New York is home to Jeremy Novak and his mad sampledelic science fair project Dymaxion, whose stripped down collages resemble something like Peter Thomas redux by The Hanatarash by way of sampled and looped sound effects lp's on an old Califone. Or maybe a lo-fi Tipsy bearing a more sinister edge with emphasis on groove and fucked-up sounds. This disc (previously released -- and
Aah, in case you'd thought the highly prolific Sonic Boom AKA Experimental Audio Research AKA E.A.R. had perhaps finally fallen silent, along come eight more tracks from his camp. In case you're an equipment geek like me and were wondering with what his
Another awesome reissue from those Universal Sound experts. Elektronische Musik Aus: Koeln was a project born in the midst of the Neue Deutsche Welle, but really came about a decade too late, as this was a band that embraced a pre-Midi electronic songsmithery that neatly fits next to Kraftwerk's technocratic vibe or even Chris Carter's percolating contributions to Throbbing Gristle. The gentlemen of E.M.A.K. hailed from Cologne and holed up in a basement right down the road from Holger Czukay's studio, constructing a sublime array of simple electronic instrumentals for synth-bleep melodicism, chiming arpeggiations, and strolling drum machine pulses. They self-released three albums on their own Originalton West imprint, and this collection on Soul Jazz culls from said albums. E.M.A.K. were very much aware of what was going on at the time, taking the best from the likes of Brian Eno (esp. Another Green World), Human League (esp. Reproduction), and even some Vangelis, to build a rather unique sound that paralleled the minimal wave producers but infusing it with a far more baroque flair in their whimsical squiggle that looks back to the exotica types of Jean-Jacques Perrey as well as some of the more adventurous disco producers out there. Connoisseurs of library music should certainly take note!
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I (Allan) initially picked up this disc 'cause I thought that Luke Eargoggle was responsible for one of my favorite tracks on Powerslaves (the electro Iron Maiden covers cd we made record of the week not too long ago): "Die With Your Boots On". I was mistaken, that song was actually performed by Maxx Klaxxon, whereas Mr. Eargoggle did a version of "Mother Russia" (not one of my fave Maiden tunes, but his electro version wasn't bad). Anyway, as it turns out I'm real glad I took a chance on this album, 'cause it turned out to be quite the jam -- so I figured I'd order a few for the store as well. Chock full of fat crunchy beats and squelchy bass lines, it's a great example of what I like about the purposefully '80s retro genre of electro, unlike a lot of other types of techno/dance music: simply put, it's funky. One of the best tracks on here is entitled "Stiff White Funk" and while no one will argue with that self-assessment, the funk is still the funk, stiff and white it may be. Actually, that particular track is awesome simply 'cause of how nervously hectic it is. It's a minefield of distorted synth explosions and sci-fi-noir fx. Very cool, along with the rest of Audio Warriors.
More electrified ragas from Earth Jerks, who now present themselves as the duo of Chris Dixon and Noel Harmonson. Both of these characters have long been part of the San Francisco scene with Dixon operating in the spaztastic spockmorgue calvacade which spawned Death Sentence Panda, Murder Murder, Total Shutdown, Cops, etc. and Harmonson is the much-revered knob twiddler from Comets On Fire and Sic Alps. The kosmische tumble for drone-on guitar and drone-on electronics drive the coyly named "Fighting A War We Can't Win" -- a long-form piece of undulating tone, fuzz, and blur that's as martial in demeanor as a ruby-red sunrise. An equally idiosyncratic title graces the toothsome minimalist fragment of "The People's Poet Is Dead." Poetic and concise for sure but hardly a funereal bone in its body, this languid duet for electronics and guitars swirling in the same universe of post-lysergic / astral projection wash conjured by Popul Vuh, Cluster, Manuel Gottsching, and whoever your favorite Krautrock magician may be at the moment. Mr. Dixon did pass on the VERY LAST copies of the first Earth Jerks discs for those of you who may have missed out on that one earlier. File #04 too is a super tiny run, and we may not be so lucky in the future.
Debut release from Seattle based electronic artist Eblake (aka E. Blake Davis). A beautifully cold, dark record full of pulsing beats and lush sonic landscapes. Fans of Autechre's "Amber" or the Chain Reaction label take note.
