There has been an avalanche of fine dispatches from Eliane Radigue's voluminous vault in recent years, which both pleases and overwhelms me, as I want to hear them all and cannot hope to keep up.  Adnos is one of the latest of those great albums and offers the added appeal of being a major, decade-spanning, formative work as well.  Originally composed between 1973 and 1980, these three lengthy pieces are stylistic precursors to Radigue's minimal drone epicTrilogie de la Morte (widely regarded to be her masterpiece). While Adnos is not quite on the same level as its similarly ambitious successor, it certainly comes damn close.
At first glance, Katie Gately has a hell of a lot in common with Holly Herndon: both are CA-based and use the voice as their primary instrument and both debuted to international acclaim while still attending college.  The similarities end there, however, as Gately's latest work displays a strong pop sensibility and talent for hooks that was not especially apparent on her significantly more unhinged and abstract cassette from earlier in the year (Pipes).  While I still do not think her aesthetic is fully developed, her combination of heavily grinding and crunching field recordings and lush vocal loops is nevertheless quite promising and unusual.
Under his Pinkcourtesyphone guise, Richard Chartier has found a way to inject a bit of levity and humor into his otherwise serious and formal electronic compositions. These two recent releases reiterate this, but also present an evolution in PCP’s sound, from avant garde electronics to traditional and rhythmic works that have recognizable points of reference, but still stand as entirely unique in this often crowded genre.
I know I am not the only person who has caught himself in a public situation hearing some sort of malfunctioning machinery and thought it would have sounded great on record. Obviously not, because it is that concept specifically that defines Blake Edwards' newest album, a gorgeous picture disc with accompanying CD-R of related material. It is his careful mixing and understated processing that make this shine, however.
This reissue offers the chance to hear another obscurity from the NWW list. With perfect backing, Vian plays synths, sequencer and piano, to create an exotic, space-age soundtrack that is quite distinct from his more raucous music with Red Noise.
After amplifying their homes and magnifying the subconscious; after reshaping kitchenware into instruments and finding voices in the buzz of computer fans, distant traffic, and the crunch of dirt; after transforming the spaces around them and constructing a space-time of their own, Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet finally turn the microphones on themselves. And not just on the noises they make, but on the places they grew up, on the people they've known, on the ideas that have driven their work, the sounds they love, and ultimately on the past and their memories. Don't come to the show expecting self-portraits though. On Photographs Graham and Jason make enigmas of themselves. We get to see a shadow of them in these pictures, but everything they do and every event they capture points to a subject somewhere outside the frame.
A strange spectacle murmurs unceremoniously just beneath the familiar hum of daily life. It's filled with little dramas and peculiar collisions that sneak by unnoticed—in the empty spaces of the room, out of the corner of your eye—small bits of information slip through the senses' fingers and fall into the subconscious where they become fodder for dreams. These unremembered fragments are a part of every environment and every observation, but would we recognize them if given a second chance? On Air Supply, Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet resurrect such mental refuse and put just such a question to the test. They may have pointed their microphones at computer vents or the back yard, but what they pulled from those sources is utterly bizarre, to the point of being completely alien.
Much of legendary composer Asmus Tietchens' recent work has been in the form of collaborations, with other like minded artists such as Richard Chartier and Dieter Moebius, with a few solo works coming out amidst the sprawling reissue campaign on Die Stadt. Fast ohne Titel, Korrosion is one of those few new and solo works, and it just reinforces that even so far into his career, Tietchens’ is no less important, and his sly sense of humor is never far behind.
Prurient has taken a backseat in the past few years in favor of Dom Fernow's more recent high profile projects. The last major Prurient releases too were somewhat baffling: the EBM noise of Bermuda Drain and minimalist techno of Through the Window screamed out as an identity crisis compared to the harsh historical releases. This 7" is a tentative step back into the world of more abrasive, but is not quite the Prurient of the early days.
The New Alchemy creates transformational music from simple elements: voices, guitars, organs, and saxophones. The music moves deliberately, contrasting an intense, blistering, squall one might associate with screams from human sacrifice, with an airy, spacious, psychedelia.
