Fourth Dimension/BDTA How many records or compositions have taken the existential essence of the cactus as their theme? Kaktuus is one (perhaps the only) such; and on the evidence of the album under consideration here, perhaps kakofoNIKT had the Agave americana particularly in mind. It’s certainly a psychedelic experience from the opening minutes, evolving into a surround-sound trip where garbled, guttering voices extemporise and vocalise without words and electronic […]
Linus Tossio
208 posts
Choose Choice finds Arnold Dreyblatt making his instruments and chosen musicians sing and chime from minimalism to moments of forthright completeness over two sides of vinyl which demand an honest listen and are ultimately rewarding when given such. Curated from more than thirty years (1981-2007) of live recordings, the LP is all the more remarkable for not sounding like a compilation of music made over such a long […]
Zoharum On the evidence presented by Tether, Echoes of Yul would seem to like to serve their acid-fried variety of rock deeply strange, with a side order of frazzled. When the opening chords of “Rosids” have subsided into a string-dripping delayscape, and samples mutter about “Triggered echoes of flashbacks” it’s evident that there’s some serious stoner rock about to kick in, and hard. Which it does, as “Guess” […]
El Paraiso Papir like to glide; Papir like to groove, sliding the strings of their sonorous guitars like they have all year to take the trip far far away from the ground and the cares of the world. Drums unfurl at first with lazy intent, performing that neat instrumental rock trick of making it seem like the rhythm’s loose and flexible while underneath it all, Christoffer Brøchmanns is […]
Black Horizons/Self-released Un Festín Sagital‘s Deimos has just four tracks over its twenty-three minutes and appears both as a cassette on Black Horizons as well as digitally, but makes its presence felt forcefully via whatever medium. There’s more than a slight affinity for the murky avant-garde sounds of a previous cassette era, with “La Ofrenda Danzante del Cuerpo Enamorado” emerging and folding into electronic static while scrawls scuttle malevolently […]
More Than Human With a name which immediately evokes time travel (or the expectation thereof) and hence perhaps stepping metaphorically and metaphysically out of the linear and quotidian, Paul Snowdon sends the listener on a trip across distances and the aeons. Lifting off with the fluttery electronica of “Iridium Watcher,” side one soon gives way to more radiophonic sounds of “Voiders Delight.” If the Time Attendant persona were […]
Lado ABC (CD)/Gagarin (LP) Ambitious as can be, mercurial music manipulator Felix Kubin joins Mitch & Mitch to generate ten tracks of modern big band electronic library music. Firmly placing tongue in cheek and putting on their stern faces, the mischievous collaborators offer up glockenspiel-friendly, brass-bound bacchanalia to jive the hepcats off their seats and into a swirl of ra-ra randomisers and stereophonic soundtrack swing, hopping and skipping gleefully […]
Dekorder With a title which perhaps both echoes and references The Faust Tapes, Luke Fowler‘s second edition of electronic murmurings sets out a distinct palette of scrawls synthesis which skitters and frolics with a studied playfulness. Despite the title, this is actually Fowler’s début album, edited down from many hours of recordings – and occasionally added to – by friend and collaborator Richard Youngs (see Lurists‘ Red & Blue, […]
Dekorder The trio of Luke Fowler, Richard Youngs and Steven Warwick of Heatsick have made some very strange electronic music here. Red & Blue is one of those on the spot collaborations which sounds like a huge amount of fun was had by all while plugging away in the studio. A liberated sense of playfulness is especially apparent, and it’s pretty much an electronic jam session which, if it […]
Zoharum For his first album in seven years under his own name (rather than as S.E.T.I.), Andrew Lagowski seems to have decided to revisit every possible way of making synthesized music – let’s lump them all under the rubric of techno just for the moment – and give it an extra shove in various oblique directions. Sprinkled with bleeps, thwups, trickles and sprightly bursts of brightly-crafted sonics, Redesine+ […]
MIE Is Black Dirt Oak a supergroup? Perhaps. With members of Desert Heat, Violators, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers, Rhyton, Psychic Ills, D. Charles Speer‘s band and NNCK (that’s just from the more well-known groups too) it probably counts as one, if such a term really holds much meaning anymore. With seven musicians on board, it often sounds like there are yet more hard at work on creating as […]
Endtyme Having played together at the Supersonic festival and with one joint CDr already under their collective (metal-studded?) belts, Zeni Geva‘s mainman KK Null and post-tuba drone duo Ore slip out this double A-side 7” vinyl single as a little extra, perhaps and hopefully prefacing more joint efforts yet to come. While “Components of Circulation” is as doomy and droney as might be expected (and that’s not meant […]
Raster-Noton Ryoji Ikeda is perhaps best known for his mastery of the ultra-minimal, for harnessing digital drones, glimmers and glitches to make unfolding sounds take seemingly apparent form in glacial patterns of space-filling lightness, of sounds so subtle as to only be noticeable when they have gone. When placed in the context of installations as found in galleries worldwide (his contribution of pure sine waves combined with stark […]
Mute Released as a taster for the forthcoming Spectre album, the S EP finds Laibach in slower, reflective mood on the opening “Eurovision,” the track unfolding with almost trip-hop intent in a fashion which harks back in tone to 1992’s Kapital. Of course they can’t help but get epic on the refrain “Europe is falling apart” – but even then the bombast is held back, and instead there’s […]
Cave12 Recorded live in Switzerland in September 2011, Killer_kipper‘s wheezing blend of electronic loops and musique concrète reveals Norbert Möslang at his most single-minded and oppressive. Juddering bass offers little in the way of an ordinary rhythmic foothold, and the scraping, grinding sounds of whatever he’s making scribble like a particularly grating shard of broken glass on the face of what could be metal, might be circuits (bent […]
Thrill Jockey The name of the band and the album gives the game away, as perhaps it should, and the cover image of two musicians walking away towards a line of telegraph poles near-hidden in a dustcloud certainly helps too. The music by Date Palms is immediately suggestive of the desert fringes, of the places where sandy dryness meets welcome verdant relief, of Joshua Tree or the scrublands […]
Sub Rosa Almost unbelievably, Rubhitbangklanghear/Rubhitbangklangear is the first album that Charlemagne Palestine and Z’ev have recorded together, though they have apparently played together a couple of time in the last twenty-odd years. This double CD (there is an LP edition with half the tracks) is released as part of Sub Rosa‘s series of Laboratoire Central collaborations and finds the veteran (and it’s fair to add legendary) improvisers/composers in […]
Glacial Movements Aneira appears as one long track, and this time round it’s simply Aidan Baker on his own with a twelve-string acoustic guitar. This is a piece which is far more isolationist than that simple statement might at first appear, as Baker uses the instrument as a sonic generator to produce a whole host of glacial textures and tones. While the sound of steel strings is still […]