Across the five pieces on this album, Ernst Karel and Annette Krebs explore an expansive but tiny sound world; the crackles and rough noises are akin to macro photos of the components of unknown objects. The whole item is out of frame but the viewer (or in this case, listener) is given a generous amount of detail of a small part. Here the sources of the sounds are deliberately kept obfuscated but it forces the listener to pay attention to the minutiae of these noises. The result is an engaging and exhausting album which challenges and drains in equal measure.

I first heard Swans in 1997 when I bought Soundtracks for the Blind in a downtown Portland record store. I picked the album on the strength of the title, but mostly because it was erroneously filed in the "Gothic" section. Immediately after buying it, I went with my father on a trip to Central Oregon. I vividly remember looking out at the blasted volcanic desert along Highway 97 to the accompaniment of the noxious, churning guitar noise of "The Sound". At the time, I had no idea that Swans were braking up or that they had been playing music for as long I had been alive.

Stepping away from the Donna Summer guise, on this album, Jason Forrest uses and abuses a wide range of platters and mixes themtogether into a bubbly cauldron of bad tastes that stays fun andbouncy. Disco, new wave, arena rock and punk are all represented insmall one or two measure doses, and it's the way that Forrestseamlessly combines disperate sounds that makes the record remarkable.

Warren Ellis, Mick Turner, and Jim White take aslightly different slant on Cinder, restricting themselves to shorter times for each piece.  The distinctivesound of Dirty Three remains intact but they sound rejuvenated.  This is a definite strong contender for album of the year.

While there never seems to be any shortage of Nadja related material being released, this release of older material (recorded in 2005 and previously only available as MP3s) drops a lot of the metal elements to Baker's sound and replaces them with trumpet and violin, and emphasizes the ambience and also the underlying melody and structure of these songs.

Thisalbum is the sound of Matthew Herbert nailing his long list of protestto the door of the food industry, composed and constructed by samplesof food. Each track highlights a different aspect of what Herbert seesas a wasteful business.  This way of working couldeasily result in tedious, academic-sounding music but I found it veryenjoyable to listen to both as an album and as a more serious statementon what we are ingesting.

Sound artist and previous Philip Jeck collaborator, Kirkegaard presentsan album of geothermal recordings collected around geysers inIceland.  Surprisingly, the results are a little flat:  the record exists more likebank of archival documents, gravelly source material awaiting revamp.

Long has Brad Rose maintained Digitalis, a beacon of experimental music nestled in the heartland of America. Spreading across the landscape like an epidemic, Rose—along with his wife, Eden—has delivered stack upon stack of gratifying discoveries both influential and enjoyable. But recently the pioneering duo has upped their own musical game, flooding an eager market with a steady stream of fantastic releases. Mechanical Gardens, however, stretches Eden and Brad’s Alter Eagle outfit to the brink of the mainstream.

While Michael Gira certainly wrote many of his finest songs in the late '80s and early '90s, I was never able to embrace the "softer" phase of the Swans oeuvre as readily as I could the rest (a trait that is not uncommon). The main reason is that Gira's defining traits, for me, have always been his iconic intensity and his willingness to be bluntly honest and ugly. Such content was complemented perfectly by the Swans' early, more primal aesthetic, but the more traditionally melodic late-period material made things a bit more complicated.  I have no problem with the change in direction itself, but the central emphasis on melody and conventional rock structure often has a tendency to undercut or obscure the weightier themes in Gira's lyrics. Hearing Gira wrestle with that central conflict as he continues to expand his sound is what makes Love of Life both fascinating and frustrating.

Tepid and, at times, hesitant, James Blackshaw's latest record for Young God is a disappointment. For much of All is Falling he and his band work diligently, trying to weave Blackshaw's erudition into something unique and captivating. Unfortunately, their success is all too infrequent and what results is an unsatisfying collection of stoic songs.

