Alexander Noice makes music that is full of complexity yet also full of mirth. On his 2019 album NOICE (also the name of the ensemble he gathered for that record), his guitar work joined forces with alto saxophone, bass, drums (both acoustic and programmed) and the twin vocals of Karina Kallas and Argenta Walther as they worked their way through Noice’s knotty but endlessly catchy compositions.
…On Perpetually and Forever, Noice handles the lion’s share of the instrumentation, credited with guitar, piano, synths, vocals, and programming, with saxophones, flute, and bass clarinet added to a few of the tracks. While the somewhat “one-person band” status of the record may lead other artists to adopt a more minimalist…
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Techno, noise, drone — as modern underground electronic music’s power trio, these three bodies thrive in spaces and on labels with the creative ambition to tease out their commonalities, while picking and pulling at the frayed edges of their discrepancies. There is perhaps one absolute that ties them together: darkness, the evocation of space and light that can take many forms — a smoke-filled car; the soupy, impenetrable air of the club; a bedroom; an underpass. On 
The jig is up. The act behind the most bewildering ambient techno of the past 15 years is not a shadowy syndicate or group of evil geniuses. It’s actually just Izaak Schlossman, who started the project back in Seattle as part of a crew called Aught. The proliferation of aliases, and the artist’s eventual move to San Francisco — where he started the synth-pop band Loveshadow — caused lingering confusion. No one could decide where 
The LP, released on Text, brings together an unusual solo project by Kieran Hebden that deliberately plays with the unpronounceable in the way it is presented. As the immediate follow-up release to 
Guttural screams, desperate moans and disaffected, dragged-out deliveries suffuse the Canadian quatuor’s second release. Reformulating some of their debut album’s mix of hardcore and folk (it’s aptly named Violence), 
Swedish singer-songwriter 
The volumes of music referenced in the title of 
Hazy and out of focus, not as in a dream, but as in awakening from short, uneasy sleep. Uneasy because it never became a full separation from the world, instead letting all of its invisible threads pass through, the mind yet another cat’s cradle – a spider’s web, leaf veins spreading fractally, voices intersecting, branching thunder, constellations in the night sky changing over millions of years. Here in the Valley, with its blurred cover art, its Grouper-like soft and processed vocals, and its echoing folk instrumentation, nurtures that disorientation, experienced as a light porosity; its murmurs become you, its murmurs become the world.
Lynn Blakey was not a name that gained a great deal of traction commercially but she was an influential figure in the indie rock and alt-country scene in her home state of North Carolina where she DJ’d on college radio in the early ’80s; this was before forming Oh Ok in Athens Georgia with Michel Stipe’s sister Lynda (driven by the inspiration of seeing REM at a small local gig). She collaborated with others such as guitarist Mitch Easter in The Royal Opposition and guitarist Michael Chumbris in Glory Fountain, but her most well-known group experience was with Tres Chicas, a band formed in the late ’90s in Raleigh, NC, with Blakey, Caitlin Cary (from Whiskeytown) and Tonya Lamm (from Hazeldine). The group sang together for a few years before releasing Sweetwater in…
With time and experience always comes a sense of knowing, and 
10 years ago, Madrid native 
Fans of experimental solo guitar records have been having a good year. The spring brought a new record by avant-jazz/power ambient guru David Torn and a career-spanning comp of madcap inventor Hans Reichel’s work. Now, Bill Orcutt’s Palilalia label gives us two LPs’ worth of gnarled fission and warped disputation from German provocateur 
Pascal Bideau’s second album as