
NWW's Steve Stapleton pronounces "Ship's a going down" and mixer's haunting drone scapes with odd (and funny) sound effects. What we have here is one long droning, sinister and haunting track. Add to this various creaks and other noises.

Christophe Stoll aka Nitrada might not know why he did it, I certainly do know why I listen to this very nice and melancholic electro-pop album.

In 2003, Ehlers and Suchy each released truly excellent albums. Less than a year later, they’re back with another CD on Staubgold, a collaboration that sees them unite with another improviser, Franz Hautzinger.

Sometimes I get the complaint that my reviews are always positive. Well, prepare for another one because only one month into 2004 and the first candidate for 'Album Of The Year 2004' is in. It might be a bit early, but staying on the safe side this will surely end in my top 10. I can't review everything so I rather use my time and space to inform people about the good stuff that I bought than write some bitter rant over some free promo.

A few months ago, Taylor Deupree, the man behind the 12k label, launched Happy with the aim of releasing “unconventional Japanese pop”. This album is the label’s first release, a magnificent meeting of laptop music and pop culture.

Funny music... not the 'humour in music' discussion; humour is way more subtle than straight up nuttiness. Dangerous ground successfully trodden particularly in the 60's when the recording possibities and technology were booming and an incentive to experiment. Jean Jacques Perrey, Gershon Kingsley, André Popp, Juan Garcia Esquivel and Raymond Scott who combined inventiveness with an incredible patience and hilarious endresults.

In 2001, FatCat released a compilation featuring unreleased artists. Chib is the only one (so far) to have been granted the privilege to release a CD on the label.

The subtitle of this album is A View Into A Dying Existence, not the first musical depiction of earth’s apocalypse you’d say, certainly in the post-black metal genre in which V:28 operates.

Since he has been focusing on production duties for the last few years, many people thought that Alex Newport’s days as a musician were over. But there was still something in him that wanted to let the world know that he could still provide the goods. Theory of Ruin is his new band.

For the first half of the year, I listened to quite a few pretty good records mixing acoustic instruments and electronic music. I listened to a few other albums of that kind over the second half of 2003, and they bored me. Was that genre already dead to me? A short-lived trend of my tastes? That’s what I thought… But Sora comes to deny my initial intuition.

With a new solo album scheduled for release any day now, it is high time for us to have a look at Keiji’s latest solo album, almost a year old now. “C’est parfait” is the result of Michel Henritzi’s attendance at a concert at the Star Pine’s Café in Tokyo on 31 March 2002. Lightning-struck by Haino’s performance, he insisted on releasing it.

Anyone into noiserock and vinyl is probably aware of the works of wonderful cult-phenomenon Harvey Milk, a diabolical trio that emerged from the extensive indie rock scene of Athens, GA, and thought it a good idea to name their band after a controversial homosexual politician from San Francisco that was ultimately assassinated. Symbolism galore if you ask me: the band appeared out of nowhere, made a lot of noise and died a premature death. Harvey Milk recorded three full-length albums in their time, as well as a handful of singles. And that is what this thirteen-track disc is all about, a couple of long-lost gems you can now finally unleash upon your speakers if you're not that big a Harvey Milk fan and never bothered to seek out the band's vinyl releases.

When you think of it, it was only logical that Jarboe and Neurosis would work together one day. For if there was one band that could be considered as a 21st century Swans, it is Neurosis. Maybe not entirely true when you take into account purely musical criteria, but much more one point when you think about the atmosphere that both bands manage(d) to create.

Two years after a widely acclaimed debut release on Klangrieg, The Kat Cosm are back with Knightboat, a mini album featuring four new tracks and three remixes. A very cute mix of electronic and pastoral folk/pop.

Immense come from Bristol but thankfully they don’t play some generic trip-hop : they favour their own kind of experimental alt-rock. Hidden between sleeves is their second album. Their first was released on Fat Cat.

If there's one heavy rockband that deserves more fame and respect, it must be Swedish four-man formation The Quill. I got to know this excellent band last year, trough their third album Voodoo Caravan. Suffice to say, before the third track had ended I was already quite impressed by the band's passionate, stoner-like branch of heavy rock. Finally a follow-up to the previous album has been released, and I can only say that this new album really highlights The Quill's talent and relevance.

Hello ladies and gentlemen, make way for the most beautiful guitar music of 2003! Make way for Australasia, Pelican’s second instalment. Make way for the majestic bird!

Ghislain Poirier. The name in itself is not as striking as P.Diddy, Timbaland or even Chad Hugo. Where I live, it would be the perfect name for the local loser. But in Quebec, or at least in music, Poirier means great, mostly instrumental, hiphop.

On ambient godfather David Toop’s latest album, one piece is inspired by Henri Michaux; this fact sheds light on several aspects of the album as a whole. Michaux was a Walloon writer and painter who was inspired by surrealism and wrote extravagant, mystical imaginary journeys and hermetic poetry, taking drugs as Baudelaire did to reach an artificial paradise. Incidentally, three of his poems were put to music by Witold £utos³awski in the early sixties. On Black chamber Toop, also an accomplished journalist and writer of the key works Ocean of sound and Exotica (and, less to the point here, Rap attack), does not use any specific texts or paintings; rather, he takes the listener on a trip through dense jungles, undiscovered tribes and the bustling streets of a Chinese town.

Some tracks presented on On Air With Guests have previously been released on Live in 1998, on which the tracks were played almost for the first time. Since then the band had grown and the tunes changed a bit. The opportunity arose to invite guests these sessions are presented here. The first versions of these tracks were pretty amazing already but this time they are insane!

Early on in my quest to explore the not quite so transparent folk genre, I stumbled across an album called The Glinting Spade, by the interestingly named band In Gowan Ring. Up to that moment I had only known the raw, compact variety of folk (street folk?), so I was kind of surprised to find out that the music of In Gowan Ring has very little in common with the kind of folk I was familiar with. In fact, In Gowan Ring exists in a totally different musical dimension.

A few months after having released an album by Sun, Staubgold releases another Australian pop gem featuring some well known scenesters.

The Soil Bleeds Black first saw the light of day in '92, as a result of brothers Michael and Mark Riddick's need to express their love for medieval folklore in sound. After two years of experimentation and having endured what can almost be referred to as an identity crisis,

Welcome ladies and gentlemen. How about a bit of good old Las Vegas style Lounge- and big band music? If you are like me you would probably run away as fast as you can. But perhaps it's worth to stick around for the golden voice of mister Richard Cheese and his Lounge against the machine.