It's been a while since we've heard from Ata Ebtekar, an Iranian sound artist and electronic composer born in Germany, who previously recorded for Warp under the name Sote, creating a clutch of killer records that were furious and fractured, beat heavy concoctions that found him fusing rave and drone and jungle into something much more dense and confusional. And dense and confusional is definitely a good way to describe the music he makes under his own name, a 'world music' of his own invention, but unlike the collaborative record he released with the Iranian Orchestra For New Music, released on local label Isounderscore, on which he took recordings and manipulated them, other than some prepared traditional instruments, Dear Iran is a wholly original work, of vast sonic scope. We read up on Ebtekar, and could have just paraphrased the dense academic description of his work, and this record, but odds are most folks just want to know what it sounds like, and Dear Iran is incredible, dense and dizzying, at times almost overwhelming, layer upon layer of textures and mutated percussion. There are no 'beats' to be found here, this is definitely not a beat record, but it is rhythmic, it just so happens that the rhythms are often implied, gnarled tangles of cascading tones, of garbled processed crunch, fractured melodies, and gristled fields of blurred glitch, it's actually quite difficult to describe, as it really does sound unlike most of what you've heard. Some tracks are almost cinematic, sweeping sheets of buzz and squelch, bits of clang and clatter seem to be pulled apart at the molecular level, and recast as flurries of splatter and skitter, which is then sculpted into almost melodic shapes, bell like tones surface throughout, lending the record most of its melodic heft, but those tones are often all twisted up, smeared into hazy chordal streaks, or laid atop one another creating strange pulsing harmonies, or alternately, lush minimal stretches of hushed bleep and bloop, all wreathed in clouds of electro static thrum. The rhythmic component surfaces throughout as well, but not in any way you might expect, a burst of tangled melodic squiggles, will suddenly coalesce and transform into a lurching stutter step pulse, before dissolving into a fog of pixelated prismatic flutter, or a seemingly freeform assemblage of rumble and whir, will gradually take the shape of mysterious propulsive soft noise streaks, before once again, splintering into a field of strange digital crunches and shimmery, or fractured swirls of darkly droney, woozy electro-minimal psychedelia. Gorgeous stuff for sure, as equally suited to academic deep listening, as pure sound, audial overload sonic bliss out. WAY recommended.
We first heard from Ata Abtekar under his pseudonym Sote, with a flurry of releases for Warp, then Dielectric, and a sound that definitely hit the spot, a deft amalgamation of fractured jungle, old school rave music, downtempo beatscapes, and shimmery dronemusic. More recently he helped compile a double disc compilation called Persian Electronic Music: Yesterday And Today (1966-2006), still to be reviewed, which collected the work of legendary Iranian new music composer Alireza Mashayekhi on one disc, and Ebtekar's more modern compositions on the other, drawing a sort of sonic timeline between Persian new music past and present, which leads directly to this double lp.
A long in the works 'collaboration' between Ebtekar and Mashayekhi. For these extended sonic explorations, Ebtekar took pieces composed by Mashayekhi, and performed by the Iranian Orchestra For New Music, and then applied various techniques to the sounds, taking live recordings, studio tracks, and then processing them, rearranging them, adding effects and samples, synthesizers, adding original sounds, harmonies and melodies, for a unique sort of modern classical Persian musiq concrete.
The original sounds are definitely present, this is most certainly not a case of the sample being rendered unrecognizable, those original sounds are as important to these pieces as anything Ebtekar had to add. Flurries of piano, moaning cellos, pizzicato plucks, soaring strings, subtle percussion, all surface here and there, and often, they are wreathed in fuzzy drones, or chopped into strangely percussive loops, or jumbled up into something much more chaotic, but just as often, Ebtekar's machinations are much more subtle, playing along as if he were not a remixer per se, but another player in the orchestra, only armed with a computer and effects instead of a flute or violin.
The sounds are varied and wondrous, from fantastical flurries of wild freaked out electronic flecked free form soft noise, to delicate tinklings and hushed moonlit drift, spacey metallic shimmers to haunting alien music box like lullabyes, Eastern sounding folk fragments drifting in soft swirls of rumble and hiss, long stretches of barely there melody and wispy streaks of distant rumble. Really quite mysterious and beautiful, whether you're into modern classical, electronic music, abstract dronemusic, or all of the above. ESPECIALLY all of the above.
Beautiful screened sleeves, with a printed insert, detailing the project, as well as the various performers and composers.
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4 singles from Digital Hardcore Recordings, Germany's nastiest, most extreme hardcore techno label, issued here in tasty uninitiated-friendly 7" format by the Beastie's Grand Royal label. A cheap way to learn all about what the hell is going on.
20+ more minutes of Berlin digital hardcore. Angry screaming techno jungle punk. Female vocals similar to those of Japanese spazzcore band Melt Banana. If you thought Atari Teenage Riot were pissed...
