Tips Zum Selbstmord

Never heard Retro'd. Gripped this sequel which brings video game music and instrumental hip hop, cloudrap, chiptune, together...although I have to say it feels relatively artless, the samples are clunky and it's fun recognizing classic 8- or 16-bit video game themes but not used in particularly innovative ways. It's OK and I guess very en vogue. But meh.

New Bandcamp-only dealio from the master(s) - I presume Samantha Davies is joining Bower here. "Houston" is a 20-minute live track from 2016, a real dark churner of a tune, thick and evil, a real good one. "White Wolf" is 9 minute live cut from 2012, more of a higher pitched squall and not as enchanting.

A whopping two hours of new Drumm music, recorded Jan-Mar 2018, presumably with a "custom resonant filter"...four tracks - "Morning", "Before Noon", "Afternoon" and "Later" but! Not at all in the Drumm mode, super quiet, barely audible sheen and glossolalia...shimmery but kinda in the Tony Conrad mode? Maybe a little William Basinski? I can't say it was terribly interesting. At least, not 2 hours worth of interest here. Unlike other ultra-quiet KD this doesn't specify stereo-listening only, so I'm not too sure what the deal is.

Volume One was all right...but Volume Two is a banger. 2 tracks, (37 + 19 minutes) of pure hypnagogic pop bliss, total deep churn with buried synths and everything good in a woozy, dreamy, sleep-piece. A la the best of the Skaters but more settled and certainly primed for slumber hours. Five stars.

Death is Not the End usually delivers up quality, but I feel like I'm missing a joke here. Henry Caravan is Louis Johnstone (??) is Wanda Group (????) who seems to have recorded this album alone in a room somewhere (I'm picturing a desolate cabin in winter). There's a lot of aimless fingerpicking experimentation that's so angular it sounds like a more purposeless Derek Bailey, and any time it threatens to get interesting Henry steps up to the mic and sings with a voice that indicates he's afflicted with a monstrous head cold, replete with sniffing and snuffing and heavy breathing throughout the tracks. Imagine your co-worker in the cubicle next to you annoying the shit out of you with their cold, and then having them mumblesing into your ear with their mucus and hot breath. Certainly no pleasure to listen to unless, like I said, I'm missing a joke? Either way....no thanks.

I was sucked in by the awesome cover art and great album title (and Dais has done some good in the past) but this is Not For Me. In the vein of the kind of industrial/electro/goth that was really big in the 90's, like...Ministry and Skinny Puppy and all. The (really good, better) witch house group AIMON did a rad cover of Swans' "Holy Money" and that track alone is a better representation of what I think this tries to be. The lyrics here don't hold up to any kind of smell test, and the whole thing is kind of overly-serious and cringe-y.

Laurie Anderson's response to Hurricane Sandy which ruined her Manhattan home, along with the Kronos Quartet...as usual for Anderson this has the sound of a cinematic, multimedia event even if it's (mostly) Kronos' strings with Anderson doing a scant few readings, although they're never boring I wish there were more. The music is of course dramatic and serious and certainly evocative of an impending/occurring natural disaster. I was expecting to be a bit more gripped, it's just OK. Not the fascinating and emotional experience I was expecting.

A single 30 minute track from these two oft collaborators following up from Sakamoto's dope "Async" from last year, this is a pretty, shimmery, twinkly track with some really nice horns (?) that crop up with about 10 mins to go. Really nice.

This got a lot of comparisons to Jan Jelinek's masterful "Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records", a 2017 reissue that was a revelation for me. Both were released around the turn of the millennium, both straddle a kind of forward-thinking electronica/DnB line...but "Earprints" wasn't quite the same revelation for me. Conjoint is an electronica/jazz collective, using both electronic and acoustic instruments, and it's clear there are a lot of ideas here, many interesting ones...the result is not jazz, not electronica, some kind of shapeshifting mass containing both. Occasionally it dips into kitschy new age-y modes so I guess you can see the appeal to the Demdike Stare guys, who reissued it. It's okay, just didn't grab me.

Never heard of the Nightcrawlers until this comp but APPARENTLY, from the evidence here, they were a dope trio of kosmiche-loving Philadelphians who made some really trippy, gritty, synth cassettes from 80-91. How have I never heard these guys before? Far from being just straight up longform Schnitzler/Schulze/Riley worship these are some seriously composed instrumental SONGS - check out "Geistesblitz" for instances. Most tracks bust the 10-minute barrier so there's only 14 spread over 2 discs, culled from various tapes and the whole thing just feels like a real missing link. Awesome.

