Africanus Okokon is a visual artist, a specialist in collage, video and animation. Turkson Side, his debut album, is almost entirely made up of samples, stitched together with conspicuous thread. It’s obvious that there is an appealing intellectual challenge for Okokon in this. But is applying the principles of his art to his music a worthwhile listen for the rest of us?
It’s a good start that it’s released on the eclectic (if sometimes indiscriminate) Other People, the label founded by Nicolas Jaar. Initially, Okokon delivers. ‘Asphalt’, the 15-minute opener, is impressive and sporadically catchy. Kinetic rhythms, half-tuned radios, keyboard mashing, backwards incantation, crickets, and electrical storms all feature, or are suggested, by free-association. Here, Okokon…

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…uses samples to mimic what might go through a magpie mind left with a quarter of an hour to space-stare. It gets better with familiarity, too: something that sounded like a tropical bird cry at first might, the second time around, transform into a sonar ping.

In fact ‘Asphalt’ is so good that it leaves the rest of the album somewhat quivering in its wake. Its unmoored and mostly unrecognisable samples, so skillfully reconstructed on ‘Asphalt’, elsewhere just boil down to a grey and forgettable mush.

There are, however, two notable exceptions. The first is ‘Contelast’, the album’s only mischievous track. It’s initially built around a laconic Britney Spears vocal sample (from the closest she got to avant-R&B, 2009’s ‘Break The Ice’) over the bland tinkle of a factory-setting ringtone. This soon gives way to unhurried percussion, which in itself is destabilised by high-pitched hums. The effect is an axis-free spin, all the more nauseous for its apparent slow speed.

The other is ‘Wrake’, a home recording of Okokon playing the krar, an Ethiopian lyre, which has strong associations in its home country. Unlike the larger ten-string beganna lyre, which is associated with devotional music and considered sacred, the krar is traditionally thought of, quite literally, as Satan’s instrument. Okokon plays it gently and imperfectly, and the result is almost mournful. By rights, ‘Wrake’ should stick out among the found sounds of Turkson Side, but instead it manages to sound every bit as sampled as the rest of the album. It could have been from a Robbie Basho experiment, or an early Devendra Banhart sketch. It’s laudable that, even when he isn’t using samples, Okokon gets the listener thinking about the role of instruments outside of their expected context, especially when played by Western musicians: where does admiration end and exploitation begin? ‘Wrake’ works both as a challenge to what we think of as authentic, and as a bewitching track in its own right.

On the back cover of Triac‘s Days, the electronic music trio thanks Richard Chartier, LINE’s curator and showrunner, Italian artist Marco Marzouli, and acclaimed music producer William Basinski, but of the three it’s the latter with whom, musically speaking, Days has most in common.
That being said, the album’s material could also be mistaken for a Celer or Stephan Mathieu production, especially when the album features glassy drones and tremulous wisps of processed sound shimmering like light reflections and hanging suspendedly in mid-air.
Formed in 2011, Triac blends the talents and musical contributions of Marco Seracini (piano, synthesizer), Augusto Tatone (electric bass), and one-time TU M’ member Rossano Polidoro,…

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…who’s credited with laptop on the recording and leads the group project. Recorded in 2014 and fifty-one minutes in length, Days‘ seven tracks are sequentially titled—“Day One,” “Day Two,” etc.—to imply that each piece was created in a single day. The keyboards and bass sounds rarely if ever appear in unaltered form; instead, they assume a blurry character, presumably the result of Polidoro’s laptop treatments. The tracks vary in duration, with the shortest four minutes (“Day Seven”) and the longest twelve (“Day Three”). While that long setting is also arguably the recording’s standout for how it so subtly and artfully sequences its fragile elements into an alternately murmuring and whistling whole, “Day Five,” impresses too in the way a faint residue of melancholy seems to rise off of its softly shimmering surfaces. In such cases, the similarities between Triac’s peaceful meditations and Celer’s cloud-like formations are hard to miss.

Days whispers at a near-subliminal level that likens it to ambient music in the textbook wallpaper-like sense; still, while there is a sense in which its material recedes into the background, there’s enough development and dynamic range within a given track to hold one’s attention and keep one engaged. There’s a strong degree of uniformity to the album, yet at the same time each of the seven settings presents a slightly different prismatic portrait of the trio’s music.