A techno-noise-punk headache served up by this reliable Digital Hardcore band. By reliable, we mean more of the same, really: frantic female punk vox, heavy beats, outrageous sloganeering, and distortion, distortion, distortion. Not veering much from the sound established by DHR leader Alec Empire's own Atari Teenage Riot. While we're much more enamored of the solo work done by EC8OR's Patric Catani, his band's new disc should satisfy those thirsting for that basic DHR headache party mentioned above.
We continue to be obsessed with the darker side of techno and house music, the strains that are all murky and shadowy and mutated, the four on the floor beats slowed down to a dying-heartbeat pulse, most of the dancefloor sucked out of the sound, leaving just the twisted skeletal remains. Elsewhere on this week's list you'll find a new record from Lucy, whose sound is just that sort of dubbed out techno-murk we can't get enough of, but this new one from Echologist is something else all together. We just discovered this is the TENTH record by Brendon Moeller, aka Echologist, but the first one we've heard, and we are totally smitten. Not nearly as murky and dark as much of the stuff we dig, what Moeller does is, is something similar to The Field, creating super lush, layered repetition, little blurts and pulsations, bits of glitch and static, sculpted and woven into deep undulating electronic soundscapes, that only sound tangentially like proper techno, and instead, sound super tripped out and psychedelic, almost like some sort of avant experimental noise music, but in the guise of techno.
The opener here "Frequency Of Love" pretty much lays it all out, exactly what is so amazing abut Echologist and why we knew this had to be Record Of The Week. A dense field of pulsing squelch, all hazy and gauzy, some alien machine language transformed into sound, a glorious blend of droned out raga-shimmer, and percolating electro, droney and trancey, and less about the rhythm, as the texture created by the rhythm, and when the low end drops out, as it occasionally does, the sound becomes some sort of airy drift, before the low end swoops back in and the sound gets, well heavy again, for lack of a better word. But then heavy is the word for what happens next, when the sound begins to thicken, the tones all gradually descending in pitch, those sounds suddenly coalescing into a thick, buzzing drone, which grinds away malevolently, before dropping out completely, leaving just a field of glimmering chiming melody, and a hazy keening high end drone. Fuck! We say it a lot, but that track, could easily have been the whole record, and we still would have made it Record Of The Week. We're guessing it'll take some serious will power to keep from setting that track on repeat play. But you know, fuck it, go for it. Still worth the price of admission if you never make it any further in.
But if you do, you'll be rewarded with more of Echologists, haunting, propulsive and mesmeric machine music, from churning industrial crunch, to loping tranced out techno, and from squelchy and cinematic low end deep dub, to gristly static drenched skitter, and from lush, almost poppy, drone-gaze electro, to stuttery sci-fi glitch-buzz groove. But those thumbnail descriptions are only part of the equation, cuz once Moeller sets the scene, lays down the beat, loops the sample, whatever electronic voodoo he does, it's all about how the sounds develop, and pro/re-gress, tone and timbre in constant flux, the background sounds a dizzying, hyperactive soundworld all their own. The sound impossibly immersive, the sort of rare electronic music that manages to be weirdly dancefloor appropriate, while still the perfect bliss out / chill out / come down soundtrack, and equally rare in that sonically, it's way more than 'dance music' or 'techno', it's a fantastically next level mutant strain of electronica, or even more specifically, some modern minimalist avant electronic experimental soundscapery, that just happens to involve elements of techno and house music, and that we find utterly and endlessly addictive. We're guessing most of you will too...
Latest disc of languid minimal abstract dub house bliss from the dynamic duo of Rod Modell and Steve Hitchell, who we've raved about in the past, the two have sort of taken that Chain Reaction heroin house sound, and Pole's skeletal dub, as well as a little Kompakt style Pop Ambience, and woven all that into their own hazy atmospheric drift, which often sounds more like some Philip Jeck turntable performance more than some techno producer, which is probably why we're so into it.
Case in point, opener, "In Echospace", a sea of staticky swells, softly churning, pulsing dreamily, all hazy and murky and washed out and otherworldly, very Jeck or Tim Hecker sounding, a slightly rhythmic blurred dronescape that could have been a Gas track, and that we find ourselves playing over and over. But when we don't press repeat, it glides right into "Summer Haze", which sounds anything but summery, the cloudy murk of the opening track remains, but a woozy reverby beat slowly surfaces, the sounds wreathed in crackle and hiss, a heartbeat like pulse, flecked with dub, and soft focus streaks of melody. The rest of the record follows suit, just check out the titles, "Firefly", "Float", "Warm", there's definitely a theme, although it's only loosely referenced, if at all, "Sub-Marine" ditches much of the gauzy hiss and blur, leaving just a loping rubbery beat, wrapped in subtle squelches, drifting on a layer of shimmery synth thrum, "Burnt Sage" is total heroin house, the beat sounding like it's coming from another building or a passing car or from underwater, the surrounding sounds soft and vaguely industrial, but all smoother out and smeared into soft focus streaks, the next few track find the beats getting bigger, thumps and crunches, still woozy and warbly, but about as close to block rockin' as this stuff will ever get, but as the record progresses from that point on, it seems to follow an arc, slowing down, and blissing out, gradually returning to the primordial sonic murk that started things off, ending with the aptly titled "Warm", which is indeed warm, and languid, soporific, a whirling blurscape of soft tones and muted melody, mixed in with the sounds of the city, voices, buses, cars, life, a gorgeously dreamlike soundtrack to late night life in some lost city...
