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Delivery Room is a bargain-priced sampler of new and upcoming releases from the Leaf Label, and reflects the eclectic, modern aesthetic of label boss Tony Morley. Unfortunately, as is often the case with collections such as these, there is a fair amount of substandard material by bands the label hopes to promote, as well as songs that suffer from the lack of context inherent in a compilation.Leaf
The trio of Bill Wells, Stefan Schneider and Anne Whitehead contribute two tracks from their mini-album Pick Up Sticks. These three musicians (and the uncredited keyboardist Barbara Morgenstern) form an avant-jazz ensemble with trombonist Whitehead improvising over Wells' spacious, textured laptop-glitch backdrops. Mexican IDM artist Murcof is virtually indistinguishable from every other artist of his ilk, and Sutekh's mix adds merely another level of boring pseudo-sophistication. In my view, Icarus is one of the more overrated electronica artists currently being heralded by scads of post-hip laptop enthusiasts, and the two cuts included here from his Leaf album I Tweet the Birdy Electric (Walt Whitman puns are oh so clever) don't do anything to change my mind. I know a lot of people who would slap me for saying this, but I'm also not altogether convinced that Manitoba's Up In Flames was an amazing reinvention of the avant-pop wheel (is there an avant-pop wheel?), and the pointless song fragment "Crayon" included here is nice, but disposable. A Hawk and a Hacksaw is the new project from ex-Bablicon, Neutral Milk Hotel and Guignol member Jeremy Barnes, and the self-titled debut is another collection of songs composed and recorded in the French countryside. The two tracks included here are richly detailed, piano-led folk songs with gloriously uncomplicated melodies and a natural sense of development, with interesting touches of outre' production. Perhaps the best reason to buy this compilation is the inclusion of a previously unreleased (outside of Japan) track from Asa Chang & Junray, whose Leaf album and subsequent EP were two of my favorite experimental releases of the last two years. "Parlor," taken from the Senaka EP, is a typically ingenious mix of hicupping, laptop-treated tabla rhythms, trumpets and recordings of Japanese slot machines. 310's "Exumix" is a jazzy sort of downtempo number that might appeal to fans of the Ninja Tune label, but holds zero interest for me. Colleen's "Ritournelle" tried hard to convince me that it was anything other than a looped kindergarten glockenspiel with extraneous glitches and pops, but failed. Japan's Riow Arai contribute one of those instrumental hip-hop things where they keep interrupting and/or mutating a random beat using ProTools presets, thereby producing something that is sure to be labeled genius by someone balder and more European than me. Clue to Kalo sound even more dreadfully dull on "Ignore the Forest Floor" than they did on their first full-length; more Four Tet beats with emo vocals. Ending the collection is a fascinating unreleased track by A Small Good Thing, a tantalizingly indescribably work of evocative cinematic ambience, sounding not unlike a spaghetti western taking place at night in a German POW camp.