Having played as drummer for acts as diverse as Flying Lotus, BOOTS, John Cale and the Mars Volta, it’s hard to know what one should expect from a Deantoni Parks solo album. If, for some reason, you expected him to hammer a sampler, precariously perched atop a kick drum, while simultaneously working the rest of the kit one-handed, then give yourself a round of applause: Though split between live performances and one-take studio recordings, Technoself is made from nothing but that setup.
In a sense, it’s all percussion; the samples are hit in real-time along with all the other parts of the drum kit, yet it’s funky, wistful, and above all raw as hell. It has infinitely more depth than other percussion-based projects, such as the maddening disaster that was Janet Weiss, Matt Cameron and…

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…Zach Hill’s Drumgasm album. Technoself is, on occasion, reminiscent of Hill’s other band — a little group called Death Grips — and one of those occasions is the superb “Our Shadows” which, along with most of the album, is rife with quick, dirty cuts that sometimes go into overdrive (as they do on “Bombay”) and at times slow to a trot (as on “Down”). When Technoself hits that perfect pace, however, such as on the thoroughly danceable “Fosse in the Grass,” it really shines.

Technoself is certainly conceptually intriguing, and for many that will be its selling point, but it’s so much more than just an impressive display of dexterity — it’s an impressive display of music, full stop.

Since the release of his first EP, Tips, on Luciano’s Cadenza label in 2007, producer and DJ Petre Inspirescu has emerged as one of the key figures of the Romanian electronic music scene, with releases on Vinylclub, Lick My Deck, Amphia, and [a:rpia:r], which he launched with his buddies Rhadoo and Raresh in 2007 as platform for them and other producers from Romania and elsewhere to release detailed, grooving house and techno with delicate structures and one-of-a-kind grooves.
Both of his more dancefloor-oriented solo albums, Intr-o Seara Organica… (2009) and Grădina Onirică (2012), are enlarged with melodies, sounds, and harmonies that go beyond the usual characteristics of a dance album. His love for classical composers like Mily Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, and…

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…Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov can be felt in his album Pădurea de Aur (Opus 2 in Re Major) (2011), released under his πEnsemble alias on the Romanian Yojik ConCon label and intended to unite classical spheres with analog electronic music production.

Inspirescu now follows his 2014 debut on Mule Musiq, the Talking Waters 12″, with Vin Ploile. Although he’s established himself as an internationally in-demand house DJ, performing regularly at all the major clubs, festivals, and party destinations around the globe, Petre Inspirescu offers no easy rhythms, melodies, or harmonies on Vin Ploile. As a musician Petre Inspirescu always tries to explore the infinite space of sound with a heartfelt human touch. To create Vin Ploile, he combined piano, string, and wind instruments with analog electronics; a deep ocean of sound forms from live improvised sessions that were edited, tweaked, and mixed to perfection, with unusual analog synth sounds fluidly grooving with subliminal bass shapes, Latin percussion, jazz rhythms, and acoustic melodies. Together they create a gaseous kinetic atmosphere full of tangible rhythm patterns, delicate chords, and ghostly modular synth pads, all subtly mixed to create space for the tones between the tones. A hypnotic after-hours album dedicated to evoking a deep listening experience, with brilliantly textured arrangements of super-charged ambient sound that goes beyond the usual definition of the genre. These suspenseful compositions seduce with a deep melodic sensibility, delivering harmonic adventures and an overall rhythmic ambience of freshness and laid-back enthusiasm. Together they represent a challenging auditory experience that will resonate in your mind long after the music has finished.

Although never a label to discourage the collaborative tangling of its artists and their shared musical influences, the Italian-born and now London-based Tullia Benedicta is perhaps the first younger artist to be openly inspired by the work of Second Language’s co-founder Glen Johnson and his work leading Piano Magic.
Previously a member of Italian post-rock outfit Grace, Benedicta may certainly know her way around the sprawling Piano Magic canon yet despite the fact that this debut solo album bears the hallmarks of immersively listening to the likes Low Birth Weight, Son De Mar and Writers Without Homes, as well as including supportive input from Johnson and his bandmates Jerome Tcherneyan and Franck Alba, the darkly alluring Anteros…

