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The first release by the DoubleMoon-label I noticed was Üç Oyundan Onyedi Müzik by BaBa Zula. It got my attention by looking different from other stuff in the Turkish section of the shop. I found out they sounded very different as well.
Would Gregor Samsa be a young man, and not a band, and would that man have been one of the characters of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, he’d be one of the nerds. A likeable one. By the way, this wouldn’t have prevented him from being shot at by the other nerds.
So Diggie-Das return to the game. It seems they broke ties with EPMD’s Def Squad or in fact any (wellknown) click at all. During the six-year-hiatus between How We Do and Generation EFX Dray and Skoob appear to have returned to their hustle in the hood.
Any regular Musique[machine] reader should be aware of them by now. And people who are not should start to take notice before it’s too late and people start making fun of them 10 years from know for not having heard of Boris at the time Feedbacker was released.
HydraHead just doesn’t want to stop providing the goods when it comes to releasing uncompromisingly heavy music. Keelhaul’s latest album comes as yet another proof…
The term 'jazz' is flexable. Some people consider everything improvised jazz, while others consider composed music following certain harmonic and rhythmic structures the same. The average jazz-appreciating Norah Jones-fan will probably run away in panic when exposed to Jimmy Ågren's third album. The title Close Enough For Jazz might serve as a caveat in that respect.
Philip Jeck’s explorations in the realm of vinyl loops and crackle continue to delight, but a few reservations have to be made. The 7 tracks on his 7th CD (randomly titled 7, unless there’s a hidden meaning I'm not aware of) testify to Jeck’s ongoing fascination with the vinyl medium, the crackles and the grooves, and the simultaneous looping of several records to obtain exciting new music and remarkable sounds.
In my teenage years, when one said « Doom », I thought about My Dying Bride. Then, a few years ago, I got to hear Electric Wizard’s Dopethrone. It was like discovering a whole new dimension. The Wizard led me to Boris, Sunn, Khanate, Grief and so on. Over the last few months, I got to hear a lot of one dimensional doom bands, which led me to an unwanted state of extra-depression. Was that genre I have come to love so much dead? I was ready to pull the trigger when Unearthly Trance first full-length made his way into my mail-box.
Bulgaria doesn’t have a very strong voice in the international metalscene. There is a scene that’s fighting hard to accomplish something but it isn’t easy in a country trying to find its way in the post-communistic democracy. When Zhivkov’s communist party fell, the members of Artery left Bulgaria to end up in Amsterdam, Holland via the Czech Republic.
Three famed improvisers record together an album meant to be somewhere between Death Metal and Free Jazz and release it on Grob. I’m sure this is enough for a lot of people to start salivating…
With the second album by Max Richter, FatCat and their 130701 imprint venture in yet another genre: post-classical music. Richter is a trained pianist (he studied with no less than the late Luciano Berio) who founded contemporary classical ensemble Piano Circus, commissioning and performing works by Arvo Part, Brian Eno, Steve Reich and Philip Glass along the years.
One writer referred to this Japanese quartet’s music as "serenity improv". The band would do well to use this description as the heading on their resumé, because it fits them like a glove. Keiichi Sugimoto (guitar and computer), Yuichiro Iwashita (guitar), Namiko Sasamoto (keyboards and sax – but jazzophobes don't flee just yet) and Tetsuro Yasunaga (computers and electronics) build mostly long, quietly rippling electro-acoustic soundscapes, meandering and unobtrusive, but anything but unengaging.
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.