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What's immediately striking about the third album by Michael Gira's Angels of Light is the visual presentation. The six photos—an empty chair, a cluttered desk, a room full of plants, a bookcase loaded with CDs and books, a rosary draped over a thermostat, and, perhaps most tellingly, an empty bedseem to paint a picture of a sufficient but lonely life.
Coil is easily playing some of their most haunting, spectral, hypnotic, and sublime material ever, combining the new with the old and doing so without the outcome sounding muddled or too disparate.
While I love sociological criticism woven into art, if it is so deliberate that it is an album's strongest point, I'm bound to be disappointed after the first listen. That being said, Lovebomb is an extremely well-founded concept album about love and the expression of culturally specific social processes, an overarching thesis that I won't attempt to evaluate. Thaemlitz covers many angles and perspectives in his exploration of this ubiquitous emotion, using generally interesting, but sometimes run of the mill, electro-acoustic music.
This two disc set is comprised of installations and live performances and, despite some interesting departures from Köner's recent output, is encumbered by its scope and formlessness.
"They bestride the Earth." John Peel said that once on his old BBC World Service show to introduce a Fall song and as a vague reference to how he would often stretch his own programming rules in their case. I feel the same way about Mika Vainio. Unfair preferential treatment is in order and a new release must be celebrated. Vainio's recorded works have been in the areas of techno (as √ò, Philus), installations (Onko), out electro-rock (Pan Sonic and Endless), and finally soundscapes, which is where In The Land belongs together with Kajo and Ydin. In this context and that of nineties and naughties electronica, In The Land is hardly radical but it is exceptional.