For the cross-generational group of indie psychedelic rock fans that I like to call the Terrascopers, last year's Ta Det Lungtby Swedish group Dungen was a revelation. This is not to suggest thatmany others before Dungen hadn't also explored the same generalpost-Beatles territory, but merely that no one had done it with quiteas much aplomb and effectiveness as Dungen, at least not since theglory days of Elephant 6 groups like Olivia Tremor Control.
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Xian Hawkins composes some of the most elegant and addicting music, butremains somewhat lost in the tidal wave of other electronic composerscurrently active. It's a shame because, as Sybarite, he manages tocoerce soft, seductive, and contemplative songs out of his machineryand his music never gets old; it's never lost in an emphasis onproduction or artiness.
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Recorded just shortly after the release of her last, self-titled album,this 7" is a rare document of Jessica Bailiff's sound away from thestudio. Included are two songs available on her full-length recordings,a cover of "Come and Close My Eyes" by Flying Saucer Attack, and aversion of "Shadow," which was previously available only on Disc A ofthe Brain in the Wirecompilation.
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Of the three 7" records released by Brainwashed this month, Aranos' twosongs stand out as shocking and strange, even with his already strangediscography considered. "No Religion" gets straight to the point as athumping bass drum and tambourine fade in, Aranos sings, "Oh, I've gotno religion and I'm glad."
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Damien Jurado dabbles thoughtfully in Americana, making the whole ofour country's midlands his playground. His songwriting has always beensharp (lauded and even appropriated by artists like Neil Halstead) andit loses none of it acuteness on these most recent twelve songs.
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For Surrounded By Silence, the fourth full-length release as Prefuse 73, Scott Herren picks up the thread from where 2003's One Word Extinguisherleft off in terms of pushing the envelope of musical beats forming intosublime compositions divided with interesting interludes. Havingpreviously collaborated on some tracks with MCs, this time out Herrenhas invited a bevy of singers and MCs such as Beans, Aesop Rock, MastaKilla and the GZA, who turn up to further enrich a good deal of thedisc's 21 tracks.
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Having spent the better part of the past ten years successfully fusinglarge ensemble jazz with electronic-based music(s) for a fresh andinteresting take, Norwegian collective, Jaga Jazzist, have refinedtheir chops and compositions for their fourth official release, What We Must.
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Perhaps electronic music's most "obscure known" collective, TheExposures began their music careers in the late 1970s as anonymoustelevision composers, creating uncredited background music forcommercials and short films on a major German television station.
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Brendan Murray is one of the most unsung practitioners of experimentalmusic in Boston's fertile scene. This beautifully crafted set of fourpieces should do much to raise his profile. As the tracks were recordedover a period of three years, each track has a slightly different feel.Murray has strengthened the set by choosing a universal theme (varioustypes of resting places) and representing it in different ways throughcareful editing.
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Music as abstract as that made over the years by Dylan Carlson's Earthlends itself to wildly variant interpretations by various people, whoread different motives into the music based on their preconceivednotions and unconscious desires. For a generation of Seattle grungescenesters, Earth were purveyors of speaker-rumbling, slow-motionheroin rock, the gloomy grunge aesthetic taken to its logical extreme.
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Aural Rage is the work of engineer and producer Danny Hyde, who isprobably best known for working with Coil during the group'stransitional period from the late 1980s to the mid-90s, a period thatincluded some of Coil's most accessible works, Love's Secret Domain, the Backwardssessions, and remixes for Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode.
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Jonas Munk's most recent releases have been a series of collaborationswith Jess Kahr, Syntaks, and Icebreaker International, the two formerbeing band-mates of Munk's in Limp, but in his first autonomous releasesince 2002's Ascend,Manual sounds more like his less beat-driven songs from his 12" onHobby Industries (compare a song like "I-dawn").
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Any doubt that the term "drone," as applied to this sort of music, iscompletely and ridiculously misleading should be eliminated afterlistening to this recording. While all sorts of pulsing tones are usedand thrown away on Long Heat,the most noticeable aspect this collaboration is that it never sitsstill or relies on constant droning sounds to achieve its ratherconfusing effect.
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I'm having difficulty imagining a sound more alluring than the one produced by this German sextet. Two years ago, Cicadidaeput me under its spell and maintained a constant spot on my late-nightlistening play list. The band has tightened up for their latest releaseand managed to outdo themselves.
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13+God is the final product of an intensive 17-day studiocollaboration between vaunted German electro-pop outfit The Notwist andUS-based ambitious free-range "rappers" Themselves. Unlikelybedfellows, a common admiration for each others' work led to thetrans-Atlantic tete-e -tete, which originally began with home-madeNotwist remixes of tracks from Themselves' avant-garde LP The No Music.All the disparate elements of both groups—Notwist-staple dreamy, catchyhooks and scattered computerized percussion; themselves' esoteric andhalf-growled, half-whined verses—are noticeably present and,surprisingly, mesh quite well together.
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Though it did make me chuckle back when I read Jon Whitney's scathingreview in which he unfavorably compared the duo to a pair of untrainedmonkeys playing with a drum machine, I actually always liked Adult's Resuscitation.
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Exquisite Corpse (a sequential collaborative process in whicheach successive contributor is only allowed to see the very end of theprevious addition before adding his or her own) is Santa Monicaaritifcer of sound Daedalus's most collaborative effort to date, withthe likes of MF Doom and Mike Ladd on board.
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Speaking as a committed New Order fan, I can confidently assert that Revenge was the worst musical excursion that Peter Hook ever took. Toying with blatantly darker themes than the main band, most notably through collaboration with the highly touted S&M outfit Skin Two, this misstep of a side-project was the least satisfying of the three acts that the group's members launched (the others being Electronic and The Other Two) after the release of Technique.
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This double CD reissue of intimate recordings by Englishman David Levyfrom 1971 is a sprawling document of immense beauty. These recordingsof rituals, chants and ceremonies strike a perfect balance betweensounding clearly recorded and gloriously primal.
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The white eyes staring out from darkness on the cover and the screamheard in the opening seconds of Nodern's debut album point toward anuncomfortable listen. He is adept at taking elements normallyassociated with specific genres and displacing them into his own,highly personal world.
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