Against the Day
Since Sam Shalabi enjoyed his mini-breakout in 2004 with the Shalabi Effect's The Trial of St. Orange, the Montreal composer has explored the overlap between popular Western music and traditional Middle Eastern musics, particularly those from Egypt, the country from which Shalabi's parents hailed. These projects tend to be diffuse and ambitious: Shalabi works with dozens of musicians on long, brash drones, or plays meditative oud pieces in comfy theaters. Land of Kush, …
Olympians
‘Experimental’ bands are never going to please everyone; a lot of them seem almost uninterested in being anything but show-offs and twats, and there’s occasionally no attempt to make a connection twixt music and listener. All we get is: ‘marvel at my amazing button-pushing skills.’ And then, suddenly and horrifically, you turn into your dad: ‘that’s not music, that’s noise!’ Despite the post-watershed name, Fuck Buttons have always been a more subtle and meditative addition to the experime…
Up From the Sewers
A Chicago act was responsible for this underground album - sometimes referred to as Euphoria Blimp Works Presents Yama And The Karma Dusters Up From The Sewers, although Euphoria Blimp Works and Yama and The Karma Dusters were both alternate names for the group. An excellent album of varied musical styles, it includes high energy rockers (Revolution (not The Beatles song), CTA and the excellent Evolution, with its environmentally conscious lyrics). There are also folk-rockers (Don't Kill The Bab…
Dream
This review for Wet Hair’s excellent debut full-length is dedicated to the late Barry Goldwater, five-term U.S. Senator. In 1984, Senator Goldwater wrote the Cable Franchise Policy and Communications Act, allowing local governments to require public, educational, and government access channels on television sets in their area. This act also wiped said local government’s hands clean of whatever content these channels would feature. Because of this act, because of Barry Goldwater, many a ni…
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…