William Basinski – El Camino Real

From Boomkat: Background information is typically scant with this latest release from William Basinski’s 2062 label, but what we do know is that it features re-discovered tape loops that have been delicately re-crafted for a recent performance at the Montalvo Arts Center. Clocking in at just under 50 minutes, “El Camino Real” is another one of those breathtaking aural tapestries that Basinski seems to have such an intuitive feel for – effortlessly piecing together elements that bring to mind everything from Arvo Part through to the Cocteau Twins without ever letting go of his own signature sound. Because the source material for these loops has been de-graded and layered so heavily, it’s hard to imagine where they could have come from or how they could have been made – all that we’re left with are mesmerising remnants of a ghostly female voice dominating the undulating mix to almost harrowing effect. There’s also something about this recording that brings to mind more recent contemporary musical experimentations, and in particular the work of Liz Harris under the Grouper moniker – its the same archetypal shoegaze aesthetic that dominates this extended piece and it has a similarly overwhelming effect on the senses : lulling you into a deep state of drift before reminding you that behind the velvety wall of sound lies an uncertain, complex world. “El Camino Real” is certainly one of Basinski’s most absorbing pieces and, for us at least, offers the most contemporary re-interpretation of his own archive recordings to date. We just can’t imagine anyone not being overwhelmed by this music – take a listen and sink in while you can…

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Various Artists(Room 40) – On Isolation

 

From Foxy Digitalis:

When reading the idea behind this new compilation on the Australian Room 40 label which was compiled by Lawrence English, I was honestly expecting lots of leftover digital hiss and “field recordings” of silence around Ayers Rock which is tried to be given meaning through a pseudo-intellectual concept. The reality is totally different though. Not only does “On Isolation” contain a great number of very interesting tracks, also the concept has been implemented in a successful way by most of the contributing artists.

English invited 15 artists to “interpret senses of disconnection, isolation and solitude […] to help awaken a deep imagination with these matters.” The 15 contributors are usual suspects when it comes to conceptually driven avantgardistic digitalism, but many of them manage well to awaken the imagination of isolation that Lawrence English had asked for and to deviate in just the necessary way from their other output. Steinbrüchel provides a very melodic piece with organic drones coming and going. Another fine melodic piece is by Zane Trow, an artist whose recordings are entirely new to me. The field recording dominated and the almost silent pieces by Scanner, Richard Chartier, Jeph Jerman or Ben Owen are maybe not the strongest moments on the CD and make me think that field recordings are too placative a way to display isolation – go to an isolated place and record it. The pieces which add other elements work better in that regard because they show the isolation through a certain atmosphere. Anyhow, other than expected, the CD works really well and, especially when listened to on headphones, really does induce thinking about isolation and its aspects.

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Animal Collective – Strawberry Jam

 

early leak from this eagerly waited new gem from the brooklyn folks, the following link is probably from a promo cd rip, the best we can take at this moment. (too early to have an opinion)

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Request: daisuke miyatani – diario

  

From Boomkat:

Some truly exquisite soundscapes in miniature here, from the label that brought you the 17 Pictures album by Wechsel Garland just a couple of weeks back. Daisuke Miyatani’s work takes on fragments of environmental recordings, guitar and other supporting acoustic instruments all finely processed via digital electronics to form a kind of musical sketchbook that brings to mind the shimmering minimalism of 12k/Happy artists like Fourcolor and Piana. ‘Rain Melodies’ and ‘Old Tape’ are to some extent self-explanatory, the former piece setting acoustic guitar plucks against a rich background of rainy day recordings, whilst the latter is a gorgeous duet between guitar and xylophone committed to warm, hiss-heavy cassette. ‘Hum’ is a lengthier track, and that rarest of things: a drone piece that manages to preserve a sense of underlying melody, with harmonious tones suspended in slow motion. An utterly beautiful album from start to finish, Diario comes highly recommended.

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Thilges – La Double Absence

 

Foxy digitalis review: Combining middle-eastern sounds with glitchy electronics is nothing entirely new. Sebastian Meissner under his Random Inc. moniker as well as Ran Slavin already proved that computers and traditional music from the middle east go well together. And Austria´s Thilges provide another fine example of how traditional middle eastern music and modern western styles can benefit from each other.

