Modularfield Hot on the heels of the recent Panic Girl Cake On Jupiter LP, Wrocław-based An On Bast arrives with Modularfield‘s next instalment in their excursion into modern electronica. However, where the Panic Girl record hinted at home comforts on a distant shore, Anna Suda‘s Coherent Excitations is a meditative, yet dance-inflected body with a sense of mystery and travel at its core.
Album review
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Hubro Stein Urheim has been recording for the best part of ten years now and this is his sixth album for Hubro, but you can’t even try and pigeonhole it just by the label. Clearly, Stein has an ear for anything good over the history of music and distils all this down to his own special recipes.
4AD The moment that twisted discord gives way to the first tune “Way The World Is”, the Pale Saints‘ The Comforts Of Madness album has you hanging on a massive wave of daggering sound. That piranha(ing) energy slamming around you, Ian Masters‘ dreamy voice thistled by melodic splashes and restless propellants, his vocals bleeding existential bluntness buttered in flaming ascents and cross-cut dynamics. As first tracks go it’s […]
Thrill Jockey It has been for over twenty years that Markus Popp has been releasing material through Thrill Jockey and still his desire to keep advancing electronic-based music keeps him ahead of the pack. He has been recording and releasing music now for nearly thirty years as Oval and also as part of Microstoria, but each new instalment finds him upping his game.
Sulatron / Pancromatic So where do I begin? This is a six-CD retrospective boxset of some of Sula Bassana’s music since 2006 containing nearly thirty tracks and beautiful presented in three gatefold sleeves, all in a hard box — this truly is a thing of wonder and a must-have for all Sula / Electric Moon fans as they are limited to 500 copies (a vinyl version is to […]
Øra Fonogram Sax player Signe Emmeluth has had a busy time of it over the last eighteen months with the release of the first Emmeluth’s Amoeba album, playing as part of Skarbø Skulekorps and guesting on the last Broen album. On top of all that, the second Amoeba album Chimaera is here and a real blast of intuitive and innovative improvisation it is.
Blue Tapes Blue Tapes‘ head honcho has thumbed his nose at what others may deem suitable for release and has chosen two highlights of his own personal canon to delight the listeners, and lure them remorselessly into the happy family of the label. A lovely and striking package on C45, the cassette is divided between two quite different sets, whose common ground is the sleepy warmth of a […]
Krysalisound The latest release from Krysalisound is the debut from Paolo Iannantuoni, trading as Nāda Mushin. A doyen of the Italian ambient scene, Paolo uses these meditative soundscapes as a means of exploring the dichotomy between movement and stasis; his guitar, electronics and field recordings conjuring up dreamlike states and the metaphysical act of travelling without moving.
Blue Tapes Originally formed to provide a live original soundtrack for a screening of E Elias Merhige’s silent horror film Begotten, this underground supergroup comprising members and associates of the Rude Mechanicals, Gnod and Téléplasmiste has evolved into its own continuing thing. The Begotten‘s debut release is a subtly shifting improvised spectrescape that opens on rattling chains and soft vocalisations, bells chiming
Dronarivm Russian label Dronarivm has released the latest offering from Swedish sound sculptor Ingmar Wennerberg on a beautifully packaged cassette limited to forty-five copies. The images on Snufmumriko‘s Sekunder, Eoner‘s cover depict etchings of ancient flying machines and the drifting drone of opener “Kasta Loss”, emanating from the speakers like an elongated sigh
Zoharum Appearing in a CD edition via the good offices of Zoharum, The Stargazer’s Assistant‘s Mirrors & Tides, Shivers & Voids was originally released on double 10” vinyl in 2013 on Utech Records. The trio here consists of David J Smith, David J Knight and Michael J York, all of whom have been members of Cyclobe and/or UnicaZürn among many other groups (Guapo, Coil, Miasma And The Carousel […]
Modularfield Modularfield is continuing its exploration of contemporary German electronic music with a couple of vinyl releases, both in beautifully executed sleeves by label boss Markus Scholz and on lovely white vinyl. First up is Panic Girl‘s Cake On Jupiter, a perfect title for the solitary joy contained within.
Zoharum Blending field recordings from places as far afield as Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Brooklyn and Indonesia, Robert L Pepper and Robin Storey (also known as Pas Musique and Rapoon respectively) brought Composited Reality to the world on cassette and USB stick in 2018. Now Zoharum have issued a CD edition, and it shimmers with a haze of imaginary and real landscapes made artificial flesh, its coherence constructed into a miasma of hallucinatory […]
Riot Season Finding a welcoming home at Riot Season, Stockholmers Kungens Män‘s umpteenth LP, and their second album for the label, Hårt Som Ben (Hard As Bone) positively oozes out of the speakers, dripping with lysergic guitar sking and a stoner (post-)rocker’s earch for the had-nodding rhythmic chug. Channelling their illustrious Swedish forebears Träd, Gräs Och Stenar as much as the heady noodlings of fellow astral travellers from […]
empreintes DIGITALes Commissioned by Deutschlandfunk Kultur in 2017 and broadcast first in July 2018, Oscillations Planétaires evokes the larger geological cycles of planet Earth, from the eruptions of geysers and volcanoes to the motion of the tides and onwards to the formation of mountain ranges and the tectonic movements of the continental plates themselves.
Warp For his original soundtrack to Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) has pulled out all the faux chorale tricks, conjuring an electronic soundtrack that positively bulges with analogue synths that lay the groundwork for a maze of synthesized and sampled voices which are not averse to interjecting “huhs!” and other Ennio Morricone-esque and sub-Magma vocalisations at suitably dramatic moments.
Mute Sometimes they come back. Throbbing Gristle were never really away. The albums that came out of the charnel house at Industrial Records threw multiple spanners in the works as the ’70s drew to a close. The world TG inhabited then was as grey as their followers and they made no effort to alleviate the suffering. TG were punk, perhaps, but the music turned away from the stop-start […]
Modularfield A squeal of metal and a wave of drone introduces Piksel‘s Places and throws you headlong into a dramatic situation with no time to prepare. Like the slow movement of enormous creatures, wings beating in subterranean isolation, things grind and shriek, and the oppressive drone pushes everything before it.