I put Lower Lip Interface on and was blasted with two amazing tracks from the start. "Ghost of a Working Man" sounds like pre-Berlin move Aaron Spectre and the second cut, "Catch The Target," reminded me of every reason I liked industrial dance music to begin with. It's too bad the disc drops off into predictable club-music territory from there on out.
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12273 Hits
For anyone who has spent any serious amount of time listening to the leftfield of electronica over the past three or four years, it's hard to imagine someone reinventing the proverbial wheel. I know the more I listen to new and "underground" electronica, the more I keep hearing the same things over and over. Phat beats make for a great 12" or live set but an album needs more. Nebulo gives a lot more. On Kolia, through atmospherics and melody, Nebulo has made the best electronica album I've heard since Ellen Allien's Berlinette.
10157 Hits
After Unai's substandard A Love Moderne made for an inauspicious resurrection for Force Tracks, this full-length from a netlabel favorite picks up the gauntlet previously held by Dub Taylor and M.R.I. Still, it isn't quite enough to bolster the once unassailable tech-house imprint.
8240 Hits
Despite (or perhaps because of) a 25 year long career playing with Einstürzende Neubauten, Mania D and Malaria! as well as running a successful record label, she has never put out her own album. I Put a Record On is a far cry from her previous work with the other groups: it captures the modern Berlin's new slick, chic culture as opposed to the decay and geographical isolation that gave birth to the Neue Deutsche Welle.
6471 Hits
A stylistic mish-mash of styles, cultures, and sounds, Radio Zumbido create the perfect documentary soundtrack for a film that does not exist. My first thought on a quick sampling of this disc was old Bomb Squad era Public Enemy.
7931 Hits
Die Stadt's reissue program of early Asmus Tietchens' early releases continues into its ninth iteration, this time focusing on two records from the late 1980s. Both differ greatly in their approach and are not equally compelling to these ears.
7503 Hits
The mad man from the Pacific Northwest creates an album based solely on the sound of Native American percussion, with the processed results as wild as the roaring bear that adorns the album's sleeve.
11841 Hits
The second installment in a proposed David Jackman trilogy (preceded by Sanctus, and to be completed with Omega) lives up to its name with a spiritual recording of Hammond organ, tower bell, gong, and processed voices.
9335 Hits
Inspired by a German audiobook of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, the tracks on this album suitably evoke contact with distant landscapes that may or may not be inhabited. An eerie otherness pervades these songs, as if anxiously awaiting the arrival of alien emissaries.
8365 Hits
Robert Horton weaves together drones, field recordings, improvisations on homemade instruments, and digital manipulations in the creation of this excellent, otherworldly recording. His explorations go in such a variety of directions and altered states that it is hard not to be a little awestruck in their wake.
7714 Hits
The latest installment to spill from Andrew Liles' ambitious and generous Vortex Vault series casts Liles as the ringleader of a black magic vaudeville act. Theatrical and playfully whimsical, this multilingual, dialogue-laden album is a striking release that shifts modes effortlessly, revealing new finds from Liles' unlimited bag of tricks at every turn.
8161 Hits
If Toronto's Do Make Say Think haven't changed much in the decade or so they've been on the scene, it's because they haven't needed to. Their mastery of their basic aesthetic elements—from their natural, textured guitar sound, to their melancholy passages, huge crescendos, album-long symmetry and even their earthy packaging—works so well that they need little evolution. It's as if they found the perfect moment and haven't left it in ten years.
6838 Hits
This collects rehearsal tapes and live performances from DIJ's early days, but is unfortunately more of an interesting historical curiosity rather than a compelling listen for anyone but the most die hard fans.
12397 Hits
Current 93 hit the hight point of their career with the album at the center of this trilogy: 1996's All the Pretty Little Horses was and is the most perfectly rendered artistic statement that David Tibet and company have created. This will sound like blasphemy to the legions who jumped aboard the apocalyptic folk train with last year's Black Ships Ate the Sky, but trust me: I know what I'm talking about. This album is much, much better than Black Ships, and I unreservedly consider it to be one of the finest albums ever recorded.
52141 Hits
The second album from the duo of Thomas Strønen and Ståle Storløkken sees them continue the good work they started on their debut album. This cheery album is one of the better things that either of them have been involved in, a collection of music far from the chaos of Supersilent and yet more active and organic than most Norwegian electronic music.
9324 Hits
Quellet’s approach to musique concrete and sound manipulation pays careful homage to the likes of Pierre Schaeffer and Luc Ferrari but Quellet's own mark remains distinct. His work has its own voice despite the weight of history that he is composing against. It is nice to hear a fresh take on what has become a stodgy and uninspired field of music; he clearly has a lot of talent and a good ear for sound.
7760 Hits
I'm not a big nostalgia nut but I do somewhat feel that various artist collections (especially a ton of those cassette-only compilations) of the late 1970s and early 1980s were far more relevant than the bulk of the collections from the mid 1990s through now. From Brussels With Love is the latest LTM re-release to exemplify this.
10130 Hits
This too short two-tracker sees Fag Tapes label head and Graveyards percussionist push each other into a messy hinterland of fumbling, scraped metal ambience.
9908 Hits
Wary of the dubious hype emanating from The Wire and other pretentious, quasi-academic outlets, I've pretty much steered clear of any "heavy" album one might learn of from such sources. Yet, something about the bass/drum duo known as Big Business drew me to seek out their latest album, and having done so I'm not the least bit disappointed.
10711 Hits
While Low are still known best for their basic three instrument arrangements, they have continuously been pushing their studio recordings to places beyond the signature sound and fan expectation. With Drums and Guns, they may have gone a bit too far. As much as I love Low and consider them one of the best rock music songwriting entities ever, no matter how much I listen to this album, I can't connect with it as a whole as much as I want to.
10536 Hits