Compared to Random Inc and Ran Slavin, “La Double Absence” is quite different though. Less experimental than the two aforementioned composers, Thilges take traditional Afghan, Persian and Arabic music and only accompanies them with electronic elements. The center of “La Double Absence” is the composition and texture. Thilges write songs, a lot of them with vocals. The vocals are provided by Zohreh Jooya, according to the label info a well known Afghan singer. Another key player on “La Double Absence” is Asim Al-Chalab whose Oud playing is central to the ambiance of most of the songs on the album. Especially the Oud playing gives them its incredibly dense texture. Thilges are best when the tracks have enough room to build this texture, like on “Hig” or the album ender “Hijaz On D”. And Thilges also prove once again that non-Western music combined with electronics doesn´t have to sound like all those tacky and bland Chill Out compilations that you hear at Starbucks all the time. A worthy addition to the Staubgold catalogue.

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Badun – Badun

From Post-Everything:

Despite this being their debut album, the band Badun has quite a few years on its back as well as a long line of live gigs. It is the fruits of all these years of experimentation and search for a unique sound that now sees the day.

The group makes clear references to Weather Report, Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis, the electronic duo Flanger (Burnt Friedman and Atom Heart) as well as Japanese artists like Sora. Still the album proves that Badun is capable of integrating its influences with its own sounds and ideas. The light melancholic tone and the tight style gives the sound a sophisticated touch and makes the album one of a kind.

With the opening tune Turban the album takes the listener by the hand and gently seduces you into Badun’s own universe without pulling the carpet away from underneath your feet.

Here you´ll find room for reflection (Pulsen, Mælkebøtten, Nr. 44 & EF10), galaxies of micro-funk (Kompleks, Myg) and meteoric showers of percussion, wizardry and controlled chaos (Søvnløs & Fyrtårn). All delivered in a non repetitive yet relaxed manner.

In the world of Badun, traditional instruments sound like they are being played by improvising robotic insects. But despite the improvisational elements the music comes across as peaceful if mildly surreal – as the cover indicates.

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Join with HjSplit before opening.

christmas decorations – communal rust

 

Great album from the growing label Comunity Library. Boomkat review:

Christmas Decorations is the seasonal (well, it’s only a few weeks late!) moniker of Nick Forte and Steve Silverstein, who in their time have managed to rack up a couple of releases for the ever-lovely Kranky label and a recent appearance on 12k, but here they are on Portland’s homely Community Library, and there could be no better place for their hazy vision of electrically manipulated rock music. Following hot on the heels of the killer Project Perfect album, ‘Communal Rust’ is a more than appropriate continuation of ComLib’s exploration into experimental (but never exclusively so) sound. Drone, minimal, guitar manipulation – call it what you will but I suppose it is always going to have a chiselled out pocket of followers and appear a little out of reach to the rest of us. However Forte and Silverstein have dropped in enough references throughout this record so that even the most academically challenged among us should be able to throw in a line and crawl on in. In ‘Closer to the Carpet’ beneath the digital hisses and crackles I can hear New Order or the Cocteau Twins, ‘Aphid Text’ shows there’s something of Robert Johnson deep down below the hotwired drum machine gurgles and on ‘Twig Harpoon’ I’m sure I can hear the ghosts of shoegaze-heroes Slowdive somewhere in the haze. This is the closest I think you can come to a digitally produced counterpart to the current new-psychedelic-folk scene, while the forest dwellers are throwing down their abstract improvisations on 4-track tape, Forte and Silverstein have done the same with a laptop and the results I think are utterly captivating. Notably, over the last two years or so laptop producers have sought to distance themselves from the tired sounds of Germany circa-2000, that over-done glitch we all got so sick of, and ‘Communal Rust’ is the perfect example of the new wave of digital sound. Instead of disregarding digital production altogether, the duo have instead modernised their output, and they’ve managed that by looking back, by plumbing the depths of music history. A startling and somewhat calming listen, let these fragments of time take you piece by piece into a distant world – gorgeous, and highly recommended for fans of Tim Hecker, Machinefabriek or Aaron Martin!

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Antiguo Autómata Mexicano – Kraut Slut

 

Pitchfork Review:

Late last year Ángel Sánchez Borges released a mini-album of ethereal drone-pop under the name Seekers Who Are Lovers. Seekers could be considered a side project for Borges if he didn’t have so many things going on at once; he’s also an experimental video artist of some renown, and now returns as Antiguo Autómata Mexicano, the name he uses for instrumental journeys into beat-driven minimalism. In 2005 he released his debut AAM record Microhate on the German label Backgroung; follow-up Kraut Slut is his first release for the Tijuana-based label Static Discos.

Given the titles of the album and the first track here, “Rother, Dinger, You, and Me”, you might guess you’re in for a concept record. And “Rother” certainly delivers on that score, channeling the spirit and the sound of classic Neu! with almost frightening accuracy, but doing so in an even more compact and completely digital package. It’s basically a cover tune, but covering a sound as opposed to a song; Borges programs a simple series of pulses to mimic the interplay between Dinger’s stark and insistent drum pulse frames Rother’s buzzing, carefully picked guitar. Both the idea and the execution are fantastic.

