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A few months ago, I downloaded one track by a band called Tarantula Hawk. It was so good that all I wanted was to buy the album. Alas, I didn’t find it in my local shops... Then I went to a Isis gig where Conspiracy Records (Neurot Belgian distributor) were selling some stuff, among which the Tarantulas second album. Cash changed hands and I found myself with a fucking great CD...
The laptops are taking over. In a couple of years, the laptops won’t even need humans to make good music. And maybe in a couple of decennia, humans won’t be needed anymore for anything at all and become extinct. But for now, we can still enjoy human creativity and Pulseprogramming's Tulsa For One Second is one of those albums created on a laptop.
A trio called Threnody Ensemble on Barry Hogan’s All Tomorrow’s Parties label, describing themselves as the best parts of Radiohead played by a chamber orchestra. Does that sound pretentious or what?
Sylvain Chauveau presents his third (mini)album, Un Autre Décembre. As a stripped down work of piano compositions, this subtle and frail piece of work constructed with minimal sounds and instrumentation now finds its way outside of France for the first time.
Displacer is one of the latest additions to the M-Tronic roster, and as we can expect from this excellent label for electronic music, this debut album is another jewel of dark cinematic melodies and carefully placed IDM beats.
What’s mine is yours was released on Neurot Recordings (Neurosis-owned label), recorded by Martin Bisi (who has worked with Cibo Matto, Sonic Youth and John Zorn a.o.) and features a member of The Angels of Light. Such simple facts should prove enough to have you interested.
The Giddy Motors are back with an excellent EP, released on both vinyl and as CD-single. The great debut album Make It Pop from this British trio has already conquered a big part of the rock / punk scene but the appetite for more blasting material isn’t satisfied just yet.
Tha Blue Herb is the best unknown band in the world. DJ O.N.O is the man behind their music. He is also part of Shigam who released a few months ago a stunning ep called Beauty. Unfortunately, it’s unavailable in Europe.
10 years ago Ulver still was this childlike old-school black-metal band. Playing in haunted forests, running around with swords and paint, hanging out with people who were their mothers nightmare. You know, the usuall kid stuff.
Hard ni sasete was my favourite album of 2002. But Tujiko Noriko’s 2001 Shojo Toshi album is equally good. Her first release on Mego, it came as big surprise for the connoisseurs of the Austrian label: Noriko’s sounds had nothing to do with most of their usual releases. As it says on the Mego website: “100% nerdy glitch boy free!”
The Desert Sessions concept is pretty cool. Bring some friends to a studio in the desert, jam a little, write some songs, record and release it with a sticker on the sleeve saying: "Featuring Kyuss and Queens Of The Stone Age members". It could be a cheap marketing trick from some slick record company manager, but the Desert Sessions are far from that.
I hate limited editions, I always end up buying them as fast as I can before they are sold out. I guess it's because a part of me is a collector. Sometimes I just want to own everything from an artist, even if it's something I already own in a less limited form.
What do you get when Mike Patton signs a Norwegian multi-instrumentalist / sampler / producer whiz on his label Ipecac Records? You'll get Kaada, hailed in Scandinavia as the best thing since sliced knäckebröd.
From Hydrahead to RCA, Cave In signed with a major label for their latest release Antenna. And you can hear it. While the band was still experimenting with songwriting and space rock sounds on Jupiter, Antenna is a solid pop rock album with some very small hints of their past.
I've always had a soft spot for The Gathering. Since I discovered Mandylion they followed the same path with their music as my taste in music.
The times that ‘music’ had to feature melody, harmony and rhythm are long forgotten since Arnold Schönberg deliberately tried to root out traditional, Western harmony by introducing his 12 tone system. Later on ‘musique concrète’ broke down the last remnants of tonality and rhythm and total abstraction became a respected artform.
Drone is the kingdom and Sunn are its rulers. White 1 is here to confirm what the fans already knew: Steve O’Malley and Greg Anderson play the heaviest music around.
Sage Francis, Alias, Themselves and now Sole. When will Anticon put a foot wrong? The question is asked, the answer is pending. And it might as well be pending for long. Very long.
Solefald returns once and for all with In Harmonia Universali. The Norwegian duo presents an interesting album with ten extreme music science experiments.
Michael Gira. That name alone is enough to arise fond memories in many music lovers mind. Is there any “underground” music genre that came up since the eighties that has not been influenced by the man’s work? Probably not. Gira has done everything: industrial, “dark”-rock, gothic, experimental electronics, post-rock to name but a few. After the demise of The Swans, he started The Angels of light. Everything is good here / Please come home is their third album.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the wonderful world of BEANS, aka Mr. Ballbeam. Hip-hop rebel. Wordsmith extraordinaire. Sonic architect. Fashion renegade. Published poet. Culture star.
A few months after his first European release (reviewed here, one of my fav CD’s of 2002), Asa-Chang is back with a new ep. Pressure was high on his shoulder: the said first album, Junray song Chang, got rave reviews and even made it in the top 4 of The Wire 2002 best list.
Former dictator Enver Hoxha put up 700,000 bunkers for three million Albanians. Extremely paranoid Hoxha closed his country hermetically and isolated his people from the outside world. The linernotes of Statement presents it as music from the “Land Of Bunkers”.
In Eastern Europe, the cultural doors have been closed so to speak. After the communist oppression, the people came to associate their culture with their former regimes and the ‘free West’ seemed to be better and a period of trying to copy the Western ways followed. Thanks to the newgained open society they were exposed to music that their former governments tried to keep from them. Cultural identity is a strong instinct though: currently people seem to rediscover their background and it resurfaces but in a different form.