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It is difficult to acknowledge S U R V I V E’s new album without touching on the hype surrounding it. Half of the Austin band, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, are responsible for the soundtrack to Stranger Things, which has received significant attention. But the fact of the matter is that the band (also featuring Adam Jones of Troller and Mark Donica) has been composing synth heavy film score work for years now, and while they are completely deserving of the attention their work is now receiving, RR7349 would be just as amazing of a record without the hype surrounding their extracurricular activities.
Multimedia artist Steve Roden has stated that his work often begins with the product of some other artist, and becomes a jumping off point for him to create his own inspired work. "Distance Piece," the audio component of Striations presented here, was part of a larger body of work inspired by an unfinished sculpture by his grandmother. The audio portion that makes up this disc may lose a bit in the translation from its overall conceptual framework, but still makes for a strong work on its own.
The enigmatic Fossil Aerosol Mining Project have somehow managed to retain their anonymity in the eight years since the project was reactivated. With this, their consistency in presenting long lost audio recordings (or excellent forgeries of them) in a new and reconstructed context has not waned in the slightest, and this second release this year (the other being digital-only) keeps that mystery alive and fascinating.
Birmingham’s Pram are the rare band that can cause me to simultaneously think conflicting thoughts like "it is absolutely criminal that this band was never as big as Stereolab" and "it is abundantly clear why this band never quite managed to transcend cult status."  In any case, they were unquestionably one of the more idiosyncratic, inspired, and polarizing bands of the '90s, though they finally managed to achieve some widespread success in the early 2000s.  In fact, Helium was recently hailed by FACT as one of the greatest post-rock albums of all-time, while an article on The Quietus proposed The Stars Are So Big as the best album of the '90s.  Appropriately, those first two Pram albums (originally released on Too Pure) have now gotten well-deserved vinyl reissues from Medical Records.  At the risk of sounding reductionist, both of these albums fall into Pram's Krautrock-influenced phase, preceding their (also reductionist) aesthetic swing into more exotica-influenced territory.  Describing Pram as "Krautrock-influenced" does not even remotely begin to capture how bizarre, artfully deranged, and fun some of these songs are though.
I cannot pretend to keep up with Andrew Liles' overwhelmingly voluminous solo output, but I pounced on this album, as it seemed significant that the generally dormant United Dairies label had reawakened to bestow its imprimatur upon this opus.  Happily, my instincts proved to be unerring (as usual).  United Dairies is the perfect home for an album as aberrant as this one: while Steven Stapleton has described it as "a masterpiece of modern contemporary composition" and Liles ostensibly drew his inspiration from the '50s and '60s avant-garde, The Power Elite more accurately sounds like a prolonged nightmare taking place inside the rusted machinery of a clock tower.  This is easily one of the year's strangest and most adventurous albums.
On their third album, Trembling Bells explore traditional folk themes such as boozing, loneliness, landscape, mystical creatures and regret, with more modern and eclectic sounds. Their joyous approach to playing and singing is hypnotic and passionate with enough humor and raw edges to steer well clear of being over-sentimental.
On last year's excellent Fountain, Grody divided his time between nods to droning contemporary ambient and more traditional acoustic guitar fare.  This time around, the focus is much heavier on his more rustic, Takoma-influenced leanings, which yields mixed results.  On one hand, these songs are more distinctive and anachronistic, but their languid pace and comparative lack of hooks blunts their impact a bit. In Search of Light still boasts some wonderful songs though–they're just a bit more sparingly distributed than they were on its predecessor.