A Guide for the Dead through the Underworld (CARRIER RECORDS 012) would be a useful manual for any human being, in particular Orpheus when he made his fated voyage through the dead zone, and of course Dante in his classical take on the numerous tortured souls he expected to find writhing in Sinnersville, even...
Schumann, Kagel and Ferrari refracted through the Warsaw kaleidoscope of imagination From Poland in October we got these three items in the Populista series, curated by Michał Libera. All these are released on the Polish Bôłt label, with help and support from Monotype Records. The first one is Dichterliebe (BR POP01), a song cycle...
Fear and Loading On this day to agitate your molecules in time with the slow crawl of the universe, tune in to Yannick Franck‘s Memorabilia (SILKEN TOFU STX.15). Fine construction of ambient music in the noire-mode from this Belgian sound artist who wallows freely in the inexplicable ambiguities of life. For him, all mysteries...
Chris Watson‘s El Tren Fantasma (TOUCH TO:42) is a new work where he’s using his field recording and editing skills to create an elaborate electro-acoustic collage, a suite of ten pieces which almost tells a story. It has something to do the with Ferrocarriles Nacionales of Mexico (whose logo even appears on the disk...
If you want to sharpen your wits with some good old-fashioned astringent modernism, the double CD On Tour (MUTABLE MUSIC 17544-2) by Ostravská Banda ought to be poured into your daily tub like a pouch of bath salts. This ensemble went on a tour of Europe in 2010 and took with them a strong...
Under Japanese Influence Expo 70 are Justin Wright and Matt Hill. On Blackout (DEBACLE RECORDS DBL054) they play a couple of half-hour cosmic improvisations using guitar, moog, Korg, drum machine and bass guitar, doing it live in parts of New York while they sat on the floor wreathed in a crepuscular haze. Pretty good...
Twenty of Another Kind A lengthy triple-CD box set of microtonal minimalism is Twenty Ten (12K1066) by the New York composer Kenneth Kirschner, offering over three hours of music across four very long compositions. The music gradually becomes fainter, quieter and more washed-out as you progress across the set; while we may start out...
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade…tonight everything I pull out of the bags turns out to be ultra-minimal music in one way or another, so let’s round up these barely-there records and provide some appropriately minimal texts. Martin Neukom deals in puzzling synthesised tones on Studien 5-7 (DOMIZIL 35). This eminent Swiss musicologist...
From April 2011, a recent piece of Hari Hardman Produkt is a cassette tape wrapped in a band of emery paper. Yooch. Not one for sensitive fingertips, and a nod to a nihilistic cultural strategy used knowingly for an LP by Durutti Column (LP wrapped in sandpaper) whose designers copied it from a Situationist...
Pilesar Please Me Radio Friendly (PUBLIC EYESORE PE112) is an energetic set of crazy songs delivered roughly in the lo-fi, unkempt and noisy post-new wave Dinosaur Jr / Sebadoh style from Pilesar, an American confluence of talents which clusters around the pale thin body of Jason Mullinax, who wrote all the songs, plays most...
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