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…is far more than a mutual mentor-mentee appreciation affair. Framed by a blend of organic and processed musical arrangements, Benedicta’s vision here is a tacit tussle between intimacy and detachment. After the brief opening collage of found sounds, eerie ambient layering and plangent keyboards that makes up the self-descriptive cinematic “Intro”, the album properly begins with the mesmeric centrepiece “Beats Or Silence”, a shadowy languid mix of watery beats and Benedicta’s vocals recalling some of This Mortal Coil’s guest singers. In its wake, the programmed backdrops shift into more glitchy and shimmery patterns for the sensual “Signs” before bleeding into the subterranean beats, ethereal washes and spoken-word prowling of the disconcerting yet engrossing “Blind”. For “Devotion”, ’80-meets-‘90s electronica and piano lines snap and pulse around Benedicta’s commanding tones to imagine prime-time Depeche Mode with a female replacement for Dave Gahan. On the ensuing “Edge Of Life”, Tricky’s Maxinquaye is cross-fertilised with Dead Can Dance to conjure a dank film-noire score, whilst the piano-led “Rain” recalls the haunted atmospherics of Nick Cave’s “A Box For Black Paul”. Proceedings conclude with an extended remixed reprise of “Beats Or Silence” by Tcherneyan, which deepens, extends and complements the original version’s captivating reach.

Anteros is certainly not an easy listen but neither is it hard to be drawn in by its magnetic attraction, which grows stronger with each listen. A stark, promising and enigma-encoding new beginning in short.

1. Intro
2. Beats Or Silence
3. Signs
4. Blind
5. Devotion
6. Edge Of Life
7. Rain
8. Beats Or Silence (Piano Magic Warehouse Mix)

Fuzz Club’s exploration of the psychedelic underground has yielded another stellar discovery in Italian coldwave duo Throw Down Bones. With live performances at Liverpool Psych Fest and the Fuzz Club Festival both being treated with great accolades, the debut album is eight tracks of instrumental electronica born from experimentation, and is the most played album on Fuzz Club’s own iTunes in 2015, and that’s without it being released yet.
For fans of Dead Skeltons, Neu and Gnod, the album set for release on December opens with ‘Exposure’, a six minute noise masterpiece with increasing intensity as sound is layered. This is experimental sound at its finest, with a drive for precision which shines through…

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…as it progresses into ‘Our Home, the Holy Mountain’. The dream like trance this track induces is not surprising when you know that to create this album, the band’s experimental creative process saw them locked away in their alpine studio for a weeklong jam session, which was harvested for sounds, riffs and effects, from which they built the final tracks.

‘A Premise to Action’ is a beautifully calm and melodic track interspersed with noise interludes so brief and fleeting it takes a couple of listens to realise if you’ve actually heard them. The tempo is increased with ‘Inner Lights’ which comes across fantastically both live and on record. As the lengthy track progresses, it evolves into something extremely clever with the use of layering over the key. There are not many bands who can produce albums without a word uttered and still ensnare an audience.

The onslaught comes next in the form of ‘Emitters’ and the stand out track from the album, and the one receiving the most attention to date, ‘Saturator’. The positioning of these two tracks, whether intentional or by a mere stroke of luck, is quite simply genius. The sounds complement each other perfectly and one leads to the other without flaw. ‘Saturator’ itself is a masterpiece and a track that had to be played extremely loud and on repeat. In its structure it is incredibly simple; four mutating elements repeated and evolved with each repetition with the addition of further guitar and tambourine later on. The intensity builds and by the end it is quite literally impossible to not be at the very least tapping a foot. To describe this track in such basic terms does not do the music true justice, the only way to understand is to listen to it and soak it in. I’d recommend doing so several times.

‘Bones’ follows, with a slightly different feel to the rest of the album due to the change of tone and effect. Whilst sticking with the same theme employed by the rest of the album, this feels like the showcase track, where they really put their skills as musicians to good effect, and it comes across in the clarity and quality of the track. Rounding off the album we have ‘It’s All Around Us’; a return to the melodic once more with its sweeping riffs and haunting migrations of sound.

Their mix of infectious beats and the raw energy of live rock n roll make Throw Down Bones a great act to watch live with their offering of a dark and modern definition of coldwave. Dave Cocks (Bass/Percussion) and Frankie Frankie (Guitar/Synth/Vocal/Effect) have created something rather special here and Fuzz Club have found a hidden gem and brought them right into the spotlight where they deserve to be.

01. Exposure (6:00)
02. Our Home, The Holy Mountain (7:30)
03. A Premise to Action (5:31)
04. Inner Lights (7:48)
05. Emitters (5:52)
06. Saturator (6:35)
07. Bones (8:30)
08. It’s All Around Us (6:28)

A highly controversial figure in the Czech Republic, Milan Knizak is mostly known in America for his membership in Fluxus in the 1960s-1970s. A performance artist, Knizak is an art renegade who was banned by the Communist regime and kept in the fringes because of his political activism and art terrorism.
After the Velvet Revolution, he was given the presidency of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Although not really a musician or composer, he deserves a place in music history; he pioneered cut-and-paste techniques with lathe records later picked up by avant-garde turntablists like Christian Marclay and Martin Tétreault. Knizak grew up in Marienbad (now Mariánské Lázné). After being thrown out of various Prague universities…

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…and art schools, he came to New York and associated himself with Fluxus, a group of postmodern conceptual artists (Yoko Ono was the best-known member).