And all those field recordings are not random, the duo have been obsesed with location recordings, and have actively been gathering sounds from all over, and the second disc here actually contains 80 minutes worth of those original raw field recordings...
A few years back, we were enraptured by a strange alien sound, one that opened our ears to a whole genre we had ignored for the most part up until then, an offshoot of techno that eventually became affectionately (and surprisingly accurately) referred to as 'heroin house'. A strangely propulsive sound mired in dense fields of hiss and murk, of fuzz and blur, the beats relegated to a distant pulse. The label was Chain Reaction, and its tiny stable of bands, Fluxion, Matrix, Hallucinator, Substance, Vainqueur, Porter Ricks, Monolake and a few others, completely changed the landscape of techno, and had us all in a frenzy. Albeit a nocturnal druggy soporific one.
Chain Reaction folded, but the sound lived on, in the abstract dub of Rhythm And Sound (the same producers behind the Chain Reaction sound), in the sound of German Chain Reaction acolyte Pole, and the Pop Ambient of Kompakt, but as much as we love all that stuff, it wasn't quite the same. The sounds were similar, each twisted into some new shape, but there was just something so special about those Chain Reaction releases. So mysterious, the sound so haunting and otherworldly, like a rave on the ocean floor, barely audible through the walls of your submarine, further obscured by the hiss and low level buzz of all the onboard machinery. Or some DJ playing microhouse into the wee hours, 5 or 6 floors below you, or better yet, in the old concrete bunker across the street, the only hint of anything going on the muted throb felt more than heard.
It's one of THOSE SOUNDS we always go on about. Like old school ragga jungle or black metal buzz, a sound that is so pleasing to our ears, we could almost listen to a simple loop of those sounds forever. The Chain Reaction sound is another, gorgeous and creepy, moonlit and languorous, the perfect music to drift off to, or to troll the dark rainswept streets of some mysterious European city.
Thus we come to this debut full length from Echospace, the duo of Rod Modell and Soultek's Steve Hitchell, both legendary techno producers, who released a handful of 12"s at the tail end of the nineties, and who were taking the Chain Reaction sound in their own new direction. Years later, the duo returned to THAT SOUND and goddamn if it doesn't sound like being transported right back to mid-nineties Berlin. Using only old school analog equipment: Roland Space Echo, Echoplex, Korg tape delay, vintage signal processors, noise generators, Sequential Circuits 8-bit samplers and analog synthesizers, the sound these two have conjured up hews crazily close to Chain Reaction, but manages to make it sound modern and new at the same time.
All the tracks here are super creepy, slow motion, underwater muted blurs of abstract techno, where the beats seem like more a byproduct of the soundmaking than the reason for it. Some tracks do thump and bump but others merely drift in a thick haze of hiss and crackle. Basslines are deep and rubbery, drenched in reverb and pulled apart into super spare space dubs, bits of percussion are sent careening into a black void, but it's the textures and the ambience that make this record so special. The opener spends the first half of its 6+ minutes offering up huge slow motion crashing waves of surf like static, of buried melodies and off fuzzy shimmer, before any beats even surface, and when they finally do they pulse and throb for a couple minutes before they're swallowed up by the wash of soft white noise. In fact, in addition to sounding underwater, it sounds like the whole disc is being broadcast over a radio between stations, all the sounds wreathed in sonic gristle and buzzy static, but all smeared into huge billowing clouds of sound.
Most of the tracks definitely have a groove, a super slithery abstract alien funk, but more often than not, it's buried beneath gorgeous layers of constantly shifting sound, offering up some barely audible thump, a four on the floor framework for the glacially shifting tectonic sonic plates above. But there are some that don't, like the 11+ minute "Ocean Of Emptiness", a muted smeared ambient drift, that sounds like standing on some vast windswept snow covered plain, under a black sky, watching the snow fall, each snowflake a tiny bit of hiss or crackle, coming in epic waves, glistening and glimmering but strangely warm and inviting. Our favorite track might have to be "Winter In Seney", which sounds like a more dubbed-out Gas. A warm swirling hissy gristly minimal smear, sprinkled with bits of record crackle, and haunting echo drenched bits of glitch and melody, the whole thing wrapped in a gorgeously hypnotic, super spare rubbery bassline, the notes blurring into each other, spreading out like a thick black cloud of dub, totally and utterly mesmerizing.
