Personal computers stand as one of the most substantial inventions of the 20th century, to some great extent because of how they’ve reframed our very identities. Our laptops, tablets and phones intersect with many branches of our lives, especially the methods by which we entertain ourselves.
Published at Decoder Magazine
September 1962: jazz legends Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach gather in New York City for a session that sets the standard for the jazz trio. Their Money Jungle session is a master class in performance in which the musicians improvise off each other rather than giving one player the solo spotlight. The influential work is a synthesis of two members of the new guard (Mingus and Roach) and a composer more known for his big band style.
Published at Echoes and Dust
Mark Reeder is one of those people who can sniff out a scene. Being friends with Joy Division and producing the last East Berlin band before the Wall collapsed is impressive enough, but Reeder has never liked to stay stationary. Finding himself in a united Germany and a new musical world, Reeder moved on to start the influential and prolific Masterminded for Success (MFS) trance imprint before pioneering the Flesh label that focused on “wet and hard” techno of Eastern European electronic music.
Published at Subrewind
The dawn of the century has seen a fragmentation of musical expression arranged into literally hundreds of microgenres. One of the more curious examples is skweee, a Scandinavian sound characterized by squealing, goofy synthesizer lines, an infatuation for vintage electronics, and off-kilter rhythms. Skweee is influenced by late-70s and 80s obscure funk, electronic disco, Kraftwerk and pioneering dance producers like Patrick Cowley.
Published at Subrewind
Sigha’s James Shaw is a versatile producer whose second album Metabolism further pushes his limits. Metabolism‘s twelve tracks showcase a schizophrenic range of styles that make for a pleasantly unpredictable and rewarding listen. Developing his chops with laidback dubstep tracks released on Scuba’s Hotflush imprint and moving into a more straightforward techno arena, his first LP Living With Ghosts showed the first signs of stretching from convention.
Published at Echoes and Dust
Early last October, French guitar and electronic pioneer Richard Pinhas played to a packed crowd at an Ambient Church event in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The show highlighted the reverberant cathedral’s natural acoustics, and Pinhas obliterated everyone’s ears with a dense, overwhelming dirge of noise that left little to subtlety.
Published at Echoes and Dust
The recent revival and excitement over modular synthesizers, chronicled in the documentary “I Dream of Wires,” is reaching critical mass and trickling into the performance arena. No longer do New Yorkers need to head to fringe electronic music festivals to see someone tinkering with a modular creation – now, it’s right in our backyard.
Published at Echoes and Dust
Positioning itself between post rock and ambient,Floor Overhead‘s majestic A Passive Bludgeoning Force presents deconstructed guitar work that is epic in scope yet maintains its calm; evoking the wide expanses of nature. Think Sigur Rós crossed with Russian Circles, or Ben Frost mixed with Fennesz.
Published at Echoes and Dust
Raster-Noton, one of the largest and most visible imprints representing a stunning array of literally dozens of experimental electronic artists (Vladislav Delay, Senking, Kanding Ray, Mika Vainio, Rjoyi Ikeda, Alva Noto, and many others) concludes its nine-part Unun series promoting young talent with Jesse Osborne-Lanthier’s debut for the label.
Published at Subrewind
Six years ago, Anders Trentemøller played a show at a midtown New York venue that doesn’t exist any more. He had just released his second album, Into the Great Wide Yonder, developing upon the melancholic electronic melodies of his debut, The Last Resort.
Published at Subrewind
The Black Angels are keeping psychedelic music alive. Their groove-based brand of brooding psych rock spans across four LPs and several side projects. The band also started Austin’s annual Levitation Festival (formerly Psych Fest), a showcase for contemporary psych bands.
Published at Subrewind
The world of Prince Rama is one heck of a ride. Sisters Nimai and Taraka Larson crank their affection for the eighties into a frenzied, neon mix of nostalgia contoured through their blend of dance music. Their flirtations with both experimental and pop forms are but one part of an interdisciplinary artistic practice.
Published at Subrewind
Rootless frontman Jeremy Hurewitz continues exploring ambient guitar work with Distant Cities, his first release on Virginia-based cassette label Otherworldly Mystics. The title to the four-track release is appropriate as Hurewitz has spent over a decade abroad exploring the globe’s hubs as well as its nooks.
Published at Echoes and Dust
Murcof’s Fernando Corona negotiates the divide between electronic and contemporary classical music that is nothing short of revelatory. Propelled by blippy, haunting beats and mangled classical instrument samples, his sullen yet gentle tracks deviate from the atonal and arhythmic varieties of electroacoustic music that tend to coincide with the genre.
Published at Subrewind
At National Sawdust, wunderkind Vijay Iyer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith take the stage for a bare, abstract jazz set. The setup is simple: a grand piano, electric keyboard, laptop and an effects box for Iyer, and a single trumpet played by Smith, who alternates timbre by selectively muting his horn’s bell flair throughout.
Published at Echoes and Dust
Squarepusher’s Tom Jenkinson is most known for his drill n’ bass assaults, impossibly chopped percussion explorations that will melt faces after prolonged exposure. Yet, he’s not one to remain tethered to a singular sound or genre. He recently released an entire album of live solo bass performances and a curious side project called Shobaleader One, a chill listen speckled with jazzy chords and vocoded lyrics.
Published at Subrewind
Time Traveler, an alias for Michele Pinna (owner of The Triangle Records), is releasing his first LP this Friday on his new imprint Chronicles Diary. An exciting, science fiction-laced epic, I’m Made of Stars / Journal began as conversations about the universe between Pinna and his father. Though the record is largely instrumental (since in space, no one can hear you scream), Stars comes across a deeply personal account of one person struggling to find themselves within the universe, a much vaster world than Earth.
Published at Subrewind
Witch house is a hybrid genre that was most prominent between 2010 and 2013. It integrates influences from goth, shoegaze, industrial, chopped and screwed hip hop, trap, and aggressive rave styles to comprise its sound. Often, tracks contain chilling synth lines overwhelming the mix; mangled, slowed, or incomprehensible vocals; and cold, electronic percussion.
Published at Subrewind
Umwelt has enjoyed a career delivering dark techno for over two decades, anchoring his sound in heavy TR-808 use. Days of Dissent is a further honing of sounds explored on this year’s earlier Cultures of Resistance. While not a complete divergence, there is nothing as experimental as Resistance‘s short “Realm of Chaos” or the apocalyptic, minimal “Realm of Chaos” on Dissent.
Published at Subrewind
Franck Vigroux is no stranger to noise. Across a wide career, he has engaged with noise as sound through various textures, recently including the short Centaure release and LP Nous Autres (We). Vigroux’s 2015 collaboration with Mika Vainio on Peau Froide, Léger Soleil (Cold Skin, Light Sun), can be used as a basis of comparison for the new Rapport Sur Le Désordre (Report Disorder) on DAC Records.
Published at Subrewind