This stripped-down 20-minute EP captures Blackshaw back near the top of his game, finding the perfect synergy between his talents as a steel-string virtuoso and his ambitions as a more varied composer.  While the overall feeling of these two pieces is languorous, melancholy, and impressionistic, the crisp sound and complex and inventive arrangements imbue them with a surprising amount of dazzle and immediacy.  James makes a virtue of brevity, as Holly is a complete, undiluted, and consistently strong effort.
Compared to the sprawling songs on their previous album 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra have streamlined their songs as well as their name and their line up for this album (the band are now a far more manageable five piece compared to the larger ensembles of previous albums). Granted there are still a couple of monster-sized pieces here but there are a number of shorter, punchier songs to break them up. Kollaps Tradixionales shows this pared down Silver Mt. Zion in ferocious form, the stark beauty of their music reinforced with a renewed fire in their bellies. As usual, I am completely blown away by their music.
The anchoring of western music to equal temperament has on one hand lead to many musical developments but on the other hand, there is a whole world of musical textures and approaches to composition lost to instruments that are stuck playing in chromatic scales. On this excellent compilation, several artists explore intonation from a number of different approachesm utilizing a range of instruments. Ranging from almost ambient soundworks to difficult conceptual pieces, The Harmonic Series is an expansive anthology of unusual and beautiful music.
In the canon of Whitehouse, this is an odd release. It lacks the unabashed brutality of the early releases, the monotone sex-crazed sounds of the mid period, and is far more restrained than anything that has been released since. I think for that reason this has become, at least for me, their lost classic. Not lacking the caustic, angry vocals and genuinely disturbing moments of their discography, the other component is a very nuanced study of electronic textures, and an oh-so-subtle sense of humor and irony that really holds it all together.
Consisting of two distinct conceptual pieces spread across a total of four tracks, La Casa creates sound based upon the disparate concepts of both nature and urban sprawl, utilizing field recordings in each case both in their untouched and heavily treated states. The complex result is simultaneously warm and inviting, yet cold and detached, exactly as the source material would lead one to expect.
The title of this album alludes to a deeply macabre and scatological Indonesian myth about young girl who possessed the dubious magical ability to defecate surprising items ranging from earrings to knives to...well...gongs. When she distributed these items to men at a village dance, the villagers collectively decided that her power was an infernal and unseemly one and that they needed to bury her alive. Fortunately, the story has a happy (albeit grisly) ending, as her friend later dug up her corpse, dismembered it, and reburied its parts all over the village, which caused delicious tuberous plants to grow. 
Aranos’s new long-form opus may be a bit lacking in his characteristic eccentricity, but it maintains his usual high standards of adventurousness, difficulty, and oblique conceptuality. While ostensibly a drone piece, the tone is much less meditative than I expected. Instead, Crow Eye Hint is a nakedly experimental and exploratory work for much of its duration, focusing on both negative space and the acoustic properties of misused pianos and clashing tones. Also, it gets pretty scary.
Recorded throughout the '90s and released in 1998 by Robot Records, the first proper album from The Aeolian String Ensemble is something of a mystery. Though it is attributed primarily to the work of David Kenny, the liner notes for Lassithi/Elysium also mention names like David Tibet and Steven Stapleton. Both songs bear out comparisons to music by either one, but the Ensemble's especially light touch and new age flourishes are entirely unique to them.
This is the first album from Wang Changcun, who is a member of the China Sound Unit, a group dedicated to investigating aural phenomena in various urban centers. Blurring the distinction between noise and the avant-garde, it also marks the first release of a Chinese composer by a Western label with international scope.
The composer Daniel Smutny has dropped his first name for his debut album. Despite his avant garde leanings, Telehors is accessible and devoid of any scholastic tendencies. It is a nice album made up of abstract sounds and haunting melodies. It can get dull at times but overall Telehors is a highly enjoyable experience.
Earth Covers Earth was the first Current 93 album I obsessed over. I acquired it not long after I found a copy of Emblems for $2.89 in a bargain bin at a record store where none of the clerks had ever heard of David Tibet or Current 93. It was a godsend. When I first heard Emblems it was like being drawn towards a black hole, and when I finally sealed my fate by listening to Earth Covers Earth I was pulled beyond the event horizon. One of the things I love about this album is the mixture of Tibet’s own lyrical songwriting, traditional tunes, and the obscure metaphysical poetry set to music. Pervaded by a vitriolic melancholy, I listen to it when I want to evoke the intermingled feelings of sadness, hope, futility, anger, joy and faith.
Like great film noir, everypiece of Murcof's puzzle is obviously manufactured and manipulated andcalculated and refined; it so completely captures a tone that I don'tmind that the sets are fake or the lighting is hyper-real.