There's been so much amazing techno lately, lots of Kompakt action, The Field, Gui Boratto, the last Pop Ambient comp, then there was the long overdue Vladislav Delay Chain Reaction reissue (C'mon! Someone reissue ALL those out of print CR discs!!), but this disc has been OWNING the cd player. At work, at home, and has quickly become the new drifting off, late at night, chill out, space out, record of choice. WAY recommended!
This Czech Republic ensemble made a big stir in the early '90s with a number of exceptional shoe-gazer singles on par with the best Creation work from Ride and Slowdive, but dissappeared from the hipster radar after a questionable ambient-techno album. "In Dust 3" marks Ectacy Of St. Theresa's first album in nearly a decade, and finds them eclectically mixing the dark synth pop sheen
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First of all, be warned, these took nearly six months to show up from Sweden; and we will most likely not be restocking these when we sell out of this batch, or if we do, it could very well take ANOTHER six months. But back in the late summer of 2011, we caught wind of what seemed like a really fascinating piece of damaged, witchy pop narcotic from the Swedish sisters Nadine and Tanya Byrne (aka Ectoplasm Girls). Shortly, there after, The Wire raved about the album; and then we simply waited for the box to show... Fortunately for a lucky few of you, that box did indeed finally arrive!
The Byrne sisters could very well be ghosts from the mid-80s cassette culture of DIY electronics, industrial antipathy, and corrosive psychedelia. As half-formed / half-forgotten songs of deconstructed piano, looped abstractions, and bad vibes, the Ectoplasm Girls arrangements aren't too dissimilar from those that Zola Jesus primitively sketched on her earliest recordings. Like Zola Jesus, voice is also key to the hauntological pop that the Ectoplasm Girls create, although they take it in an entirely different direction. At times, they adopt a baby-faced atonal lunacy with shrill lullabies above their murky tunes, abstracted rhythms, and macabre electronics; and at others, they utter mantras in dull monotone as if these strangely seductive passages were culled from their own exorcisms. "Sexodrome" takes all the right cues from Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, with vocal fragments orbiting a skeletal rhythmic plod that's all gotta reference Cronenberg in some way shape or form. It's too creepy not to! A blast of hurricane noise launches "If Your Mother Asks" which surges forward through driving techno stomp akin to TG's ceaseless march "Discipline" and complementary slashes of noise and vocal gaspings.
If we thought we could get more, we might expound more on the subject of the Ectoplasm Girls; but as it stands, we've got less than a dozen. So, delay now and perhaps delay forever.
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Skweee!
We first were introduced to Edu K on the second installment of the party starting, raw booty shaking Rio Baile Funk collection. His two tracks on that comp really stood out and grabbed our attention and our bodies as we couldn't help but smile and shake it everytime they came on. So we've been wanting to hear more and we finally were able to get our hands on a new 12" from him. Teamed up with Marina of Bonde De Role fame they make a potent one-two punch of raw and sizzling fun. Edu K brings the sweaty ass shakin' bombastic bounce of Baile Funk better then almost anyone. With Marina on vocals it's kind of like if Peaches got hyphy or if Timberland hooked up with CSS. The Crookers edit on the 'b' side kills, making this a must have 12" for anyone who wants to sweat and shake it all summer long.
The opening track of Efterklang's latest album sounds like the loveliness of a choir and orchestra being carried to your ears on the wings of an autumn breeze. Light, airy, and shimmeringly blissful. It's the sound of a glorious dream that gradually builds and darkens to heart-swelling proportions. Although this Danish band has two dreamy main vocalists Linda Drejer Bonde and Thomas Sjoberg, it is the giant choruses where they shine brightest. The unpredictable proggy rhythmic interplay between the brass, strings and vocals is captivating, quite possibly drawing inspiration from the likes of Yes and King Crimson. Parades' sweepingly regal grandeur spurs cinematic imaginings of gowned maidens rushing down castle staircases and armored knights charging into battle. Really beautiful.
