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A few months ago, when i reviewed Motion’s album, I complained that sometimes 12k favoured “sound-signature” to quality when choosing to release some works. The new Shuttle358 album is here to remind us what a great label 12k really is.
For a while it seemed that Fiuczynski’s Headless Torsos were going to continue without the Screaming of Dean Bowman. An instrumental release and some loose tidbits on the site with Freedom Bremner surfaced but now the second Screaming Headless Torsos studio-album has materialised with Dean on it.
Southern Sludge gone sugar coated?
So what happens when two legendary doomsters team up and record a brand new album ? Well it certainly ain’t pretty, but it ain’t real good either.
Over the last twenty-seven years Harold Budd has released a slow but steady stream of albums of beatific minimalist contemporary classical music. Sadly the master of the soft pedal piano is leaving the stool with this his swansong. Fortunately Avalon Sutra could not be a more fitting end to an understated and at times underrated career.
Annie Gosfield is one of the most unique and remarkable artists working under the umbrella of John Zorn’s Tzadik label. Her past releases have been a melting pot of contempory classical stylings with musique concrete and sample based industrial sound works.
A year after releasing Vol one of Music To Play In The Dark, Coil dispatched the second part onto an expectant audience. Vol One had reinvented Coil and there was a high level of anticipation and anxiety over what Vol two was to entail.
Fear falls burning is the new project of Dirk Serries, aka VidnaObmana. However, the music is not to be compared.
A couple of years ago, Alan Bishop set up the Sublime Frequencies label in order to rewrite the history of what has become, after a clever marketing decision in the late 1980s, known as "world music".
Very intriguing and very interesting project, some weird music from Antwerp. The man behind this is not entirely unknown.
The fact that Boom Bip doesn’t fall into the hip-hop genre anymore, the music Bryan Hollon started with, isn’t news for a lot of this act’s followers. That this new album strays even more away from his roots consequently doesn’t come as a surprise either. The Cincinnati-born Hollon takes it a bit further even, by playing all instruments by himself.
Plunderphonics as a genre is rather mixed bag. It all depends on wit and clever use of your source material.
I refuse to introduce this man any longer. This is (you’d almost start cursing) Aaron Funk’s 12th (!) studio album in a way too short time. I, as a devotee of his music, have to admit that his latest couple of albums haven’t impressed me as much the albums did in the period 2001-2002. The concept of this album however, seemed interesting enough to lay my hands upon another Snares album.
Lounge-music has been out of fashion for years now, but luckily the American duo Thievery Corporation is not part of that trend. They just continue their work which they’re good at, and that’s creating very relaxing “lounge” records, accompanied by many influences from diverse musical styles.
As of writing, the posthumous dissection of Coils discography and archives has begun after the untimely but not entirely surprising death of founding member Jhonn Balance. When looking back at the career of Balance and Coil the Music to play in the dark series stands outs as one of their finest and most important works. It signified the full transformation from noisy industrial influenced soundscapests to otherworldly explorers of the sonic unknown that had been occurring since the mid nineties and releases like the Equinox/Solstice series. A rather pithy description I know but those interested in Coils history should seek out David Keenan’s England’s hidden reverse book.
A couple of years ago, WCCC released their emo-tinted debut ep, and I wasn’t entirely convinced. However I thought there was some promising stuff ahead from them. They are back with a new album and a radical change of style.
It’s ironic (to say the least) how something as pitiful as the situation in ‘da hoods’ has become a fashionstatement. Under guise of ‘keepin’ it real’ rappers like The Game (with certified villain looks to compete with 50, and calling his album The Documentary to feign realism) and 50 Cent claim to play what they call ‘the game’. Let’s entertain ‘dem crackaz’ with how the black peoples in the projects are doomed to play their role in the ‘War On Drugs’ under a shiney and glorious exterior of phat rimz and booty-shakin’ hoes.
Where were you 15 years ago? What’s changed in your life since then? How hard would it be to get together with your old friends that you had not seen or spoken with in 15 years and just pick up the pieces?
Jazz is in origin folkmusic, over the years there have been many interpretations of the genre and it regularly crossed over to other genres as far as contemporary art music. Nowadays the term jazz can’t really be used as a descriptive term for a distinct sound. It seems synonymous with ‘improvisation’ but I’ve seen too many jazz concerts where everybody was reading from sheetmusic for a large part of the show.
I’m a big fan of this bands first two albums. Criteria ov 666 and Toward the dusk were both highly absorbing works combining industrial and doom metal in an atmospheric and powerful way. For me one of the bands strongest aspects was the performance of Malfeitor Fabban on vocals, who’s mix of black metal like screams and monk like chants added a wonderfully obscure edge to the sound.
Traditional Irish music always seems in danger of either becoming horribly sentimental New Agery or the opposite end: equally shallow drinking anthems for hooligans. Primordial managed to distill the melancholic and dramatic aspects and keep away from both of those interpretations.
Thighpaulsandra is without doubt one of the fiercest and most elite talents in electronic music today. This his third album pushes the standard of his work into even more sublime and rarefied zones.
Roger Doyle produced some of the most remarkable electro-acoustic music of the last twenty-five years with his Babel box set. Here after a short break he returns with a new manifesto of sound.
Dutch label Basta has a reputation of releasing wonderfully restored historic recordings of strange music that applied new technologies of the fifties and sixties. The electronic recordings by Raymond Scott, Samuel Hoffman’s theremin box, André Popp’s Delirium in Hi-Fi, but also a recent release of Moog- and tapesplice-pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey.