This live concert in, no surprise, Rome sees David Tibet joined by Maja Elliott on piano and John Contreras on cello. Performed around the same time as Tibet was creating the first installment in his Aleph trilogy. However, as the line up suggests, this was not the ferocious psychedelic rock that Current 93 were unleashing in the studio. Instead, the group play through a quiet, tender set of old favorites and (at the time) new compositions.
The latest album from Italy’s Architeuthis Rex sees them continuing to confound and entrance with their eclectic and heavy sound. More focused and unsettling than their debut album, here they once again plumb the depths to uncover a world of sounds which sound like they come from some bottomless fissure in the middle of the ocean. Taking as much inspiration from aquatic zoology (in its various forms) as from music, Urania is a fantastic exploration of concept and sound.
As much as I've always enjoyed Blackshaw's work, solo acoustic guitar albums have never quite been my favorite thing and I always wished he would record something else as ambitious and divergent as The Glass Bead's Game's "Cross" (or "Arc," for that matter).  However, James' recent nylon string compositions have caused me to stop thinking that.  Love is the Plan builds upon the promise of the similar Holly, but completely and dazzlingly eclipses it, striking the perfect balance between  blur-fingered virtuosity and poignant melody.  This is easily Blackshaw's best album to date.
Mohn is the newest collaborative project for two German techno mainstays: Wolfgang Voigt (aka Studio 1, Mike Ink, Gas) and Jörg Burger (aka the Bionaut, Triola, the Modernist). The duo's debut self-titled album sticks to territory in between the steady, physical pulse of "Tiefental," from last year's Total 12 compilation, and "Manifesto," a damn near beat-less, immersive storm-cloud of ambience from Pop Ambient 2012.
Pitre's latest composition is certainly an impressive and mesmerizing one, but it is quite a daunting challenge to find words to describe quite why it works so well.  Built around computer-randomized patterns of harmonics and fleshed out by a sextet of strings and dulcimer, Feel Free's beauty lies in its rippling, organic near-stasis: this is classical music blurred, stretched, and rendered in such a pointillist fashion as to seem like a languid, blissful, and formless haze.
After last year's acclaimed Please Stop Loving Me and the Ante Algo Azul subscription series, Szczepanik has almost simultaneously put out his first and second vinyl releases. While the two albums could hardly be more different from each other, both carry the composer's careful attention to detail and creation of beautiful, sparse music.
Souvenirs d'un Autre Monde introduced Alcest to the world five years ago with Stéphane "Neige" Paut's ideas fully formed from the start. Écailles de Lune took a conceptually dark detour, with Neige playing around with bold song structures (the album opens with a two-song suite lasting 20 minutes, both parts also titled "Écailles de Lune") and branching into new sounds (see all-acoustic closer "Sur l'Ocean Couleur de Fer"). Third album Les Voyages de l'Âme—translating to The Journeys of the Soul—boasts cleaner production, more immediate hooks, shorter songs, and spiritually evocative titles ("Beings of Light," "Summer's Glory"). In short, this is Alcest's most approachable, immediately striking album.
This is a very welcome reissue of the final album by the Collins sisters. They cast a marvelous spell on mysterious traditional songs from Southern England. It's all here: advice, a beheading, blacksmiths, erections, farming, happiness, a hanging, letters, loss, love, nosebleeds, poaching, pudding, rakes, revenge, treachery, and youth. All that and their cover of "Never Again," a Richard Thompson lament more contemporary to this 1978 recording.
Aside from his role as the lead singer of The Buzzcocks, Pete Shelley briefly operated his own label, Groovy Records, devoted to strange electronic music. Drag City have reissued the full Groovy catalog including this mesmerizing solo album by Shelley. Consisting solely of shifting oscillator patterns, this is a far cry from the short, choppy punk he is best known for yet is just as engaging as his more famous efforts.
In August of 1982, Mute released the 7" single for "Life on the Line," one month ahead of the forthcoming album. It was a stark contrast to the previous single, "Saturday Night Special," released only in February that year. This too was a catchy melody, but it was unashamedly supplied by a beefy synth and almost purely electric rhythm. Frank had decided to strip the producing and engineering team leaving only John Fryer and himself at the controls. The result is arguably the favorite amongst the fans.
