Chris Brokaw’s latest is a murky, moody affair, written quickly, according to the artist, on a 1960s Teisco Del Ray guitar. It’s far more solitary than Puritan, his last solo full-length, sheathed in echo and overtone, his voice shrouded in eerie, cloudy atmospherics. The guitar tone is more like what we heard in 2023’s all-instrumental Live at the Decommissioned Power Station than the clear, song-structured reveries in Puritan.
Brokaw describes his set-up with specificity, as designed by “Belgian luthier Flip Scipio with heavy gauge flat wound strings and an .80 gauge low E string tuned down to a low A, which reframes how you play the instrument.” But whatever the alignment of gear, the sound envelops the ear like a grey fog rolling in from the ocean,…
Category: ***
For The Unutterable, Mark E. Smith settled in with the (mostly) new lineup that debuted on 1999’s The Marshall Suite and recorded yet another gorgeous, rambunctious, only occasionally scrutable masterpiece. Though it’s not overly chocked with new ideas (especially for those already well-versed in the Fall canon), The Unutterable benefits from excellent songwriting and the crisp production of soundman extraordinaire Grant Showbiz, on loan from Billy Bragg.
The far-too-short opener “Cyber Insekt” immediately launches the listener into a dense, chaotic sound world that’s only amplified throughout the album. The heavy rockabilly guitars and pummeling drums heard on The Marshall Suite are practically overwhelmed…
ASMR for Suicidal Thoughts marks Varg2™ back in collaboration with Chatline, an enigmatic figure long in orbit of Northern Electronics. Recorded live to tape, the record resists comfort. Contained within are two harrowing demonstrations that drag on emptiness, anxiety, and abject pleasure. And though terse and severe, that very void becomes the vessel for its mottled meaning.
Unopen to exploration, ‘ASMR for Suicidal Thoughts’ locks the listener into its own saturated atmosphere. Stripped back and unchanging, and suffocatingly cold at the best of times, funereal melodies pepper cyclical noise so brittle it can barely repeat itself. Disturbingly intimate glints of memories are passed over out of reach, yet with the alarming immediacy of déjà vu.
Karl Bartos, renowned as an essential member and songwriter of Kraftwerk during their most innovative years, is reissuing his solo album Communication on Hamburg’s Bureau B. First released in 2003, 13 years after leaving the legendary electronic group, the re-release arrives at a moment when its central theme, the transformation of culture through electronic media, feels more relevant than ever.
When Bartos departed Kraftwerk in 1990, he left behind a catalogue that had redefined electronic music: “The Model”, “The Robots”, “Numbers”, “Pocket Calculator” and many more bear his imprint as co-writer and melody-maker. 2021 Kraftwerk’s classic line-up was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for their innovative work…
Peter Baumann (formerly of Tangerine Dream) also played an important role in Consequenz III. As so often before, Baumann generously provided Schnitzler and Seidel with studio space at his Paragon Studio. The recordings for this album were the immediate continuation of “Con 3”. Seidel’s additional drums and percussion were still being set up, Schnitzler’s Korg MS 10 and the obligatory sequencer were still warm – and another recording session began straight away. There seemed to be enough time to finish an album. Baumann’s Paragon Studio was a veritable El Dorado. Although Schnitzler and Seidel used their own comparatively modest setups, here they had access to highly professional recording equipment and an acoustically ideal recording space.
Denna berättelse åtföljs av bilder was created following an invitation (from curator Patrik Haggren at Göteborgs Konsthall) to artistically respond to Jonatan Pihlgren’s exhibition Vargtimme. The foundational sounds were generated by converting photographs of Pihlgren’s artworks into audio using the software JPG to WAV Converter. These sounds were supplemented with field recordings from the exhibition space.
Additionally, a poem was written and recited at the end of the performance. In the poem (included with this cassette), I drew from my associative notes from the exhibition visits as well as fragments from the script of Ingmar Bergman’s film The Hour of the Wolf, which served as a kind of subtext to the exhibition.
After decades of working at the margins of experimental electronic music, French composer Manon Anne Gillis returns with Eyry], her ninth solo album and a stunning testament to her unique approach to sound as a tactile, sensory experience. Released on Art Into Life as a limited edition of 300 vinyl copies, Eyry weaves together voice, breathing, words, and sounds using ingenious methodologies that have defined Gillis’ practice since the 1980s.
Since her earliest works in the 1980s, Gillis has been creating music using primitive systems, pursuing an aesthetic that privileges feeling and immersion over conceptual understanding. Eyry continues this trajectory with ten pieces that transform spoken word and singing into blurred noise and irregular repetitions, plunging them…
A spellbinding five-CD box set Archives Box 1983-2005 documenting the entire enigmatic production of one of the missing links in experimental electronic and prototypical industrial music: Anne Gillis. From her groundbreaking 1983 Devil’s Picnic release through her 2005 installations and exhibitions, this comprehensive collection unveils the hidden world of a visionary French composer whose work anticipated much of what would follow in electroacoustic composition and sound art.