A ""cult classic"" that I never heard of till now. Even for 1997 this seems ahead of its time. Leading off with a 15-minute mostly-drone track is a bold move, and the album moves into slightly more identifiable jungle/IDM/drum n bass zones with a dark bent. There are some absolute bangers here from the thumping "Dead (Too)" to the glitchy, disorienting heavyosity of "Damaged III". Feels almost like a predecessor to some of Venetian Snares' darker, more aggressive works. "High Life" is another lengthy droning dark ambient track right before the final cut "My Confession" which is a DnB assault over a sinister and syrupy ambient wash. Exhausting at 77 minutes but an absolute beauty nevertheless.

Strut and Art Yard have been doing the lord's work with these Sun Ra reissues. This one comes from a radio studio session in '74 or '75. The Arkestra is a 9-man unit this time featuring twin towers Marshall Allen and John Gilmore along with Eddie Thomas on drums, Atakatune on oboe and congas, and Akh Tal Ebah and James Jacson contributing vocals. Notably no bass player. Four tracks here - "Island in the Sun", "New Dawn", a great version of "Unmask the Batman" and the best of the bunch, "I'll Wait For You". Certainly not the most cosmic as the Arkestra has ever gotten and not an earmark but a good listen and another piece in the neverending Sun Ra puzzle.

Kind of an odds n' sods tape release from Sahel Sounds. Just what it says on the tin, field recordings from Mali and Mauritania that never made it onto any other Sahel release. So you've got it all - music, prayer calls, radio clips, singing, various sounds recorded here and about...the fidelity is kind of tinny for the most part which is a bummer. Kind of reminiscent of Aaron Diilloway's field recordings in Nepal. Interesting enough but not terribly remarkable.

I like Mark McGuire and I always like a good "music for sleeping" album. Hard to find good albums to sleep to. What's with those Spotify playlists with like 8 minute tracks? And as soon as you start falling asleep it changes? Cmon. Here's 4 25 minute tracks McGuire put together to help his infant daughter get to sleep and stay asleep. I can't attest to how they work on kids but they are pretty effective - don't expect much though, these tracks are all borderline white noise. Not like ambient music posing as music to sleep to, like actual sleep-machine sounds. So not terribly exciting, but effective I suppose.

A chance-upon on Bandcamp by this super-buzzed about band. "The melancholy joy of black meal and the tension of post-rock"? Yes! The first track is called "Fire, Walk with Me"? Yes! That's where the excitement stops. The music is total...pablum. The black metal is boring, the post-rock is non-existent (every now and then they deedly deedly deedly a keyboard every now and then) but yeah. This shit sucks. Skip.

I've been vaguely aware of Car Seat Headrest for a while but always ignored them because I assumed they were some crappy indie rock band and indie rock is usually crappy. The impetus to check this out was actually Pitchfork's Best New Music review. Figured there might be more to the group than I was flippantly dismissing and I'm glad I did. This is a re-recorded version of CSH's (basically the nom de plume of Will Toledo) 2011 album only with a full band and it's an absolute gem, anchored by two huge tracks, "Beach Life-in-Death" and "Famous Prophets (Stars)". Toledo is a brilliant songwriter and a great lyricist. I have to go back and check out the original "bedroom lofi version" but I liked this one way more than I expected. Like the War on Drugs last year it's a refreshing rock album in a mostly shitty and dead rock genre, but even better. It reminds me a lot of Sonic Youth, but less sneer-y and more soul-baringly honest. I dunn...

I'm told this is Carlo Guistini's first release "under his own name" but I can't really find out what he's done under any other names because his is shared with an Italian actor soooo...wherever this came from, it's quite interesting. Giustini apparently rented a house built in 1966, set up two microphones and two dictaphones in each room and then recorded the house's natural frequencies, resonance, vibrations, as well as Giustini's own movements within the house. The description quite plainly states "no musical instruments have been used for this release". So Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" is a natural point of reference. There are 4 tracks, one for each room I guess, and the result is ambient in the true sense of the word - the sound of a house simply existing, and of a person's movements within those walls. It's decidedly atmospheric, sometimes even moody. Hauntology would not be a misguided term to thro...

Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett teamed up for a live improvisation based on the works of the artist Zin Taylor. His art adorns the cover here for you to get a sense of his style; and their performance was inspired by a 90-metre wall drawing of Taylor. Their performance was whittled down and re-mixed into the 10 tracks here. The result is a slow, spacious, electro-acoustic, ambient work for synth, piano, flute, field recordings and maybe more? The performance is slowly engrossing and it's interesting to hear the differences from track to track, making me wonder how this worked originally as a 40-minute performance. Maybe we can hear the unedited set someday. This is an inventive and interesting album but it's definitely not stuffy academia. Definitely one to revisit.