You suckers without turntables get yet another temporary reprieve, as Ekkehard Ehlers' five lovely mini-albums, previously released only on vinyl, are here compiled onto one handy cd. And lovely is most certainly an understatement. This is some of the most gorgeous, sublime and moving electronic/glitch/sample based music we have ever heard. Sounds are completely recontextualised into cloudy, indistinct but somehow emotionally and sonically spot-on homages to some of Ehlers' influences. Falling somewhere between Stephen Mathieu and Oval, Ehlers adds remarkable depth and emotion to what is quite often a cold and clinical artform.
Tracks one and two are the "Plays Cornelius Cardew" lp and are lovely layered soundscapes as only Ehlers can conjure. Sampled sounds are seamlessly woven into dense, textural tone poems again highly reminiscent of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas. The second (track three and four) in the "Plays" series is a 'tribute' to the German beat poet Hubert Fichte. Where those previous tracks are dominated by ephemeral drone work with refined patinas of digital corrosion, this piece curiously sounds like Pole doing free jazz, with erratic squiggles of granular synthesized saxophone and really lazy strums from a guitar seeping up from an electronically sculpted metallic haze. Even those slowly developed basslines that Pole plops into his neo-dub show up in "Plays Hubert Fichte" although Ehlers disregards Pole's structuralism in favor of an amorphous improvisation of deep hovering movements. "Plays John Cassavetes" (tracks five and six) is part three in Ehler's series of 'tributes' and for these pieces he seamlessly weaves orchestral samples into beautiful landscapes of sonic reverberations. Very reminiscent of Wolfgang Voigt's work as Gas, or those brief, subtle moments of bliss found on My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless" record. Tracks seven and eight find Ehlers sampling fragments of Albert Ayler. However, as with most of these pieces, it is debatable as to how much Ayler is actually present on this recording, musically. Consisting entirely of digitally altered cello recordings, these two sidelong pieces gently swell, teeter and expand, forming beautiful, haunting drones that lie beneath digital snippets of arrhythmic ephemera. Somehow, Ehlers manages to restructure a mundane cello recording into a wonderfully reticular songpoem. The final two tracks are from the 'Plays Robert Johnson' 7" which we were never able to get enough of to list. Two short tracks: the first is an abstractly plucked, slow-motion, Reynols-on-cough-syrup style tarpit blues jam, while the final track is all throbbing four-on-the-floor Kompakt style minimal/heroin house.
Trust us, we plow through a lot of pretentious electronic crap that takes itself too seriously -- and while the conceit of the five Ehler tributes might suggest that he could fall into this trap -- he does not. Ehlers delivers, and you'll love this. We all do.
An effusive title that roughly translates as "Politics Do Not Need An Enemy" and a cover photogragh of an individual wearing a t-shirt with a pre-9/11 image of the World Trade Center introduce this recording from German electronic music composer Ekkehard Ehlers. It's hard not to immediately qualify the music within as holding some sort of political agenda or at least some wry commentary about politics, culture, art, or whatever, simply because he's already loaded the metaphoric gun with rather powerful signifiers. For better or for worse, those political references remain an external device and Ehlers' music pursues a path entirely different.
Best known for the outstanding "Plays" series of homages to Cornelius Cardew, John Cassavettes, Albert Ayler, etc. and for his equally solid "Heroin" collaboration with Stefan Mathieu, Ehlers had developed a myopic fuzziness of digital pixelations from various samples, found sounds, and acoustic instrumentations. While the laptop is still the center of the Ehlers' world, the ephemeral drones which previously amassed from dense layerings of tiny sounds have subsided within "Politik Braucht Keinen Feind." Considering that the aesthetic flourishing of digital synthesis through programs like Max/ MSP and Supercollider has over-saturated the market, Ehlers' decision is certainly a good one. Here, he has culled strident samples from cello and bass clarinet performances and manipulated them into looped details. In turn, he has exaggerated many of those textures, such as through his increase of the bass frequencies from the bass clarinet into psychoacoustically potent tones and through his emphasis of the micro-abrasions between the bow and the cello's strings. These little events and gestures flutter into atonal orchestrations and psychically tense atmospheres which come across as something of a hybrid of Tony Conrad and Pierre Henry. Beautiful but uneasy listening.
Eclectic German musician Eichstaedt's many projects range from jazz keyboard grooves to free improv to Mr. Bunglized rock to bleepy electronica. The latter is what is evident on this limited-edition cd-recordable, as Bjoern experiments with washes of wheezing electronics, droning blippage, and what sound like dissonant guitar meanderings over the three lengthy tracks here. Similar in spirit to the output of the Corpus Hermeticum label, perhaps, especially the work of Kjetil Brandsdal. Very nice (hey if it wasn't we wouldn't have gotten him to send us these from Europe). He says he's already at work on his next project, apparently some sort of cold and grim solo black metal band! Can't wait to hear it.