Pup is another entry into the highly nuanced, subtle, and delicate world ofminimalism that at one time would have been called “ambient” but nowgoes by titles like “lowercase.” There’s too much of this sortof thing for me to be able to stay abreast of, but Dan Abrams’ work asFenton is solid and enjoyable.
Youth and painfully melodramatic vocals don't spell out "genius" in big, bold letters. While much of the music that this 17 year-old old writes sounds nice (in terms of production), many of his songs are covered in a too-sweet glow that renders all the glorious fuzz and inherent beauty of his guitar work null. Connor Kirby-Long makes music full of good ideas: at times his arrangements hint at a desire to push his own songwriting abilities forward, but all too often this results in a stifling inertia where nothing goes anywhere. There's huge washes of electronic buzz permeating every corner of every song, but this isn't enough to carry the record all by itself.
In describing the sound of Mono's third full-length album it's hard not to invoke a number of bands whom I have nevertheless sworn to eschew in the body of this review. Let it suffice to say that the music is sweeping, anthemic, instrumental, crescendo-heavy, at once deliberately delicate and mindlessly reckless; this much should give you some idea of the musical path on which Mono tread (some might even call it a new path to Helicon, to tell the truth).
There is something otherworldly lurking just below the surface of Klas Rydberg's strained howls that is slightly off-putting, something that is not so much heard as felt, something that draws you in while oozing a slight uneasiness. Where a majority of the increasing number of sludgy, pseudo doom acts are content to pound away on the same note for hours on end in the name of "atmosphere," this Swedish septet strives for something more on their third full length.
In an era when so many guitarists have taken to laptop processing in order to coax new life from their thought-tired instruments, it seems only fair that other solo-instrumentalists should join the fun. And while the cello has enjoyed its fair share of fusion within the rock sphere, I've yet to see someone sit alone with this instrument, so engorged with classical and acoustic traditions, and really "plug in." Part of what makes Arnold Haberl's output as Noid so fascinating is the way the Austrian cellist moves beyond a banal, deconstructivist treatment of his playing and into ideas for composition where the computer feels less like a medium guiding the production of a piece and more like a voice within the music, to be engaged and countered, rather than simply played-through. Haberl's pieces branch off of strict minimalist ideas, bypassing crude layering techniques of the analog past and instead favoring tightly-wound, stuttering loop effects, drawn out often to the realm of nauseous formalism. Rarely is any multi-tracking involved in Noid's creations; rather miniature fragments of playing are captured, treated, and allowed to loop out, at times for over ten minutes with no real variation. The cello's woody groan becomes an industrial sander on the opening "melodien," stripped of human presence, even a performer's pause or the negative space of a hand slightly off-beat. It's clear after such a beginning that this will be "process" music, here less about the process of making, which becomes increasingly transparent as the disc progresses, and more about the process of listening, of accepting the music's sensory overload in juxtaposition with virtual lifelessness of the sounds themselves and the possibility of their "performance." Haberl does perform with live sampling and manipulation, and the points on Monodigmen where his cello is left recognizable logically become some of the most mind-numbing. "Vacuum 1" is a 12-minute piece of the cellist in lock-groove mode, struggling around what sounds like the opening strains of "Flight of the Bumblebee." After the question of Haberl actually playing such an infernal half-measure over and over again has been ruled out, listening becomes a tug-of-war between enduring the instrument's stunted flight and the utter detachment resulting from the search for patterns, or anything "material" in the music, and finding nothing. I hesitate to dismiss Noid's music as a purely formal exercise because of the way he continuously engages the elements of poise and human concentration almost inseparable from his chosen instrument, in an ultimate reduction of all that is traditionally expressive about it. There are times when Monodigmen feels like an extension of Cage's efforts to communicate the zen-like void or 'nothing' in musical composition; other times, however, Haberl's creation seems too much of an endurance test to communicate anything worth the time it takes to get there.
Also on the short side—but decidedly not as fun—is the third album from French musician, vocalist and poet Toog. The record is intended to be a modern variation on Poems For Lou, a book written during World War I by poet and soldier Guillaume Apollinaire who was inspired by a woman named Lou that he loved and lost in Nice before the war. In Toog's version, the role of the muse is played by actress Asia Argento, and WWI is replaced by the war and terrorism of the post-9/11 world. It's impossible for me to verify if Toog's words truly reflect these themes, as aside from two pieces that are sultrily spoken by Argento, all of the readings are in French, a language that I remember very little of from my lessons of many years ago. At least the music, which is produced by French sound artist Digiki, is generally quite nice, mixing together elements of downtempo electro & ambient with low-key pop & hip-hop, and even some hints of industrial, classical and cabaret. Given the strong poetic theme of the work, however, it's quite obvious that without some understanding of the words, listeners just won't get the full message that Toog is trying to convey in the 10 tracks on 'Lou Etendue'.
