Split
Despite the fact I've always had a liking for Pan Sonic I recently found out that Mika Vainio isn't actually the one with the fringe. Oh well, that's faceless leccyblokes for you. The one without the fringe is on spectacularly uncompromising form here, beginning with a nasty bit of high-frequency blasting before crashing into a heavy, ultra distorted 'tone' that could almost pass for Sunn 0))) being processed to within an inch of their lives. A temporary respite eventually arrives in the …
Birdland
This is the deluxe remastered LP edition of the previously cassette only release on Beniffer Editions. It is their third official full length, described as 'a totally peaced out collection of destructo boombox symphonies'. Sounds about right to us. This French Canadian duo, who’s output has been prolific already - two full lengths, two cassettes, a single and an appearance on the “World’s Lousy Vol. 2” comp - is mining territory similar to Chrome and Suicide channelled through warm layers…
Immer Etwas
Immer Etwas is the first full length release from this one man bedroom recording project turned full on 5-piece live band. Nice Face have been turning out singles, comp tracks, and cassettes at a steady clip over the past two years and change. This LP is a solid thirteen tracks of drum-machine driven blown out hook-laden punk rock that one reviewer prone to curmudgeonly ranting proclaimed “locks Blank Dogs in the pound, erases ‘Psychedelic’ from Psychedelic Horseshit, makes purses and boo…
Life Review (1993-2003)
The Shadow Ring formed in the seaside town of Folkestone, England in 1993. Over the course of a decade, and through eight LPs, Graham Lambkin, Darren Harris and later Tim Goss scraped out a unique musical pathway for themselves, armed with only the barest of tools. With each release the Shadow Ring presented themselves as a group in constant flux. Naive acoustic improvisations, dour bedroom sci-fi epics, cryptic D.I.Y. theatre and glacial electronic soundscapes all became fair game in the…
On Patrol
Gorgeous double LP version "If a tree falls in a forest and no one's around, shit still gets crushed. If Cameron Stallones holes up solo-style in a suburban cave and wah-riffs over canned bongos for five straight months, double LPs still get dropped. These are basic life laws. The latest from Mr. Araw is easily his least compromising audio self-portrait to date. Three minute rhythm sketches are stretched into ten minute loop pedal odysseys. Organ solos last for entire vinyl sides. Ambiguou…
A Small Turn Of Human Kindness
Athens weirdcore trio Harvey Milk is a blessedly difficult band to “know.” They frustrate category, aesthetic response, and heavy music scene politics in estimable, admirable ways. On the heels of their feedback-saturated return to recording – first the somewhat tentative Special Wishes and then 2008’s Life . . . the Best Game in Town – they return with A Small Turn of Human Kindness, an album named after the very first track on their 1996 debut. A seven-part dirge, this album continues …
Beautiful Monolith Two
It seems as Campbell Kneale (within his Love Will Destroy The World project) aims to discover any darkest and most dangerous corners of the modern experimental music. As an experienced and dedicated hunter, he doesn't walk the empty tracks, rather he's interested much more in rich bushes and impassable thickets. The A side's track is “Glittery Skin”, it shows Merzbow-like pulsating electronic noises, but the main energy-giver is obscure and doomy heavy guitar riff. Sick, anarchic, trancesending …
Wealth
This is the first solo album of Norwegian composer and musician Jørgen Knudsen who was a founding member of highly acclaimed duo Information. This duo had an unique combination of sound and creative methods as well as their interest in connecting music with visuals, texts, dances etc. Information released a few fantastic albums on labels such as Beatservice and Rune Grammofon. Jørgen had been working on his first solo album during last few years, recording and collecting the audio sources for it…
Para Pacem Para Bellum
Para Pacem Para Bellum” is the first CD release with the great music of Svyatoslav Lunyov's. That serious, highly emotional and spiritual work is the result of two general methods of creating music: academic tradition (scores, acoustic instruments and playing of the real musicians) and the contemporary/experimental way (generating, synthesis, editing with computer tools). Needs to say that this electro-acoustic work combines the well-known traditional elements of the Requiem, Passions and the Ma…
Le Voyage
On 2008, Dusted’s Matthew Wuethrich wrote of last Alps LP, III: “The overall effect is anachronistic, but never nostalgic,” and that “filmic atmosphere is key to the album.” Much of the same can be said for Le Voyage, which finds the San Francisco psych-folk trio working in the same framework, exploring (what is now) familiar stylistic territory. And while this can be seen as lack of progression, the band has made an even better record here, dialing-back some of the meandering tendencies …
Crow Autumn
Richard Skelton’s work as A Broken Consort is, ostensibly, consistently and easily contextualized within a broader composer-centric scene. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, for example, deal in similar realms of psychogeographics with their soundtrack work on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and the like. There, the compositions render emotions on the physical plane. Landscapes and troubled faces don’t just feel alienated or manic or soul-crushingly vast. They look it.…
Apocatastisis
released 10 march, 2007. performed and recorded by michael gibbons (bardo pond) over the course of 2006 in the lemur house, apocatastisis is a meditation on restoration and awakening. an inner voyage in seven parts consisting of guitars, effects, sitar, tabla and violin. a truly special record. from a one-time pressing of 677 hand-numbered copies. housed within sleeves that were individually silk-screened by alan sherry (SIWA). all pre-orders of this release also received copies of this 500mg bo…
Self-portrait
The April edition of jazkamer's 2010 monthly CD-series. The first all-acoustic jazkamer record.