Leona Anderson's mock-pompous operatic voice can provoke amusement and nauseous grimacing. Music To Suffer By is as beguiling as a jar of pickled walnuts: nectar for a few people, odd and repulsive to others. Either way, this re-mastered album shouldn't be swallowed in one sitting.

After the two most recent Jesu works had returned to the heavy guitar sound the project began with, Justin Broadrick saw fit to separate that project into two distinct entities: Jesu for heavy guitar music, and Pale Sketcher (named for the Pale Sketches compilation) for the more ambient and electronic pop sounds. Considering that the two most electronic Jesu releases are among my favorites from that band (the split with Envy and Why Are We Not Perfect), I had high hopes for this project. After hearing it, I think there's a lot of potential with Pale Sketcher, though I don't know if this album demonstrates that inherently.

With a few exceptions, most of Mehdi Ameziane's recording career can be broken down into two simple categories: "great albums" and "albums that would have been great if they had been pared down a bit." Then Fell the Ashes... happily falls quite squarely in the former category. There is definitely some evidence here that Mehdi is continuing to evolve and improve, but the more important thing is that this is one of the most perfect distillations of everything that makes TwinSisterMoon so unique and wonderful. This is one of my favorite albums of 2010.

Although Factory Records has certainly earned its iconic status, most of the label’s best work was released during its early years. While always adventurous and unpredictable, the label began to drift towards decadence, questionable whims, and trends doomed to rapid obsolescence as the '80s unfolded. To his credit, curator James Nice manages to unearth a couple of long-forgotten gems from this dicey period, but most of the songs collected here succeed only as curiosities or mere footnotes in the evolution of contemporary dance music.

 

Apparently the penultimate installment in the long-running series of compilations from Sub Rosa, this volume continues the tradition of putting some of the bigger names (Z'ev, Stephen O’Malley) with some newer and up and coming artists (Torturing Nurse, Robert Piotrowicz), but this time with a seemingly stronger bent towards contemporary "noise," which is a good thing.

The third in a series of three releases (completing the arc that began with Retreat and Return, both released simultaneously last year), this piece also formed the basis of Eleh’s one and only live performance earlier this year at Mutek. Diverting from the usual pursuit of pure tone, Repose sees Eleh adopting a grittier, grainier palette of sound in addition to those ethereal sound waves which dominate the rest of the releases. This is a bewitching but regrettably short experiment with positive results.

The combination of Carsten Nicolai’s Alva Noto persona and Blixa Bargeld has been established as a live entity and the videos that have surfaced online have been tantalizing. This first official output by the duo has finally landed and this EP lives up to all my expectations. Across the two sides of this 12", Nicolai and Bargeld cover huge amounts of ground in a short space of time. From typical Raster-Noton electronics to songs about moles (the digging mammals rather than skin tags), this is as surprising as it is brilliant.

In 1991 three exceptionally creative and influential records were dropped on a mostly deaf audience. It took many years for people to catch up with Talk Talk's Laughing Stock and Slint's Spiderland, and by then numerous other bands had already borrowed their ideas and built new ones upon them. Unfortunately, Swans' White Light from the Mouth of Infinity is still waiting for people to catch up. It completes the trajectory that was begun with Children of God and it perfects the ideas that were only half-realized on The Burning World. More than an influential record, it is arguably Swans' finest and most concise accomplishment to date.

Close on the heels of last year's Caress, Redact, the latest work from Public Speaking’s Jason Anthony Harris (along with some friends) is an even further refinement of his deconstruction of soulful pop and R&B sounds. With equal measures vocals, piano, found sounds, and synth noises, he shapes these disparate elements into catchy songs, albeit within a depressing and bleak context.

Easily the most maligned release in Swans' discography, there is a definite awkwardness to it, no doubt in part to major label pressures and the heavy hand of Bill Laswell on the production. However, listening to the material in context, it does show the evolution of the band's sound, even with its obtuseness. While it does have a certain "sore thumb" quality to it, it is a necessary evolutionary step for the band that’s flawed, and a flawed Swans album is better than most other bands at their best.