elements. The songs are littered with over-blow often bizarre theatrical vocals & strange harmonies.
After the lacklustre to plain awful Summer Made good, I thought all was lost for múm, but with Go Go Smear Poison Ivy- they’ve recaptured the wonder, inventiveness and tuneful flair of their music, and also made their most mature, polished, compact, musically dense album of their career- all with out losing any of their fun & charm.
Gaslini soundtrack for this 1971 Giallo film goes from rich and haunted female wailed main theme, to more eerier discordant, jazzy and dark experimental waters & back to easy listening melodics and camp-ness.
Outre is a death metal nightmare with very gothic, Grand Guignol like & darkly theatrical surreal tendencies that bob like a headless corpse to the top of the audio water ever so often.
Nemezis are a polish electronica/ beat-bound project that will appeal to those who enjoy easy melodic yet inventive music, thats littered with retro references and textures. If you have enjoyed the likes of Daft Punk, Royksopp, Air, etc- you’ll find much to get your teeth into here.
Nord is the debut release by France's Year of Light. This music is all over the map, which is a good thing. Mostly though, it borders close to the Neurosis and Isis school of avant-metal. Don't expect a cardboard replica of such music though; it has plenty of individual touches which make it unique.
Amazing Daze presents something of a departure for Marcus Schmickler (a.k.a Pluramon). Schmickler's music through the years has consisted of everything from glitchy electronica to shoegazer pop, so maybe departure isn't the right word. Perhaps it's just one of many stops along the way. Drone is nothing new to Schmickler, but until now it's been presented in bits and pieces, within the context of his more song-based albums. Amazing Daze is his first headlong foray into extended drones, as each these pieces exceed twenty minutes each.
Astral Orange Sunshine brings together four spacey and swirling electronic unfolds with a Merzbow favourite the EMS Synthi as the main sound generator here, but this for the most part stays noise free- with only the last track diving into noise matter towards it’s middle.
Though this double disk set is highly enjoyable and memory jolting ride with some pleasant surprises along the way, sadly it’s far from a definitive history of Grindcore as promised in t’s sub-title.
Asa Irons, of Feathers and Witch, wrote these songs, inspired by the wooded and mountainous Northeastern United States, where he resides. The album was recorded in "an abandoned yellow bathroom in the basement of a large building". Not a very exotic setting considering the music's natural origins.
The Idle Suite are a New Zealand "supergroup" including members from Sferic Experiment, MarineVille, the Stumps, Dress, Sandoz Lab Technicians, King Loser, Cloudboy, Bad Statistics and Cloudboy. In reality, this recording sounds like a series of jam sessions between like-minded individuals. It's loose limbed improv music consisting of two drummers, guitars, bass and keyboards. There are some moments of intensity on these tracks, particularly on the last track, the epic twenty-three minute Forcefield, where the guitars feed back and the bass wanders. Mostly though, this music, though intermittently interesting, isn't sharp enough to keep interest.
Your Money;moon made brings together pulsing and throbbing electronic space noise, with chugging melancholy punked meets arty guitar craft & forays into more subtle & surreal soundworlds. All making a rather intriguing and often dangerous intergalactic musical trip.
This double disk set shows the different sides to these Australia purveyor's of doom; going from coarse, brutal and grinding doom with black metal edges, to spacey overloaded with noise/improvised tendencies, to grim harmonic rock/ country elements, to more expansive, mystical & atmospheric dark ambient side roads.
Under the Balcony is a memorable collection of quirky and inventive electronica that slides between dance floor friendly beatscapes, retro electro washers, and theatricals. Mixing in organic elements like acoustic guitars, Steel drums, slap bass, etc.
Katamine is mainly a one man band starring Israeli Assaf Tager, a session man who has lent his guitar playing talents to recordings by Elliott Smith, Beth Gibbons and Moloko. Lag, Katamine's debut, claims to include a band consisting of Uri Frost on guitar, Haggai Freshtman on drums and Zoe Polanski, credited with vocals, bass and casio. Oddly enough, only three of this disk's ten songs sound like anything more than Assaf Tager playing solo on vocals and guitar. Drums or bass are not evident at any time. The only evidence of additional noises or instrumentation are the backing vocals by Zoe Polanski on Winschester Gun, and subtle noises on Where the Ambulance Rolls and No Wonder We're Damaged.
Sart is the debut of the Norwegian duo of Jostein Dahl Gjelsvik and Rune Sagevik, otherwise known as Pjusk. Recently Taylor Deupree's 12k label has pushed away a bit from austere minimalism toward a more organic, natural sound. Since a non-specific form of music meets such criteria, many possiblities are opened up by such a philosophy. Unbound by genre, there's a lot of freedom for the artists' imagination to roam.
Valcanus 68 is the audio equivalent of a trip through someones unfolding mind and thier descent into insanity, it's made up of all manner of grainy,worn and battened music; sampled and played, along with beatscapes and a host of sound and dialogue samples.
Godheadscope is a project by Matt Rosin, who has also worked as Cindervoice and with Dead Raven Choir. A City Out of Sight is the full length debut for Godheadscope, and it's a hefty slab. It's taken me quite some time to be able to review this, partly because I wasn't exactly sure how to process the material. It is without a doubt an original work, which forges its own territory.
Sifantin Och Mörkret is a captivating mixture of playful often child like electronics, folk, rock & quirky sounds collages. Managing to sound cute, dramatic, sorrowful & distressing often in the same song-all making a heady audio adventure where you don’t know what you’ll hear next.