Knizak’s performance art pieces usually involved very down-to-earth human activities turned into absurd gestures (like adults playing childish games in the middle of the street). His search for the ultimate desacralization of art took a new turn in the mid-’60s when he began to paint, break, scratch, and alter LPs in every possible way (including cutting them and pasting unrelated pieces together). These works stand as both art pieces and playable scores. He extended the concept to printed scores – erasing notes, changing bar sequences, pasting unrelated passages together, etc. Recordings of his mutilated records were released by the label Multiphla in 1979 (reissued on CD by Ampersand).

Back in Europe in the late ’70s, Knizak continued to create and lecture, even though he was persona non grata in Czechoslovakia and kept making enemies with his agit-prop antics and flammable politic statements. A friend of Vaclav Havel, he became one of the many members of the artistic community to take part in the first government of the liberated Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. As president of the Academy of Fine Arts, he was the source of many scandals, buying his own works with the institution’s money and self-curating major exhibitions of his works. He later became director of the National Gallery in Prague.

Milan Knízák and Opening Performance Orchestra revisit Knízák’s 1979 Broken Music in Berlin, 2014.
Part one, “Broken Music,” features Knízák with Phaerentz performing with turntables and broken records, CD players and CDs, cassette players and cassettes, and keyboard.
Part two, “Re:Broken Music,” features Opening Performance Orchestra performing with five laptops and “fraction music (broken section, re:broken section, fraction section).”

01. Milan Knizak – Broken Music (44:59)
02. Opening Performance Orchestra – Re-Broken Music (32:59)

Post Industrial Noise was an “audio artsemble” conceived in 1982 in Columbus, Ohio by the trio Robert Crise Jr, Gerald F. Nelson, and Dana Riashi Ritchey. They started on a drum machine, guitars, and vocals but quickly evolved to one member on synths and two guitarists on occasional synths.
Robert Crise Jr maintained a studio titled “The Center for Contemporary Realism” where he conceived most of the lyrics for PIN. Gerald F. Nelson was a local performance artist, and Dana Riashi (OSU art student) claimed to be the “idea-mediator” between Robert and Gerald.
The output of PIN could be described a more experimental/minimalist offshoot of new wave with pleasant synth sequences blanketed in rich synth tones. Fans of Near Paris will obviously…

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…draw comparisons, but the overall feel of PIN is a bit darker and possibly more lo-fi in all aspects. The opening track “Sketch” has a definite cold wave vibe with slightly echoed vocals over a subtle drum machine beat and monotonous synth lines. “Prelude” is a deep instrumental cut with synth and sample interplay resulting in a hypnotic slab of brilliance. The tracks on this collection have been restored from the original analog tape reel for this reissue.

1. Sketch (5:34)
2. Survivalists (4:28)
3. Outside Reality (4:33)
4. Compartment Life (2:45)
5. COTA City Salsa (4:38)
6. Think (6:57)
7. Symphony Of A Mind (5:34)
8. Prelude (3:59)
9. Eyes (6:24)

Radioland: Radio-Activity Revisited is a stunning reimagining of Kraftwerk’s seminal album, created to celebrate its 40th anniversary.
Radioland was initially devised as a breathtaking audio-visual live experience by the Anglo-French trio of Matthew Bourne (synthesisers, voice), Franck Vigroux (electronics) and visual artist Antoine Schmitt.
The original music has been transformed with hurricanes of modulated electronics, earth-shattering bass frequencies, vocoders ebbing and throbbing and the occasional drop into periods of eerie near-silence. Using a variety of vintage analogue synthesisers and electronics, they have recreated the futuristic, industrial world of ominous darkness and dazzling light imagined…

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…by Kraftwerk in 1975 and reconstructed in this bold new manifestation for 2015. The album is mastered by Denis Blackham, who mastered Kraftwerk’s classic 1974 album Autobahn. Both versions include liner notes by David Stubbs, author of Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany, and photographs and images from the project. The album cover artwork is taken from the video work of Antoine Schmitt, creator of the captivating visuals that are a vital component of the Radioland performance. Matthew Bourne and Franck Vigroux’s impressive collective CV boasts collaborations with artists such as John Zorn, Nostalgia 77, Marc Ribot, Annette Peacock, Elliot Sharp, Mika Vainio, Ben Miller and Zeena Parkins.