But Kraut Slut doesn’t stay long on the motorik road. “Mitte” sticks with sharp, crackly beats but drapes over them a soft curtain of static and lush chords suggesting a much more amorphous and dreamy headspace. It has the pulse of techno, but in terms of mood “Mitte” is closer to the shadowy and sensual world of his Seekers work. Same goes for “Extirpe” which is mostly slow-drift synthetic drone, with just a few percussive beeps and rips lurking in the shadows, while “Harm and Jazz” kicks up so much digital dust it the foreground, a constantly shifting collage of machine noise and buzzes, you can barely make out the steady bass and drums moving somewhere behind. “Malandro de Culto” and “Ill Stijl” are Borges’ excursion into more dancefloor-oriented techno, and the latter especially, with its precise but busy array of bleeps, is a particularly focused beam of forward-moving energy.

So then, album title and opening track aside, what exactly binds these disparate elements into a single project? Borges seems most drawn to micro-leaning computer music as a way to conjure atmosphere; there’s a lot of suggestion in Borges’ music, hints at various possibilities, and you never get the sense that the technology– always at the forefront considering the persistent use of glitches and noise– is the music’s subject. On its own, Kraut Slut is an evocative sampling of the potential of computer-based minimalism with a handful of fantastic tracks; considered along with Borges’ other recent work, the record makes him seem an even more compelling artist worth following closely.

Mark Richardson

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Raster-Noton

hey everyone, i wanna say sorry ’cause i mislabeled the signal link on the previous post(it was a link to the frank bretschneider’s rhythm album), so please ignore here is fix to what was here before, the corrected shit with also the link to the equally fantastic frank bretschneider album:

New Raster-Noton release, the album Robotron from the Signal project. Here is the release:

Raster-Noton’s flagship signal – olaf bender, frank bretschneider and carsten nicolai – is something like the reference group of one of the pivotal labels of new minimal electronic music. but although only having released one cd so far, their sessions and concerts have been very influential until today. some of those tracks of the past years now result in a compilation that joins the work of the three masterminds of raster-noton, but not like a simple aggregation of egos, much rather like a conversation in which every discourse modulates the other and in the end it is not possible anymore to distinguish between each individual contribution. in this sense, signal would be a superego that serves a process in which the rule, coincidence and interaction play equal parts. this blends into an open and democratic music that has some of kraftwerk’s melancholy in it. thus, signal are their spiritual heirs.

robotron was recorded at voxxx studio/chemnitz, unit/tokyo, palast der republik/berlin between 2001 and 2006.

post production was done at villa massimo/rome and raster-studio/chemnitz.
here is the signal link

frank bretschneider is a member of signal and is releasing this great album, also on Raster-Noton. The label release:

„rhythm“ is neither pop nor avant-garde, but deals simply with the basic principles of any modern music: rhythm.

frank bretschneider takes his, never simple, but all the more heartfelt relationship to rhythm and it’s complexity, to an intense inventory and, this time, works less out of suspenseful abstract sounds, than out of grooves. the terseness and precision of previous works remains, as well as a preference for high-voltage sounds halfway between noise and tone. new is the assemblage of the material. a combination of programming, composition and construction, which draws a clear distinction to his preferred loop-based work on foregone albums, is connected with bretschneider’s very idiosyncratic aesthetic of digital sound: controlled and objective. the whole follows simple mechanical states: on/off, forward/backward, up/down, slow/fast, loud/quiet, dull/brilliant, soft/hard and is characterized by the absence of any romanticism. still this return to the elementary, the fundamental, does not diminish the music to dance-floor functionality, instead bretschneider always stays emphatically musical and manages to generate sophisticated and complex rhythm-structures, which respectively induce minimal deviations in frequency and timing relationships to generate a surplus of funk.

in all, „rhythm“ is probably bretschneider’s most direct, clear and concentrated work yet.

frank bretschneider works as a musician and composer in berlin. since 1996 he has published a number of albums for raster-noton, mille plateaux and 12k. the music for „rhythm“ was created between june 2006 and march 2007.
rhythm link

Cordouan – Love

Cordouan is Axel from sweden, active in several projects. With Cordouan he creates deep and melancholic songs that might remind you of Tarentel and Windy & Carl.
No Matter how though you think you are, sit back, push the play button and be prepared to enter the beautiful world of melancholy. The very personal nature of the album only adds up to this..

A gorgeous release, with equally stunning artwork to make it something not to be missed.

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