Since the early 1980s, Manon Anne Gillis has been creating music using primitive systems, pursuing the smallest of impulses to their logical end-points. Her work exists in a space simultaneously quotidian and theatrical, transforming spoken word, breathing, and singing into blurred noise…
In the uncompromising world of Muslimgauze, few releases capture the raw urgency and political fire of Bryn Jones’s vision as powerfully as No Human Rights for Arabs in Israel. Now returning via MG Archive Vol. 033 as a double CD in a limited edition of 200 manually screen-printed copies, this confrontational masterpiece stands as one of the most rhythmically relentless and politically potent works in the entire Muslimgauze catalog. The album’s genesis reflects the chaotic creative process that defined Jones’s approach: Staalplaat received two DATs bearing the same provocative title but containing different content—overlapping in places yet distinct enough to warrant this expanded double CD presentation. The result is a work that captures Muslimgauze at his most focused…
Vinyl-on-demand presents the definitive excavation of Bryn Jones’ formative years with Complete Oblique 1980-1983, a comprehensive 7LP/7CD box set that collects every recording from the pre-Muslimgauze era. This extraordinary archaeological document captures one of experimental music’s most prolific figures in the crucial period before his transformation into the underground legend we know today. Between 1980 and 1983, working under the moniker E.g Oblique Graph, Jones was assembling what would become one of experimental music’s most singular vocabularies through minimal electronic pieces built from synths and tape manipulations. This collection gathers all three impossible-to-find cassettes originally released on “Kinematograph Tapes”…
This work consists of sound and a collection of AI-generated images. The image collection is a compilation of AI-generated images used in a projection at the Merzbow Free Noise concert held on January 6, 2025, at WWW in Shibuya, Tokyo. The use of such visuals in Merzbow is rare in recent years, and of course, the use of AI-generated images in a live performance is a first.
The concert was divided into two parts, and one of the rehearsal recordings of the songs performed in the first part is the first track on the CD, “Peacock Analogy.” This track mixes live recordings of computer sounds from Sonicware’s TextureLab, Oscillator, and CD. The second track, “Tenbyo Caterpillar 1,” is one of Merzbow’s most recent studio recordings.
Loula Yorke’s Hydrology is an effortlessly flowing universe of modular synthesis. Deeply rooted in the essence of water as a starting point, the six pieces on the album explore fluidity in different forms and atmospheres, always true to Yorke’s unique and personal live expressive canvas.
From the circular mantra of the opener “SICL,” we are smoothly and progressively spiraling from the outer limits of the album towards the denser compositional artery of “Gleam” where whispering and at times manipulated voices form a backdrop for the tonal fluctuations of the repetitive synthesizers that zoom in and out like watery particles gleaming in the dark.
The reverberant and spacious production of the album allows for a clean and transparent…
Golden Brown’s Stefan Beck was inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series as he wrote this suite of songs, and he encourages listeners to read the books while absorbing Patterner. His interpretation isn’t especially literal; the title comes from a master wizard in the trilogy and a couple of the track titles are place names from the world LeGuin built. However, the books have a wonderful down-to-earth naturalism, spiked with the glitter of occasional magic, and massed, sometimes, into epic contours. That’s something this music has as well, a cosmic Americana made of ordinary sounds — guitar picking, cello predominate — polished to a heightened, semi-surreal clarity.
Beck has made three previous albums as Golden Brown. He’s also a member of Prairiewolf,…
Recorded live in their hometown of Nottingham on 30th November 2024 to a sold-out crowd, this incredible show was part of the 25th anniversary celebrations of the iconic Bodega venue. It’s rare for Sleaford Mods to perform for such a small crowd, which made this show feel even more intimate and memorable.
Combining the revolutionary fury of punk and hip-hop with the bleakness of austerity-era Great Britain, Sleaford Mods capture the spirit of their time with blunt eloquence. Andrew Fearn’s minimalistic, intentionally cheap-sounding loops, guitars, and keyboards provide a fitting backdrop as Jason Williamson rants about politics, injustice, and pop culture with outrage, scathing humor, and occasionally, rough-edged poignancy.
…year to year, the air is growing swiftly warmer around the world. This is the impetus for forms of minutiae‘s Ice Series, produced in association with UNESCO & WMO’s Art for Glaciers Preservation. Now in its fourth (of five) installments, the series continues to underline both the beauty of glacial sounds and the threat of their extinction.
Cheryl E. Leonard has been involved in climate issues for years; much of this album stems from a residency in Svalbard in 2011. The difference between this and prior entries in the series is the human element; Leonard shares not only field recordings, but the percussion of found objects such as bones and driftwood, as well as samples and scrapes from saws, boats, beakers and more.
We can imagine David Rothenberg relating to…
Marja Ahti’s music rarely commands attention. Depending on the context in which it’s played, whether listening on speakers or headphones, during a time of day bustling with activity or in the dead of night, the Turku, Finland-based Swedish sound artist’s pieces may easily slip into the background and disappear completely beneath the threshold of perception. At the same time, her subtle electroacoustic strokes contain an invitation to listen deeply, leaving behind a trail of found sound, field recordings, synthesizers, amplified objects, and inchoate effects to be assembled into a rewarding sonic narrative.
Ahti’s recent collaboration with kindred sound artist Manja Ristić, Transference on Erstwhile, is a lovely example of this approach: a collage…