1. Geiger Counter (2:07)
2. Radioactivity (5:07)
3. Radioland (4:50)
4. Airwaves (5:16)
5. Intermission (1:17)
6. The Voice Of Energy (2:53)
7. Antenna (7:04)
8. Radio Stars (6:07)
9. Uranium (2:52)
10. Transistor (4:25)
11. Ohm Sweet Ohm (3:17)

Of M. Ostermeier‘s 2011 album The Rules of Another Small World, Fluid Radio wrote, “A stunning collection of pieces exploring the intricacies of found sounds and electronics and the beauty of the piano in its natural state.”
As it turns out, much the same could be said of the Baltimore-based composer’s newest collection Still. Never perhaps has a recording been more aptly titled as this one, given its propensity for stillness and calm, and such qualities make for a richly contemplative listening experience.
Still, Ostermeier’s first album in four years is also his third on Tench, the label he curates and that was founded in 2010, the year his first outing on the label, Chance Reconstruction, appeared. That artists such as Marcus Fischer, Porya Hatami,…

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…and The Green Kingdom have also appeared on Tench should immediately convey an impression of the kinds of ambient- and electro-acoustic-styled material we’re talking about. Restraint, understatement, and minimalism would seem to be the principles by which Ostermeier operate: the album weighs in at a svelte thirty-six minutes, and even the track titles are minimal (as if to emphasize the point further two of them are named “Stasis” and “Inertia”). Its title notwithstanding, Still isn’t an album lacking in incident. The most aggressive setting of the eight featured—to the extent that an Ostermeier track can be deemed aggressive—is “Counterpoise,” which underlays its piano splashes with waves of electronic pulsations and the percussive tapping of what sounds like a typewriter.

Effecting a careful balance between electronic and acoustic elements, Ostermeier establishes in a typical moodpiece a subtle electronic foundation overtop of which light speckles of percussive noise and sprinkles of acoustic piano flutter. While the specific path a given track follows can’t be predicted, nothing feels random; instead, elements are distributed with a methodical degree of precision that seems almost surgical, and the meditative music hangs in the air like incense, imbuing the environment with desaturated hues in a manner consistent with classic ambient music. In a lovely vignette such as “Hang,” the gentle brush strokes of the piano feel like warm rays of sunlight seeping into one’s home during the early morning hours.

Partir to Live (2012) is a non-narrative film experience in sensations, in ethical confusion, and in physical and psychic contusions, directed by Domingo Garcia-Huidobro of Föllakzoid.
Dutch minimalist composer Jozef van Wissem’s score for the film consists of appropriated 12-string electric guitar drone, black baroque lute mirror images, and minimal electronics.
Garcia-Huidobro is an aficionado of paranormal experiences. Partir to Live sees him attempting to reconstruct the previous moments of what could have been one of these episodes. High-tension cables, a forest, an abandoned church, a barefoot woman; past, present and future become confused, and in this dissolved reality, he is not sure to have found what he was looking for.

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Partir to Live was part of the official selection at Valdivia Film Festival and premiered internationally at ATP Festival in Camber Sands UK. It has screened at over a dozen more festivals since, including the Brussels Film Festival and the Moscow International Film Festival.

White noise sound is, let’s be blunt, rather boring. You’ve got to be some kind of sadist to actually enjoy listening to it and if for some reason you don’t know what it is, hit the search engines and find some, but don’t say you weren’t warned.
Luckily, there is little alignment between Swansea six-piece White Noise Sound’s second album Like a Pyramid of Fire and their name. Formed in 2006, the Welsh outfit came together through natural evolution more than anything else, as various local acts joined ranks. In 2010 they released an acclaimed eponymous debut long player described in certain quarters as “psychedelia meeting krautrock”, with numbers such as the excellent Sunset blazing a psychedelic, motorik trail of magnificence. Sunset was the perfect…

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…prescription of ‘their’ sound at the time, a sound heavily influenced by The Jesus And Mary Chain and in particular Spacemen 3 amongst others, but with the involvement of Pete Kember then perhaps this was inevitable.

LAPOF – as it shall hitherto be known – is largely a different beast to that of its predecessor. Cian Ciaran of Super Furry Animals remains on mixing and production, along with Dublin techno DJ and producer Phil Kieran, so the new direction is a little unexpected and occasionally results in a sound of confusion as experiments begin to stand shoulder to shoulder with a tried and trusted formula.

