Available once again (no clue if this one's limited) is one of my top-10 albums of the year. The Un-Releases was originally released earlier this year in an "official" bootleg teeny-tiny quantity which barely made it across the water to the USA. Now, through K in Olympia, Washington the disc should be easier to get a hold of. Available once again (no clue if this one's limited) is one of my top-10 albums of the year. The Un-Releases was originally released earlier this year in an "official" bootleg teeny-tiny quantity which barely made it across the water to the USA. Now, through K in Olympia, Washington the disc should be easier to get a hold of.
Combine immaturesemi-formulaec predictable electronica with girly teenage drama and youtoo can release an album it seems. Okay, I love Kid to death and I'veloved his judgement in the past but I've got some issues with thisrelease. While I've heard word that the other release by Belctum fromKit Clayton's label is great, this disc makes me somewhat sour. The CDremains playing however, while I've already written it off. Painfully Ilisten on as high school girls pull off poorly faked English accents,sandwiched between unexciting techno babble, waiting for somethinggreat to happen. I feel guilty listening on. It's almost like drivingby an accident scene, you stare, fascinated at ugliness and destructioneven though you know you really really really shouldn't be staring.Unfortunately the cable carrier in my town doesn't offer The AccidentChannel yet. "Oh honey, look an accident." "Don't worry dear, we'lljust drive on and not slow down traffic and catch the highlightstonight on The Accident Channel."
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Thankfully, Oi! is not a trawl through a dubious underbelly of UK punk. It’s a two disc snapshot of recent Brazilian music from Amapa to Rio Grande Do Sul, Acre to Paraiba, mapping the places where indigenous forms meet dub, funk, psychedelia, and several other outer-national sub-genres. Of the 40 tracks I prefer those suggesting cool, dark alleys, mind warping neon surfboards, or vertigo-inducing rooftops, to others which feel like over-crowded hip-hop/carnival nether regions where “party” is a verb and Karl Pilkington dreams of quiet reverie during a hellish episode of An Idiot Abroad.
This is Vantzou's solo debut, but she should be familiar to many from her work as the visual half of Adam Wiltzie's The Dead Texan project.  That association was not a fluke, as Christina's musical aesthetic clearly shares a lot of quiet, slow-moving, and nuanced common ground with the Stars of the Lid milieu.  Such comparisons are pretty much inevitable in any discussion of No. 1, but Christina establishes her own voice by embracing impressionist classical music and a brighter, more pastoral mood.
I was very curious about what The Drift's latest album was going to sound like, as so much has changed since 2008's well-regarded Memory Drawings: Danny Paul Grody fell in love with steel-string acoustic guitars, stellar double-bassist Safa Shokrai left the band, and–most significantly–founding member Jeff Jacobs succumbed to cancer.  The band opted not to replace Jacobs, which left them with the very difficult puzzle of continuing without their primary melodic instrument.  The resultant album understandably loses all traces of their jazzier, more dub-inflected recent work (Jacobs played trumpet), but returns fairly successfully to The Drift's more straightforward post-rock roots...sometimes.
The second outing on compact disc for the anonymous minimalist Eleh compiles three out of print, vinyl-only releases. The eight pieces that make up the Floating Frequencies/Intuitive Synthesis have been tarted up for a digital release and they sound unbelievably good. While there is no new material included, these discs make for essential listening either for Eleh die hards or for those without turntables who have been wondering what all the fuss was about.
I first met Othon Mataragas in Austria at Donaufestival '07 (curated by David Tibet) where he was performing with Current 93. Since then, he has been on the soundtrack to the Bruce LaBruce film Otto; or Up With Dead People and then part of a live accompaniment to the Derek Jarman film The Angelic Conversation, orchestrated by Peter Christopherson. I've seen Othon contribute his pianist skills to Ron Athey's automatic writing performance in London (Gifts of the Spirits), and he is currently working on an collaboration with artist Franko B (Because of Love). His debut album, Digital Angel, focused on childhood nightmares of corporations taking over our identities and features a lovely rendition of Coil's "The Dreamer is Still Asleep," sung by David Tibet. His second album, Impermanence, is provocative, filled with torment that is presented in a profound yet light-hearted way. Othon's arrangements are gorgeous and timeless.
As a collaboration between two artists who are almost impossible to pin down by genre conventions, A Throne Without A King is at times a difficult album, often not resembling anything from either artist, but a different beast entirely. It may be difficult, but its worth the effort to fully absorb what’s there to be heard.
I reviewed the first four installments of this now-completed 12 volume series a few months back, and now that it has come to its conclusion, the final product is even more impressive, documenting Szczepanik's evolving and developing compositional skills. With each piece having its own voice, yet feeling somehow connected to one another, it's a perfectly encapsulated suite of recordings.
Der Blutharsch's sudden transition from militaristic industrial project to perverse psychedelic rock band was jarring and abrupt, and always a bit baffling. The albums since Time is Thee Enemy! have moved more and more into that direction, but often laden with a sense of identity confusion: the pieces never seemed to come together quite right for me. In this collaboration with Aluk Todolo, however, both embrace their hallucinogenic tendencies in unison, resulting in a brilliantly cohesive album that is equal parts krautrock, psychedelia, and dark experimentalism.