Last year Soave reissued Roberto Musci's "The Loa of Music", which came out of nowhere and completely stunned me. They also reissued Giovanni Venosta's "Olympic Signals", but I missed that one. After those two debuts in the 80's, Musci and Venosta came together and made "Urban and Tribal Portraits". Similar to the only album I can use as a basis of comparison, "The Loa of Music", it continues in the vein of fourth world music, made in a time when I really can't conjure up anything remotely similar that I'm aware of. This isn't as world shaking as "Loa" for me but still really interesting, 12 tracks of occasionally psychedelic, jazzy, folky, arty, avant garde or otherwise unclassifiable genres informed by Musci and Venosta's "world music" travels. It's a little too scattershot - feels more like a compilation than a cohesive work - but I'm glad I'm getting to know these cats better.

I usually like my black metal weird (sometimes aggressively so) and despite the title (doesn't that mean tremendous mystery) this isn't weird, pretty straightforward black metal, but done really right. Makes me think of Darkthrone or Destroyer 666. There are even a couple of folky interludes that I enjoyed, and the rest of the metal isn't folky at all (thankfully). The riffs are buzzing, aggressive and the vocals are just a hate-filled spew. The guitar even reminds me of La Quiete, of all bands. The unrestrained aggression is there in both at least. Good solid old school BM record.

A dual stamp of approval, FACT mag's bandcamp round-up and put out on George Clanton's label. First I've heard of Negative Gemini and the descripto sounded cool. It's an EP and she does some really cool takes on pop with an electronic bent. Some of these tunes sound gripped from Aphex Twin or the Prodigy by way of Burial with dreamy, ethereal poppy vocals ala Bjork or Imogen Heap or a not-shitty Gwen Stefani. And the genre bending calls to mind FKA Twigs or Laurel Halo. The EP starts real hot - "Infin Path" and the title track are pop gems, "You Weren't There Anymore" is a cool almost hookless affair. The second half contains a club mix of the title track and a couple other tunes I found less interesting. But there's some real...I don't want to say "potential" here but potential to make something reaaallly mindbending. Definitely of note!

I danced around this one on Bandcamp a little bit, saw it pop up in a few places and thought it wasn't for me, I'm kind of over the whole chiptune retro gaming fad...finally I just oculdn't ignore it and put it on the wishlist, and fuck me if it isn't absolutely incredible. I haven't played any new video games in years so I'm coming at this from a purely musical angle and video game soundtrack or not, this is just an absolute masterwork. It's so good - nostalgic but not cloying, emotional depth, beautiful, thrilling, melodious...who is Lena Raine? Where did she come from? Where did she learn how to make music like this? Listen to the 11-minute EPIC (used without a touch of irony) "Reach for the Summit" and you too will be convinced. Then listen to the other 100 odd minutes. Wondrous.

This is a pretty boring record of wildly overproduced noise/black metal. Except for the screaming and shrieks, which were at times on point, I wasn't feeling with.

Well I'll be. Sounds like Haswell has been walking this fucked rave/electronic/noise path for a little bit now. I completely missed out. Still stuck on the Live Salvages and the albums with Hecker and Yasunao Tone. Admittedly I haven't kept up much but wow, this caught me by surprise and really sunk its teeth in. A "mini album" built around a 10 minute collab with vocalist Sue Tompkins (first time Haswell has ever used a vocalist I'm told) but all tracks are great in their own aggressively dancey, atonal kind of way. I want to throw around lazy comparisons like early Aphex Twin and Venetian Snares but that doesn't do the record justice. It's definitely "nostalgic", "retro", "of the past" but with a gnarly updated take. I'm also reminded of Consumer Electronics too but that's fair because Haswell actually is IN that group. Real good.

Tabbed this one because I follow ORAL_records on Bandcamp (Montreal represent) and this sounded pretty cool: "all sounds were captured live at time of the concert thru an app for iPhone developed by the artist. This app connects twelve iPhones with Rode microphones disseminated in the city to the concert hall. All raw feeds are manipulated live by Felix-Antoine". The city in question is Valparaiso, Chile, and Morin does a real credible job during the din of evening streetlife (or what I imagine to be) into an impressive, churning roar. The sad thing is this piece is just 20 minutes long, but the "1" in the title gives hope that there's more to come (or more live manipulations to come). Note that the label has this released as "Coexistensive" but Morin's personal site seems to call it "Coextensive" so that's what I figure is the real title. This slots right in nicely with that Quebec/Alien8 noise scene - for fans of Daniel Menche, Fra...

As I may have said (did I say it below?) I've yet to be as ***taken*** with Dedekind Cut as some blogs and zines out there, though I admit the potential is there. This actually came out before "Tahoe", not sure how I only got around to it after, but nevertheless. I won't judge a man off a mixtape and this is a kind of interesting collage of a lot of different sounds - ambient, noise, surf rock, pop. It's all over the place and fairly enjoyably so although nothing really stuck either.