The biggest nod to the past is possibly Red Light, an enthrallingly driving, droning rhythmical monster that finishes off with a gargantuan guitaring passage of compelling power – an excellent foothold for early fans before they tackle this different approach. Single and opening track Heavy Echo has attracted widespread admiration since its release; it’s a thoroughly captivating, droning fuzzfest of ‘life gone wrong’ that recalls Brian Jonestown Massacre and was apparently conceived in a Cardiff flat by band leader Daniel Henley – let’s hope for his neighbours’ sake the demo was rather toned down compared to the final version.

Elsewhere, the band begin to drift off on a tangent to the norm: the beautiful All You Need is set to a meticulous, mechanical beat with hushed vocals and swirling synths as the shoegaze-laced Maps are brought to mind whilst the pulsating experimentation of Can’t You See It borrows samples and other effects as electronica not unlike that witnessed on Boards Of Canada’s Geodaddi begins to take a hold. The slower Bow opens to blips and beeps in the style of Kasabian from their eponymous debut and Do It Again rolls along like an evolving beast, built around repetition and a catchy keyboard riff as the band tap into their krautrock influences.

Step Into The Light is simply magnificent: following a slower path with simple guitar chords, soaring synths and cymbals alongside persistent drumming it’s a thing of beauty, leading to a cinematic climax brushed with brass-led orchestration. The experimentation doesn’t always come off, however, with closing track Feel It sounding a little like a leftover piece of collated electronic bleeps.

With the debut so teasingly like Spacemen 3, the follow-up will probably disappoint those that just wanted more of the same, but LAPOF is so much more, with varying influences popping up all over the place. Whilst this has diluted an overall consistency, it’s revealed a depth that was certainly not prevalent for 2010’s introduction to the band, and playing with fire in this manner was an undeniable risk. The change of direction has perhaps been primarily due to Kieran’s influence, but however they got here is largely irrelevant; where they go next, though, is potentially mouth-watering.

For the 15 years Monorail Trespassing has been in operation they’ve released a staggering amount of music. To celebrate their 100th release they’ve delivered the newest offering from Pedestrian Deposit, the duo of Jonathan Borges and Shannon A. Kennedy. “The Architector” is two side-long tracks built off of material dating from February 2010 through December 2014 “recorded at lungmotor c.n., goose nest, and in the field”.
Pedestrian Deposit give a bit of detail on their Facebook about the release stating, “The culmination of five years of obsessive work – fits and starts of ongoing perfectionism that spawned two solo projects and two additional records. Beginning with crude and unfamiliar source materials, each sound is examined…

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…from every possible angle, then taken apart and reconstructed along with the compositional process. From 2010 forward, each phase is represented; the past three U.S. tours have given clues, and these recordings offer more of the puzzle, but you will never get everything at once. To be experienced as foreground with no distractions. This begins a practice of self-containment and preservation from outside elements.” For the people familiar with their work already, this presents some very compelling information; but for those who aren’t, it barely hints at the intensely visceral and powerful noise ahead.
Reducing Pedestrian Deposit’s sound to a strictly “noise” signifier, however, would be a terrible disservice to the duo. Their pieces are for the most part composed, with a strict adherence to form, spatiality, dynamics, and timbre. Live performances often include elaborate rigging structures, suspending Kennedy in an array of pulleys, chains, and other pieces wielding contact mics in a seemingly dangerous but composed dance of sonic annihilation. Borges, keenly aware of dynamic minutia, switches from stoically composed to all out furious, extracting devastating feedback from the ether. Side A’s “A Cold Harvest”, begins with brief flashes of metallic dread on top of a steady and rippling undercurrent of low-end oscillation. The overwhelming feeling is that of dread. The sounds morph into labored groans of synth with triggered splashes of feedback that never seem to spiral out from their control. Sharp stabs of synth build over distant electronic wails. The tension is haunting. Dancing around the edges of complete breakdown the duo builds an already unnerving sound to near hysteria before completely falling off to slow paced crawl of clicking feedback and sublime bowed cello. “Shifted Snake” kicks of the B side with dexterous punches of harsh noise, silhouetted by almost imperceptible bed of fuzz. Glistening bubbles of synth boil over, melting into the layers of looping textured noise. Soft resonant tones float in and out of the structure. The noise eventually fades leaving only the resonance behind; a glowing orb of distant light rotating around you just beyond your arms reach that swells with a slow and steady speed before ultimately consuming you. This is an extraordinary release from a titan in experimental music. It makes you painfully aware of the intricacies of awareness, beckoning you to give everything you have to the energy of the performance.