- A Hawk and a Hacksaw - Maremaillette
- Asa Chang & Junray - Parlor
- A Small Good Thing - Owl in a Box
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Though I've heard the formula before, it's impossible to disregard this album. Despite being another quiet and minimalist approach to electronic soundscaping, there's something special about the way these songs play themselves out and, in some cases, the integration of just a few key sounds adds up to startling beauty. Lido Lato is a double CD release from Greece's Poeta Negra label.Poeta Negra
The CDs differ from each other in slight ways. The first disc is a purely sound-oriented amalgam of synthetic pops, hisses, hiccups, and blurs while the second disc sounds like it could be performed live by a group of individuals (given the right equipment). "Amymoni P." and "Shaker S." begin the first disc with a wavering blend of distorted plastic expanding into infinity and a churning series of pseudo-melodies that barely escape the speakers. They're a perfect statement of intent and while I've heard similar compositions before, Coti has a unique way of arranging the sounds so that they play with eachother in ways that are unavoidably hypnotic. "Beben G.," for instance, rolls along in exactly the same way from beginning to end, but Coti adds a whole spectrum of sounds over this radiating harmony and ends up producing the illusion of movement. The manner in which the crystaline pops and hums fall in and out of existence is somewhat breathtaking and repeated listens only add to its beauty. There are numerous examples of excellent aural trickery to be heard throughout the first disc. It would have, by itself, stood comfortably as a great album with many highlights, but the second disc is the most attractive thing about Lido Lato. "Neige P." is the more rhythmic cousin to disc one's "Amymoni P.;" where one moans and bellows, the other skips along in staccato before loosening up and bleeding away in a whisper of piano and reverberation. The mixing of acoustic and electronic sound sources on disc 2 is absolutely superb. "Partito Per Sempre" coughs and eases along with the sound of escalating whines and old upright pianos hooked up to life support. The instruments never stand away from their buzzing counterparts, but they add an element that would've made the first disc even more exceptional and unique. "Beben P." stands out in my mind as one of the finest and most endearing songs I've heard this year. A simple melody played on what sounds like a toy keyboard gallops along clumsily over the sound of a baby attempting to sing and playing with wooden or plastic toys. I found myself pressing the back button on this song more than a few times before moving on to the final two pieces. "P. Strtch" closes out the album with the purity of strings moving like water over a faded and delicate ringing that escapes into the atmosphere. The way the violins and cellos take over the synthesizers and laptop productions is as elegant as can be and it serves as the perfect ending to an album that showcases the depths electronic music can reach. 
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The California of the 1960s was a breeding ground for eccentric characters: psychedelic prophets, cult leaders, crank scientists, charlatans, fringe artists, bizarre self-taught musicians and psychotic burnouts. Some individuals, it seems, were able embody all of these archetypes at once; and of these, at least one managed to record and release an album. Bobby Brown's 1972 LP The Enlightening Beam of Axonda is a holy grail for collectors of rare psych, and one of the most idiosyncratic works to emerge from the West Coast petri-dish of psychedelics and self-motivated outsiders.Akarma
The LP was originally issued in a small run on Destiny Records, and today trades hands for absurdly inflated prices, which makes this deluxe digipack CD reissue on Italy's Akarma label a particularly welcome release. Bobby Brown has the misfortune to share a namesake with the notorious R&B artist and Whitney Houston/crack abuser, making Google searches problematic to all but the most persistent. This Bobby Brown was a blonde, blue-eyed flower-child surfer from Sacramento who traveled up and down the West Coast throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, performing live at acid-drenched beach parties and hawking his records from the back of a van. Brown played more than 18 self-built instruments — harps, bells, zithers, woodwinds, sitar and percussion — all arranged into an ingeniously constructed series of cross-triggered racks that surrounded him during live performances, making it possible for him to play several instruments and sing simultaneously. His voice stretches across six unusually expressive octaves, vacillating lysergically one moment and perfectly mimicking the sounds of a theremin the next. It's tempting to try to fit this "Universal One Man Orchestra" into a framework including other outsiders such as Harry Partch and Moondog, but the Axonda album resists such easy categorization. It's a concept album, relating the journey of a spiritual adept named "Johnny" from his pastoral Hawaiian home, across the globe and eventually into the cosmos. Johnny makes contact with the God-machine Axonda and its clear beam of consciousness light, which reveals to him the future of mankind — the reconciliation of all world religions and a merging into pure, perfected Godhead. It's undeniably hokey and quite often banal, but Bobby Brown's sincerity sells it, hypnotizing with trippy, beatific melodies and an unorthodox marriage of exotica, island music, Indian raga and African rhythms. Brown's speaker-vibrating bass and oceanic tenor coos perfectly express his impossibly utopian philosophies, coasting along with multi-tracked instrumentals and overdubbed vocals, pausing between songs for spoken-word narrative transitions. Brown's painstakingly scribed liner notes are reproduced in this edition, full of hilarious boasts about his explication of the fictional scientific concept of "the Bray" — "an original contribution to the field of Religion & Science...not yet discovered by other humanoids" that will one day "lead to the most significant change in the history of humanity (plus total religious unity)." Perhaps Bobby's ambitions were ultimately unrealistic, but The Enlightening Beam of Axonda is an original and uncompromising work of art, and a valuable contribution to the field of outsider art. 
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