I've grown to expect unusual albums from Daniel Padden and this one did not disappoint me.  Much like Sublime Frequencies and Harappian Night Recordings, Ship Chop is the product of an omnivorous love of indigenous and exotic music from around the world: Padden took his favorite records and turned them into collage pieces that inventively combine previously unrelated cultures and sounds. Most remarkable about the album, however, is how exacting he was with his editing.  This easily could have been a murky and surreal miasma of overlapping recordings, but it isn't.  Instead, this album is surprisingly coherent, sharp, and hook-filled.  While there quite a few shorter pieces that are too brief to be satisfying, the handful of more extended songs are pretty unerringly excellent and it all forms a memorably warped whole.
Michal Jacaszek is one of the few contemporary composers around who is able to blend classical themes and instrumentation with digitized noise without sounding forced or unnatural.  It's a very distinctive aesthetic that he has been honing for a decade now and it seems to grow more refined with each new album.  Glimmer doesn't stylistically diverge at all from my expectations, but Jacaszek has made some definite improvements in building textural layers and balancing his characteristic gloom with some warmth and movement.  Those minor tweaks collectively make a big difference, as this might be his finest album yet.
When I first found Throbbing Gristle's live album, I expected it to be the ultimate TG time capsule--preserving TG's live sound for future generations—but the band had other plans.  Rather than a live recording made at a pubic gig, Heathen Earth was a contrived and controlled affair that captured the sound of Throbbing Gristle performing for an invited audience in their studio. Rather than a blistering assault, it played more like a subdued (albeit menacing) jam session. They never made it easy.
Ten years ago this week a heart attack ended Frank Tovey's life. To this day, Fad Gadget has still not achieved "household name" status but Tovey's music continues to have an influence both directly and indirectly on music across numerous genres and ages. This month Brainwashed is going to honor his work by tackling each Fad Gadget album.
This is the first of two collaborative albums between Jim O’Rourke and Christoph Heemann and represents some stunning spaced-out collage work by both artists. While it lacks the variance of Vol. 2, this particular work is a master class in using a very limited palette of sounds to create a massive emotional impact. The duo are almost painterly in their craft, shading and blending the different tones into each other rather than allowing any discrete patterns to emerge.
It has been a few years since Terry Riley has released an album with any meat to it. This double CD represents the first major recorded work Riley has done in a long time and it is a sprawling and intense journey. However, it is far from a return to form and a number of flaws get in the way of this being listed alongside his classic works.
Taking a step away from his singer-songwriter dabblings and harsher noise outputs of Burning Star Core, Yeh's 1975 is a piece of sound art that occasionally flirts with musical elements, but prefers to stay in the realm of abstraction, with a healthy sense of humor to boot. While it might not feel like an album in the traditional sense, the pieces that make up this disc still come together strongly, making for a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
In a move that can only be described as "classic Heemann," Plastic Palace People 2 exhumes and recombines recordings from a 20-year-old collaboration.  These aren't just unheard remnants from the vault though: a lengthy and very recognizable segment of Mimyriad is reprised.  In fact, this can easily be viewed as a third version of that album–while most members of Mimir are not represented, their absence is not especially noticeable (given the nature of the music) and the two albums follow a similarly drifting, abstract, and long-form structure.  I think this incarnation definitely improves on the previous ones in most ways, but the whole endeavor is still as puzzling as it is revelatory.
For his second solo effort, Deerhunter's Lockett Pundt abandons his experimental tendencies and throws himself wholeheartedly into making chiming, sun-dappled guitar pop.  On one hand, this album is much more focused, hook-filled, and filler-free than The Floodlight Collective.  On the other hand, he absolutely should not have done that, as he was much more compelling before.
Time of the metronomic kind gives shape to music. It defines the tempo of a song, fixes when sounds should and shouldn’t be played, and determines mood as surely as major and minor keys do. On 2 Seconds/B minor/Wave, Michael Pisaro and Taku Sugimoto reverse that relationship and employ sound to illuminate the physical shapes and vaulted spaces of time. The product of independent performances, this album comes together in an astonishingly cohesive way, meaning that besides being a perspective-bending and aleatoric success, it is also a beautiful 60 minutes of music. Listen closely or let it pass over you, either way it furnishes many rewards.