Book of Air is a series of bundled compositions for improvised music, exploring the parameters of sound and time. Fieldtone is the first chapter.
Fieldtone refers to ‘roomtone’: Roomtone is the “silence” recorded at a location or space when no music is played or dialogue spoken. Every room is different, and these recordings always carry their unique character.
The compositions of fieldtone are inspired by the tempo and sonic textures of specific nature locations. The sound to be found in nature has a very slow groove. A groove embedded by silence, and so slow it can almost only be felt while spending a few hours in the nature at sea, during a forest trip, in open fields, … It is this groove and the “silence” of nature that was an inspiration for…

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…the Fieldtone compositions.

By embedding this silent slowness into the compositions, the details of the sounds played become much more prominent. In this way the silence in the music amplifies the sounds that are played, and will also amplify the room surrounding the listener.

Certainly one central key to Sebastian Zangar‘s second album appears in its title, with the M an indirect reference to Maurizio (Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald), whose Basic Channel material had a huge impact on the Romania-born German resident. Children of M isn’t, however, a one-dimensional rip-off, no matter how indebted its sound design and dub-techno style are to Basic Channel and Chain Reaction. Also key to the album is that it wasn’t created within a single cloistered studio but instead at two locations: Berlin, an admittedly primary inspiration, and Ingarö Fagerholm, a tiny island near Stockholm, Sweden.
As a result, the album’s twelve tracks incorporate aspects of both the city and the country, and the tension between contrasts — the industrial world…

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…versus uncontaminated nature, for instance — occasionally surfaces in the material. “To Stardub with Love,” for example, seems to have its feet planted in both locales, with the sweltering humidity and plentiful bird chatter evoking the countryside and the marching bass-and-drum pulse suggesting the hectic pace of life in the big city. The metronomic pulsations of “On the Train,” on the other hand, lead one to visualize a scenic journey undertaken by Zangar from Berlin to Ingarö Fagerholm, while “Waldeckpark” possesses similarly evocative power. On this otherwise instrumental album, a rasta-fied voice surfaces alongside aquatic burble in “Silent Saxophone” in a way that aligns Zangar’s project to Ernestus and von Oswald’s Rhythm & Sound project rather than Maurizio.

Children of M isn’t a concept album per se, but it is bound together by the dub-techno theme, even if the twelve tracks were ones selected from dozens Zangar created between 2012 and 2015. He won’t win any awards for originality and innovation, but there’s no denying the album offers a satisfying take on the style. Minimal bass-and-drum patterns repeatedly rise out of heavy mist, their insistent pulsations augmented by clangorous chords and metallic washes, and with the tracks bathed in a perpetual blanket of hiss and crackle, there’s atmosphere aplenty and no shortage of rhythmic thrust, too.

Chicagoan experimentalist Jim O’Rourke is experimenting with a new music distribution technique. He’s launched a Bandcamp site, where he’s releasing albums full of rare material. Together, they’re called Steamroom 1-20.
The longtime Sonic Youth associate has detailed each of the records’ origins with pithy descriptions such as, “Recorded 2012. Originally released as a tour cd for the Christoph Heemann / Will Long / Jim O’Rourke 2013 Japan Tour,” which applies to Steamroom 1.
All of the full-lengths are split into just one or two tracks, and many were recorded in Tokyo last several years. Streamroom 5 and Streamroom 8 are the oldest pieces O’Rourke has collected – both date back to 1990. Steamroom 7, meanwhile…

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…was originally crafted as the soundtrack to the Makino Takashi film The World. Streamroom 9: Originally released as a limited edition lp on Entenpfuhl in 1991 recorded between 1990 and 1991, Steamroom 10: Made for the Editions Mego presentations at the CTM Festival, Berlin January 2014 recorded at steamroom tokyo 8/13-1/14, Steamroom 13: Recorded April-June 2013 at Steamroom Tokyo, Steamroom 16: recorded live at super deluxe, tokyo on june 17, 2013 a recreation of shows done throughout europe and in toronto between 1989-1994…

Ross Manning is an interdisciplinary artist working with installation, technology, movement and sound.
Over the past half decade, Manning has been responsible for a variety of increasingly profound explorations into light and movement.
His installations aim to reveal spectrum and frequency in patterns that often go unrecognised.
On new album Interlacing, the versatile Australian artist explores two varied strains of his work.
Firstly, he weaves together electro-magnetic recordings and custom electronics to create a cascading flow of uneasy tonality and noise.
Secondly, he showcases a range of custom made fan-driven instruments, creating fluttering patterns of rhythm and melody using everything from clock chimes to wooden boards of nails.

