Label: Klangbad Format: CD,LP If any band is ripe for some re-mixing, it is Faust. The elements that combine to form their music have already been through a process involving a stripping down, transformation and reformation both in the studio and in ‘live’ performance. To offer these elements to those who are influenced by and in sympathy with Faust’s working methods seems an ideal situation for both translation […]
Album review
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Label: Soleilmoon Format: 2CD Shifts is a solo project by Frans de Waard, ostensibly to produce ambient music using interwoven guitar patterns with various added effects and special recording techniques. In this collaboration the Shifts recordings have been taken and reprocessed by Asmus Tietchens and vidnaObmana . Each artist was given the same sound material and then left to their own devices to come up with a `recycling’. […]
Label: Rocketgirl/Mind Expansion Format: CD Füxa‘s sixth album finds Randall Nieman‘s particular take on guitary synth music (or perhaps, synthy guitar music) developed yet further into a sound of drones and melodies which insinuate their way into the background and back again. Aided by the steadfast drumming of Drew Peters and occasional low-key vocal contributions from Stephen Lawrie and Jo Doran, Supercharged will more than likely have started […]
Label: Frozen Empire Media Format: CD Nyugodt lurks somewhere in the grey area between dub and electroglitch musique concrete. Noisescapes mix (at times clash) with fractured rhythms. Sometimes closer to the twisted rhythms of Autechre than dub, sometimes almost completely seized by the seething abrasive textures of manipulated noise, the album seldom abandons rhythm completely. And then, beneath the layers of noise the occasional melody manages to surface. […]
Label: Phantom Code/World Serpent Format: CD The title of Cyclobe‘s second album release soon becomes fitting as the music opens out, expands and contracts, almost oozes from the pores in the breathing walls – but where are they visiting from exactly? Some might suggest grayling spacefarers, others could contend, quite successfully, that the source of the sonic visitations lies closer to the realms of the subconscious, and of […]
Grönland/EMI Electrola/Astralwerks NEU! Guitar arches out like twilit sunshadows and the omnipresent beat is there, new dawn, new dawn. Synthesizer languidly moves backwards and forth, the Sunday eveningmorning that holds in rapt attention at the creation of something new. Six crepuscular tracks? Wcka wcka wcka. Wow wow wow. And so on. Then on to the swelling and pitching of the flanged cymbals, split side by side, side-to-side, riding […]
Label: Mute Format: 2CD Okay, so it may be the wrong time, given recent events, for a band whose name translates as “Collapsing New Buildings” to release an album called Strategies Against Architecture III, but, heedless of a Stockhausen-style backlash, those wonderfully inventive German sonic terrorists (again, perhaps not a good analogy, but what the fuck) Einstürzende Neubauten are at it again, this time with a double CD […]
Label: Thrill Jockey Format: CD,LP Welcome to the end of the world. With civilization on the brink of destruction, and all those Biblical prophecies starting to look not quite so funny, the inimitable Bobby Conn bounds back onto the scene, perversely enough eschewing the eschatological apocalypses of Rise Up! and giving us an album of (among many other things), good time sleazy RAWK’n’RAWL!!! Yeah! Coming on like a […]
Label: Staubgold Format: CD What better subject for a To Rococo Rot concept album than a highly modernist building in Cologne? With twelve modular rooms to work represent both the structure and purpose of, the logical method the band took was to compose a three minute track for each section. What emerges is a stripped-down album which works within the structural constraints to deliciously minimal effect, whether on […]
Label: 130701(UK, Europe)/Alien8(North America)/P-Vine(Japan) Format: CD,2LP This recording contains the result of collaborative jamming from musicians including members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Fly Pan Am and Exhaust. They set up in a house in Montreal, ‘an old falling down monstrosity’, and recorded solidly for five days more concerned with the actual experience of collective playing/recording than the end results. But it’s the end results that we have […]
Label: Soleimoon Format: CD Face The Wound is a Sprache Opera, a dialogue between the male and female voices. Known for working with found sounds, Z’ev assembled the narrative of Face The Wound from 30 cassettes collected from thrift shops, garage sales, and flea markets. The rhythms of the voices mix with the rhythms of electronic percussion and electronic textures. The journey through Z’ev’s assembled narrative isn’t an […]
Label: Stretchy Format: CD Like Hawkwind before them, the Ozrics have stuck to their groove with determined, singled-minded commitment to spacey reggae bass and soaring, intricate guitar line. Rushy, twiddly synths, flute twirls and all the expected head, ears and what’s left of the brain in the sky moments ride over faux-Arabic percussion and nifty keyboard throbs. It’s all very lysergic, and as they’ve been at it for […]
Label: Matador Format: CD,LP In their latest album Matmos use the bone crunching noises of plastic surgery for their samples. So if you’ve had a nose job be warned, Matmos might have transformed the noise of your nose being broken into a snare. Well, here it is … A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure is a collage of sound recorded in clinics and operating theatres. […]
Label: Brombron Format: CD Edited down from a week’s recording in and around Extrapool studio in Nijmegen, Holland by Antenna Farm and Main in the summer of 2000, AF_M is the first in the Brombron series of collaborations initiated by Staalplaat and Extrapool. Using laptops, guitars, environmental and close-miked recordings and the studio itself, the five untitled tracks were improvised then later whittled down in strict order of […]
Label: One Little Indian Format: CD If, at any point in the last six or seven years, you had only taken the time to ask, then I would have told you, dear reader, that Björk Gudmundsdottir was THE Great Pop star of the 1990’s, what Bowie was to the 70’s, and, I would contend, Prince to the 1980’s. I use the term great not in the term of […]
Label: United Dairies Format: CD One of Nurse With Wound‘s most assuredly out there recordings in a career constructed from such moments, Santoor Lena Bicyle takes many of the elements of rhythm and groove Steven Stapleton and collaborators have been working on over the last few releases, condenses them, mashes them up again and throws half away to produce a further chapter of derangement. With Aranos on board, […]
Label: Ronin Format: CD There’s no denying 23 Skidoo their place among the innovators at the interface of Eighties post-Industrial Funk, World Music and general experimental groove development. It’s one of those mysteries and licensing which has no doubt kept their back catalogue out of print for more than a decade, so these re-releases on their own Ronin imprint are thoroughly welcome, and it’s always nice to have […]
Label: Ash International Format: CD Sourced from field recordings made by Hazard and Chris Watson and reprocessed by Benny Nilsen, Wind takes the sound of that element as it moves across two continents and brings out the drama of nature in an immediate, textural manner. Where the Isolationists drew their analogue/digital interfaces into dense wastes of often desolate structures (a broad generalisation, true), Wind concentrates on the immensity […]