Peradam
In Rene Daumal's Mount Analogue, a peradam is described as a clear and extremely hard stone, a true crystal. It is so transparent that it is nearly impossible to see. To discover a peradam was always the result of an inner act. At said moment in time, the stone's brilliance might catch the eye of one who seeks the truth. Most peradams were found on the rough and dangerous trails up the mountain. Peradam is the result of Marcia Bassett (Zaimph, Hototogisu) and Jenny Grf (Harrius, Metalux) collabo…
Reflex
Reflex is the fifth solo album by Switzerland's Reto Mder (Ural Umbo, Sum of R, Pendulum Nisum) as RM74. A creepy, paranoid record of sinister melody and complex structure. Electronics, organ, synthesizer, guitars and other instrumentation drifts in and out of bizarre atmospherics. The tracks gain emotional resonance as they move among vexing swells of dense, rotting psychedelia. Presented in a heavy matte sleeve printed with dark metallic ink. Includes fold out insert. Photograph by Phill…
Blind Jesus
Blind Jesus by Andrew L. Hooker and Stefano Pilia debuts with a record that, according to this writer, is one of the best works of avant-rock heard recently: unravelled stuttering in the vein of Storm & Stress fall from crumbling gorges of tape loops, caracoling flights in the foreground interrupted with improvised retro-folk, wanton porno-concrète jokes arm-in-arm with strained ecstatic drones, followed by melancholic acoustic crackling, industrial creaking, soulful moans, obstacular Supreme Di…
Guitares Derive
A host of independent labels sprang up in France during the pivotal period of the 60s and 70s in the course of the cultural and musical revolution then unfolding; labels like the legendary Saravah, BYG, Futura, but also Shandar, a cult label par excellence set up in 1971 by gallery owner Chantal Darcy in collaboration with the journalist Daniel Caux (1945-2008) as artistic director. Just a glimpse at the Shandar catalogue makes one’s head spin, as all of its productions have become key musical r…
Thing
For fifteen years, Trans Am has forged a musical legacy that has consistently confounded those who would confine them to generic indie-rock labels and rather spoken for itself. Trans Am a-la 2010 is a band of veterans unafraid to contradict themselves, one that has grown stronger in its music and more confident in its identity over the course of now nine full length albums.
City of Straw
On their seventh studio album, Sightings don’t make any radical breaks from their past. Instead, Richard Hoffman, Jonathan Lockie and Mark Morgan continue the slow evolution of their vision, a sort of "industrialization" of rock. On 2007’s Through the Panama, the trio achieved their best amalgamation yet. City of Straw doesn’t really up the ante, but it stays right there. These 39 minutes run the gamut from chittering electronics to punk chaos. When saying "industrial" in reference to …
Real Life Is No Cool
As supportive as Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's fans have been of his random acts of creative fitfulness, one wouldn't blame them for feeling a bit tested by his most recent string of output. Between his brilliant but impractical 2008 long-player Where You Go I Go Too and his 42-minute refit of "Little Drummer Boy", two of the Norwegian producer's recent major releases have accounted for nearly 100 minutes of music across a scant four tracks. In a scene where an elongated 12-minute re…