In my opinion most remixers are lazy, worthless slugs that bring nothing of interest to music. Funckarma don’t appear to fall into this low life form category.

Recompas main man Travis Thatcher gave me a copy of his first album forFlorida’s Nophi label months ago, but I’m ashamed to admit that thedisc sat at the bottom of a bag and then the bottom of a stack on mydesk until just now. I’m glad that I finally dug it up as it’s quicklyfound a place in my year-end “best of” list.

 

The Hangable Auto Bulb EPs have been a bit of a holy grail for Aphex Twin fans and now I understand why. It covers in eight tracks most of the ground that he covers in the ten years or so since the EPs’ original release.

The latest from Architect recaptures a lot of what I used to enjoyabout industrial club music without playing in the regrettable sandboxof melodrama and bad rhyming couplets that forced me to leave most ofthat music behind a decade ago.  This is boot-stomping beat musicthat I don't feel ashamed to blast even if I'm not heading to a club.

Until now I’d have called Tape’s musicseasonally or temperamentally effective, but Rideau arrives as a near-reinvention of the trio’s sound, theirmost fully-realized and best record yet. Tapehas clearly taken a chance with this one and I’m glad. 

On his latest album, Randy Garcia sings “Music is the only reason on this Earth for some of us to stay,” and it’s a mantra that’s as catchy as it is bittersweet. Nerd Parade is a celebration of life and music, and it’s just another in a long line of quality home-brewed records from Garcia’s criminally overlooked Nophi Recordings.

The collection of obscure older tracks from this Cologne-sceneüber-collaborator replaces a legacy of pastoral ambience and blessed outelectronica with the exuberances of a bedroom pop star, leaving me feeling abit punkt.

Slowly, and without a lot of fanfare, the members of this ever-changingand evolving collective have become the world's first full-scalecarnival band without a carnival to play.  Instead, life is theircarnival, and they a group of minstrels that record their reactions tothe happenings around them, natural and unnatural, without sparing thelistener anything.

He goes by the name Lucifer and he makes a noise that'll stand outamong every other noise album in just about anyone's collection.Throbbing Gristle was as much concerned with beats as they were withconfrontation and the Noise/Girl project takes that premise a stepforward.

I’ve never been to the Midwest, but based on the bands that come out ofthat whole scene, I have to imagine it to be a pretty fucked up place.Stnnng(pronounced “stunning”) call Minneapolis their home and they can’t helpbut be a reflection of a geographical area known better for itsoppressive winters and amazing ability to be flat than its contributionto society.

Just when I'd almost completely forgotten about Tactile, John Everallchimes in with another well-timed collection of abstract electronicevocations of interior emotional landscapes.

This brief EP from Larsen contains four new tracks from their upcomingalbum, two which have been remixed by other artists, and two whichappear in nascent form, and will be subject to additional mixing byLustmord before they appear on the album proper. By its very nature,it's a pretty superfluous stopgap, and doesn't share the engrossing,complex moods of Larsen's full-length albums.

Thanks in no small regard to the efforts of high profile DJs like Richie Hawtin, whose DE9mix CDs in particular have served as accessible benchmarks for thesubgenre, minimal techno and its incestuous electronic variantscontinue to enjoy the freedoms of expression and progression whilemaintaining an audience.

1996. Near Reykjavik, Iceland. Staring at the brick home was not a pleasant experience; the lights seeping coolly out of the windows never impressed anyone with kindness or welcoming warmth. If there was any reason for the continued interest taken in the building, it was certainly because of its occupant, a man whose strange walk and unconvincing kindness spoke of foreign intrigue and deep suspicion. 

Although it's not a split single, "Smiling Off" is split down themiddle: the first half being the 4/4 dance record and the second beingthefree-form noise-off.

For Black Dice's third full-length LP for DFA, they've almost completely abandoned the tropical sunshine of Creature Comfortsand embraced their family's beat tendencies. It's still Black Dice,however, and the whimsical surrealistic approach to songwriting isstill present, however it's more refined than ever.

Twenty-one of the bigger names in independent music can be and probably have been wrong, but they're spot on with The Now Sound Redesigned,a remix project that can rightly be called an event. The relevant backstory: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the four Dedrick siblingscreated some beautifully constructed and legitimately awe-inspiringsunshine pop over a five year period. Never garnering commercialsuccess, the Dedricks called it quits in 1972, leaving their creationsto languish in obscurity forever, but for the LPs purchased second-handby vinyl junkies and fanatical crate diggers.

For any musician that has had a career as long and as important as Michael Gira, keeping up the momentum must be an almost overwhelming task. As if the early Angels of Light material wasn’t enough of a departure from Swans, successive albums and tours have seen Gira stripping his sound and his songs down to a rootsy, folk-fueled core that is both more immediate and more direct than most of his back catalogue. While the last Angels of Light full length left me feeling that I’d peeked a bit too closely in on the man behind the curtain, Gira’s portion of the latest split release with Akron/Family accomplishes more of that uneasy closeness and it’s his portion of the disc that I’m most apt to skip.

Inna City Pressure was a true revelation on its initial releasein 1998. Long before the term "mashup" entered the lexicon andunforeseen marriages between, say, Jay-Z and the Beatles were commoncurrency, Dr. Israel welded together reggae, dub, metal, punk, jungleand drum 'n' bass with ease and verve, simultaneously revealing theunderpinnings the genres had in common while seamlessly creating afresh and vital sound all his own. Seven years on sees Dr. Israel witha new label, hordes of imitators, thousands of these new "mashups," anda large potential audience that may not be in the know. So the braintrust at ROIR has deemed it time for an Inna City Pressure reissue.

This is an album filled to the brim with the sounds of the space-time beingslowed down to an audible crawl. Sun Ra thought that space was theplace, but Aranos must've decided that such a comment just wouldn't doand took the whole concept a step further: the space-time continuum isthe place, a more ephemeral, seething place.