Ding, ding! (x4) Something ring a bell? That's cuz Eight Bells is the new group formed from the ashes of veteran spacerockers Subarachnoid Space, whose last album before they disbanded in 2010 was titled, Eight Bells. Since we liked that record a lot, we're happy to report that Subarachnoid Space guitarist Melynda Jackson has teamed with erstwhile Subarachnoid Space drummer Chris Van Huffel, plus bassist Haley Westeiner, to take up where Subarachnoid Space left off, this trio continuing Subarachnoid Space's latter-day trajectory into heavier and heavier territories, to the point that it makes sense that this would be recorded by Billy Anderson, and come out on Seventh Rule. And woah this is good, damn good. Mostly instrumental (even when there is singing, it's often kinda used as another instrument), and definitely progressive, with sinuous song structures and intricate epic arrangements, they play a kind of mathy, moody spacerock that at times even ventures into black metal territory - Cascadian black metal we guess, to be precise, since that's where they're based, up in the Pacific Northwest. Seriously, if you didn't know the context, there's stretches where you'd think it was a BM record for sure. And as space rock or post rock, it's definitely rockin'. Think Kinksi meets Wolves In The Throne Room...
A good example of Eight Bells' dynamic, apocalyptic mathrock is how the urgent angular quickstep of track two, "Fate And Technology" takes a sudden shift into slower, quieter, more placid territory adorned by dreamy, gentle female singing, but then builds up again to sheer, near black metal blasting complete with harsh, throatripped vokills. Those vokills and vocals are both handled by Haley, but the title track does bring in guest vocalist Kris Force of Amber Asylum to add her haunting pipes to the mix, for some extra atmosphere, that track reminding us, with its scrambling riffery, of Stinking Lizveta, at first anyway, then getting seriously epic in a postrock way, 12+ minutes full of drama and majesty (and intense chops!), climaxing with thunderous drum pound and wordless high end operatic vocalizations from Force. Here and elsewhere there's droning synths, echoing effects, and a thick, muscular bass presence, part of what makes Eight Bells so heavy and propulsive.
For fans of Subarachnoid Space (of course) and Liturgy and maybe the likes of Worm Ouroboros too. Recommended!!
One of the many diverse branches of Ms Beth Custer's formidable creative tree. This one takes her into a melting pot of electronics, dance and jazz.
We've been a bit remiss in our mission to continue listing all of the great Gooom titles that have yet to make it over to our part of the world (some recent Gooom faves: M83, Abstrackt Keal Agram, Cyann And Ben, Purple Confusion, Mils, etc.) so we'll get back on track with this ep from Eisebs. The title, Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, couldn't be more appropriate. This is bouncy, sugary, caffeinated electro pop. Playful melodies, goofy fuzzed out synths, super lo-fi Nintendo rhythms, all crunchy and fuzzy and totally goofy and fun. Weird robotic voices, skittery almost jungle rhythms and lots of other little sonic surprises are sprinkled liberally throughout. Sounds a bit like if Add N To X were 15 year old girls, and were asked to make music for a video game that featured starfish riding giraffes and battling giant pink penguins and tiny purple bats, on a quest to rescue the Little Prince. Fun!
Similar in intent to Squarepusher, Ekswyzia is dedicated to fusing the expressiveness of jazz within electronica programming. While Squarepusher definitely embraces a grooviness from jazz, Ekswysia takes the freeform jazz approach with a frenzy of squelchy synthetic screeches and sampled cymbals, snares, and toms clattering away with a frenzied often irregular pace. Challenging to say the least.
Ever since Pole decided to abandon the druggy Chain Reaction minimalism that we love so much, we've been continually searching for some new dub technician to fill that Pole shaped hole in our hearts, and with Reverberate Slowly from the mysterious El Fog, it seems like we've finally found it. Nothing here is brand new, instead it's variations on a sound we love, the abstract minimal space dub: click, pop, hiss, all harnessed into a skeletal skitter. Bathed in record crackle, these rhythms drift over ghostly moonlit expanses of near nothingness, the only color supplied by brief flourishes of vibraphone, or shimmery acoustic guitar, there is a definite Portishead vibe as well, with the washed out blur of the ambience, and the dusty old record quality of the sound. But even those little flourishes sometimes get chopped and clipped, rendering them just another rhythmic element. But rhythm is what it's all about, mood and rhythm, and the mood IS the rhythm. Shuffling, shimmering, pulsing like a heartbeat...