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Japan is where I first started getting interested in making electronics,” Ross explains of his first experiments conducted whilst he was living and teaching in Japan, “I would go into Aki-habara and all the electronics stalls. Japan is where I saw all this amazing music and art and also got the chance to start building and experimenting.”

Hox is the collaborative project of Wire bassist Graham Lewis and Swedish ambient/experimental musician Andreas Karperyd. Lewis has previously worked alongside Karperyd as a member of ambient outfit He Said Omala.
Entitled Duke of York, the album is the first from the duo in 16 years. The pair first worked together as Hox for 1999’s It-ness album, and Duke of York is the duo’s first new material since then.
According to Editions Mego, the new album is a “contemporary electronic pop record,” described by the label as “tender, skewered, sophisticated and unsettling. Whilst both tackling the sonic side of the outing Lewis also presents pleasantly paranoid lyrics, Karperyd drapes it all in a distinguished design. This combination presents a substantial…

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…study of the sonically impressive, visually inviting and songs rich in brooding, dark atmosphere and melodic content.”

British electronic musician Martin Jenkins has been making records under the name Pye Corner Audio for most of this decade. Using a collection of eccentric analog snyths and lo-fi recording, he creates a retro-distopian-future sound filtered through John Carpenter soundtracks, JG Ballard novels, early Mute Records and all things dark and seedy. Jenkins is fairly prolific, dropping singles and tracks online frequently, most of which have been culled for a series of Black Mill Tapes compilations.
Jenkins has lined up a new album on Vancouver- based label More Than Human. Prowler follows soon after his tape of analogue dance cuts for Ecstatic Recordings and offers 7 tracks of “eerie beatless acidy squelch”, according to Norman Records.
While groove-oriented, this is more creepy mood…

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…music than anything to get you on the dancefloor.

1. After Dark
2. She Hunts at Night
3. Something Happened
4. Before Dawn
5. Prowler
6. Decade Counter
7. Morning

A full decade after Return to Acid Planet 10, Michael Fakesch and Chris De Luca reunite as Funkstörung to deliver their fourth long player. Unlike that recording, this self-titled album features all-new tracks. The duo don’t push boundaries or really reinvent anything here (though on some level, they can’t help themselves when it comes to sonics).
Instead, they focus on their core strength: writing sensual IDM pop songs full of spare, sonorous melodies set to hip-hop and elliptical electro beats with irresistible basslines. Nine of these 14 cuts include vocals and are delivered by a host of friends old and new. First single “Laid Out (one of four tunes featuring Anothr), remains a highlight, but it is nearly eclipsed by the soulful “So Simple,” with Jamie Lidell on the mike. Australian duo Audego…

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…lend their spacy, jazzy, trip-hop stylings to “FalI Into You.” Jay-Jay Johanson adds his voice to the aching, glitch-ridden “I Love Him So” as ziggy synth shards and acoustic piano loops frame his airy tenor. The darkest tune in this bunch is the tense, taut, nearly cinematic “Killers,” featuring Taprikk Sweezee, with a lyric that juxtaposes eros and heartbreak. The spectral, languid “Chnnl” and the brooding, creepy “Slo” are the only two instrumentals that don’t act as brief ambient interludes to link vocal tracks. There is a wonderful bluesy feel in Adi’s vocal on “Who Is Who,” with its crawling, downtempo snare colored and textured by a slow-strolling synth, hypnotic bassline, and icy breaks. Funkstörung have a history of looking to the past for inspiration. Here they remind longtime fans of their requisite skills as songwriters (think back to Disconnected) while offering enough sultry, elegant, and seductive beat constructions to attract a new legion as well.

1. Fall Into You (feat. Audego) [03:20]
2. Laid Out (feat. Anothr) [03:38]
3. Iatc [00:37]
4. So Simple (feat. Jamie Lidell) [03:55]
5. Hpe [00:42]
6. Drown in Time (feat. Anothr) [03:13]
7. Chnnl [02:30]
8. Killers (feat. Taprikk Sweezee) [03:30]
9. Slo [02:35]
10. Who Is Who? (feat. Adi) [03:20]
11. All the Things (feat. Anothr) [03:25]
12. I Love Him So (feat. Jay-Jay Johanson) [03:12]
13. Krktr [00:19]
14. The Other Way Round (feat. Anothr) [03:40]
15. Solute (Bonus) [02:54]
16. Pseudonyms (Bonus) (feat. Anothr) [03:58]
17. Sevn (Bonus) [06:56]