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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.
When I first heard about this project I was sceptical: especially the name of Mike Portnoy from Dream Theater worried me, despite my fondness for Jim Matheos' and Kevin Moore's respective works in Fates Warning and Chroma Key. Portnoy seems to be on about every Magna Carta 'superband' release full of symphonic progrock virtuosity which made me fear the same on this release...
Nick Cave is a survivor. From Sidney to Berlin to Sao Paulo to London, he has lived all around the world. With the Birthday Party, the Bad Seeds or solo, he has been an essential artist in the punk, industrial, gothic, folk and rock scenes. He has survived a drug addiction and a consuming relationship with PJ Harvey. Now he settled down, in London, living with his wife and kids, going to his “office” from 9 to 5, writing songs. Sometimes, such a life leaves marks.
Legend and pillar of the country genre, Johnny Cash has cemented a legendary reputation and aura of a diety, in a sense, for himself over the course of more than 50 years. He IS the original man in black, and he could make a grown man cry -- moving mountains and decimating all that's in his path with his stripped-down and raw vocal delivery.
Four years ago Massive Attack released Mezzanine, a masterpiece of trip-hop music. The band was standing at the peak in their career and Mezzanine was, and still is, a huge success.
HiM is seen as a groundbreaking project for the also groundbreaking drummer Doug Scharin. His experiments with jazz & dub are widely acclaimed, and as the title of this release claims, Japan is no exception.
Illproductionz is a fairly young hip-hop trio from The Netherlands, who some time ago released this CD which is actually some kind of demo by themselves. The release recently won a local prize for best artwork for this disc, but it is not the design I'm impressed with. It's the content.
Head-honcho Trey Spruance (Mr. Bungle, Secret Chiefs 3) is a self-professed fan of folkmusic from the Balkans. The signing of the traditional Californian Balkan-orchestra Danubius for his own label surprised me a bit though.
Mono was formed in 2000 in Japan. This information matters a lot as when you listen to One step more and you die, their third release and second full-length, you can only be impressed by the tightness of the band and the quality of the compositions: so many bands won’t ever achieve this, even if they keep on trying for twenty years...
Kim Hiorthoy. Does that sound Norwegian or what? The Norsemen have an excellent reputation considering music, and the last couple of years show a movement towards (nu-)jazz and electronic music. Melke belongs to the latter category, but the suspect is raised that he's just one among the many. We'll see...