This is definite headphone music, so much is going on, on a microscopic level, various bits of hiss and fuzz, muted rhythms -beneath- the rhythms, melodies that are barely there shadows, guitars looped into melodies that smear into fuzzy soft focus textures, while the beat beneath is as unobtrusive as it is subtly relentless, beneath it all are huge bass swells, that lurk silently, before throbbing briefly and retreating once again, letting the rhythms trip trebly across the sound field, before they surface again to rattle your chest, like some distant passing train, or thunder rolling over the hills.
Reverberate Slowly is late night chill out bliss out drift off fade away sonic nirvana. It's about 1:00 am as this review is winding down, time to flip off the lights, shut down the computer, roll into bed, and drift off and let El Fog envelop us and carry us off...
Summer in San Francisco is a funny thing. It doesn't really happen, most of July and even August is chilly, grey, and windy. We know we have no room to really complain about the weather here, but it can get you down. Luckily we do usually get this small blast of Indian Summer that hits late in September and we all run to the park, the beach, a lake, anywhere to soak it all up as much as we can, as we know it will be gone before we know it. So in these times of packing in as much summer as we can in just a handful of days we really need and relish when an end of the summer jam shows up just in time to blast as we play in the sunshine.
El Guincho has given us the perfect bright, bouncy and colorful soundtrack that's beyond perfect for tapping into the carefree vibe of running through waves and playing in sand, the fleeting summer state of mind that is already on its way out. Picking up perfectly where his 2008 debut left off, and even upping he quality of songcraft and irresistibility. While El Guincho is from Spain, his music really sounds like someone so in touch with so many great sounds being made across the globe. It's a universal kind of super smart and catchy dance minded pop, filled with so many cascading melodies, catchy rhythms and such impeccable taste.
One of those perfect records that seamlessly mixes synths, samples, and live instruments along with warm and welcoming vocals to create songs that are made for letting down your guard and soaking up some much needed joy and sunshine. So damn good!
El-B is one of the pioneers and inspiring forces that helped usher in the sound of dubstep as we know it. Pushing the UK garage scene in new and exciting directions, incorporating elements of house, drum & bass and dancehall creating a pulsating sound that would become the core of modern dubstep. While folks like Burial, Pinch and Kode9 would take bits and pieces of this foundation and give it a much more sinister and brooding vibe, you can still tell that it was probably one of those rare white label 12"s by El-B that helped trigger many of the ideas that would find their way in today's leading dubstep records. A few months ago we raved (pun intended!) about the Zomby record Where Were You In '92 with its amazing combination of various elements from house and rave culture with dubstep's dark driving allure. There's no denying that these El-B tracks had to be a gigantic source of inspiration for Zomby as so much of what he was doing almost a decade ago can be found in the grooves of that record. If you're like us you probably don't have tons of those rare white label 12"s so it's rad to be able to get a great collection of El-B's jams on one single disc along with a really informative 14-page booklet that breaks things down so well.
The vinyl version doesn't have all the songs from the cd, but for vinyl addicts it's definitely cool, with one track stretched out on each side of the double 12".
There are a few people who always seem to be in the right place at the right time, in spite of themselves. Judging from the liner-notes to this anthology of his early works, Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh led one of those lives. His first public
"Crossing Into The Electric Magnetic" is a documentation of the work that El-Dabh composed during his stay at the Center, and certainly has the grizzled electronic crackle and pointilist composition techniques indicative of coming from that institution. Occasionally, El-Dabh incorporates poems sung in the Arabic tradition along with the musique concrete and electronics. Really Cool.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
This is the second full length from Electric Birds (Mike Martinez -- head honcho of Deluxe, formerly of Cars Get Crushed). Panorama is full of rich tones, layered with organic found sounds and bubbly beats. Fans of Nobukazu Takemura and Matmos should definitely check this out.
Third record from Mike Martinez and his Electric Birds. The earthy, organic textures formerly prominent on past EB releases collide with a newfound love of dub and the cold microhouse rhythms of Berlin. Not too distant from the arctic dub stylings of
With credits as providing additional production, Matmos' influence on the sound of the one-man project, Electric Birds, may be much greater than simply supplying a sampled whoopy-cushion every once in a while. Mike Martinez - the brainchild behind the album - has concocted an exceptional debut album of organic electronica liberally spiked with halcyon and bliss-pop, complete with guitars drenched in Slowdive reverb, algorithmic digital sputterings, awkwardly happy-go-lucky breaks, and a whimsical sensibility.
Electric Company is one Brad Laner, whom you may recognize as he is formerly of L.A. dreampopsters Medicine. Riding on the coattails of his acclaimed 'Slow Food' lp on Mike Paradinas' Planet µ label as well as last year's wonderful 'Exitos' cd on
Brad Laner (of Medicine) returns with another solo electronic effort, ambient computer collage art.
