Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Review: Autechre - Oversteps
Autechre, formed in 1991, has enjoyed a long career of critical success and wide alternative audiences. Yorkshire, England duo Sean Booth and Rob Brown, influenced by the dark, abstract proto-jazz of Coil, the primal, Dadaist terror of Cabaret Voltaire and the plastic-snapping crisp percussion of European club music, amassed an impressive amount of gear before they even graduated from high school. Rather than creating music that dripped with emotive affectation, opted to create sharply digitally textured collages of rhythmic, hyper-processed sound that ebbs and flows with a distinct pulse.
Their latest, Oversteps, is a more album-centric effort than 2008’s Quaristice. This time around, Autechre sounds like a more analog, jazzier Gridlock, mixing overdriven bass fuzz hits with skittering drum machine patches. Square wave blips and saw wave bass lines thud and collide with MIDI General Instrument-sounding intervals in a kind of foreign parroting. Oversteps, crafted of artfully-sliced Odyssian passages of moods, push the edges of electronic rock like the thin walls of a slowly blown-out latex balloon, hearkening to early 2000’s digitally-sourced electronica, around the time when we were figuring out what Google was and Napster was still a good idea. (Some of us were there, man.)
Enjoy a Warp-provided album sampler below. Pick it up from Warpmart if you like what you hear. (The packaging is beautiful.)
RIP Alex Chilton, 1950 - 2010
The great Alex Chilton is dead. Long live Alex Chilton.
"I guess that my life has been a series of flukes in the record business. The first thing I ever did was the biggest record that I'll ever have."
"I guess that my life has been a series of flukes in the record business. The first thing I ever did was the biggest record that I'll ever have."
On the subject of: Post-Punk
A Certain Ratio - Shack Up
Virgin Prunes - Theme For Thought
The Wake - On Our Honeymoon
Ike Yard - We Are One
Mix: 333
Download MP3 (Mediafire)
Track listing:
1. Rachels - Systems / Layers
2. Neurosis - From the Hill
3. Sleep - Numb
4. True Widow - Minor it Down
5. Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corp. - Strange Dreams
6. Black Motor - Aamen
7. Grouper - Second Skin-Zombie Wind
8. Mount Eerie - With My Hands Out
a cursory guide to krautrock
Krautrock was an experimental music form in the early 1970s, born in Germany and offensively named as such by the war-obsessed post-World War II British music press. Krautrock was rooted in psychedelica but evolved into its own true art form. Instead of following the beaten path of Western music and the German state-sanctioned deustche Schlager (inoffensive, bland pop music), Krautrock bands broke musical conventions and experimented with early synthesizers, drones, and avant-garde arrangements. Bands like Faust, Neu!, Can, Amon Duul, and the supergroup Harmonia continually expressed themselves freely and without any fear of mainstream rejection.
NEU! - Hallogallo
Can - The Theif
Faust - It's A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl
Harmonia - Veterano
Cluster - Hollywood
Mix: Run For Your Money vol. 2
Download here
Tracklist:
01. A Broken Consort - For Nothing
02. Indian Jewelry - Walking on the Water
03. Fennesz + Sakamoto - Cendre
04. Oneohtrix Point Never - Format & Journey North
05. Origin Unknown - Valley of the Shadows
06. Venetian Snares - This Bitter Earth
07. Tricky - Makes Me Wanna Die
08. Ak-Momo - Women to Control
09. Fela Kuti - Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake Am
10. Bugskull - High Steppin' II
11. Killah Priest - Heavy Mental
12. Giuseppe Ielasi - Aix 03
13. Four Tet - The Butterfly Effect
14. Pivot - Nothing Hurts Machine
Previously: Run for Your Money 1
Tortoise
I saw Tortoise last week at Mr. Smalls'. For those unaquainted with their music, Chicago natives Tortoise revolutionized independent music in the '90s by incorporating more left-field influences into their post-rock compositions like Krautrock, avant-jazz, electronica, and classical minimalism. Leaning on crisp instrumentation, instrumental prowess and the dynamics of the players themselves, Tortoise swam alone in a punk- and rock-dominated music sea for a good while. The first album, Tortoise, cemented the tone for Chicago prog rock in 1994 and secured Tortoise's label, Thrill Jockey, as a mainstay label in the underground music world.
Tortoise broke the surface of the underground with Millions Now Living Will Never Die in 1996, followed by the seminal TNT in 1998. Standards emerged in 2001, followed by It's All Around You in 2004, a collaborative album with Bonnie 'Prince' Billy called The Brave and The Bold, numerous side-project albums, and 2009's Beacons of Ancestorship.
Tortoise, in all their musical proliferation and incredible connections to other major players in the music world, were pretty solid live. I was surprised by their relatively simple stage setup; I was expecting tons more equipment. Seems like old hat for these guys - and that's exactly what I saw; a well-oiled, legendary machine. Check out some videos below.
New Mix: Run For Your Money 1
Produced in association with my boy Rory over at Stilltown; in effect this is part of a new series. Dude does some legit work; puts out a compilation of local hip-hop tracks every so often, as well as the occasional mix of stuff from other cities. Also posts a lot of really rare underground hip-hop; worth it if you're looking to expand your borders a little.
Download Here
Tracklist:
1. Lee Fields & The Expressions - Money I$ King
2. Discotheque - Disco Special
3. Divine Styler - Grey Matter
4. Squarepusher - Circular Flexing
5. Amighty Arrogant - Red Rain
6. Ichiro - Jibun no SUMO mix (clip)
7. Mandalay - Insensible
8. SALEM - Streets of Philadelphia
9. Morcheeba - Howling
10. Flying Lotus - Quakes
11. Impact All Stars - Easy Come dub
12. Phaseone - Confessio Amantis
13. Heiner Goebbels - So Wird Der Schrecken Ohne Ende Langsam Normale Leben
14. Aa - We've Come Too Far
mix
(INTRO)
SALEM - redlightsheath
Blissed Out - Jain
Bullion - Say Goodbye to What
Ooooo - sedsumthing
Soft Circle - Feel the Light
The Seven Fields of Aphelion - Grown
Sleepover - Your World is Night
(OUT)
Download and enjoy.
Low - The Great Destroyer
This album hit me when it was new as achieving that spellbinding quality that so many other acts strive for. Then, like the good late high school student I was, I listened to the rest of Low's back catalog. Vintage or no, The Great Destroyer is a sonic masterpiece. Download it if you like; listen to it here below.
New Clipd Beaks - "Blood" and "Home"
Oakland noise-rockers Clipd Beaks' new one, To Realize, is out today on Lovepump United. It's evocative and slow, like a slow letting out of everything. A dirge. I'd give you the whole album, but instead, here are the tracks the band has given away thus far. Buy it - it's worth it.
Download everything in the band's past discography here.
Endorsement: Until The Light Takes Us
Until the Light Takes Us is a feature-length documentary on the black metal movement in Norway in the early to mid-1990s. For those of you (not) in the dark, black metal rose to notoriety due to a rash of church burnings, murders, and suicides. However, along with this came an explosion of creative and artistic expression that would define an inexplicable rebellion against modern culture and Christianity, as well as a nihilistic exploration of the human condition.
Until the Light Takes Us opens in Pittsburgh at the Melwood Screening Room this Friday, January 29 until February 2. Opening night festivities include a live set by local black metallurgists Manahaga, accompanied by visuals by R. Henry and atmospherics by Forest Dweller. I will be there.
For those skeptical of the intellectual merits of black metal as a cultural phenomenon, the New York Times recently reported on an academic discourse on the genre that happened in Brooklyn. Read and be enlightened. Most interestingly, black metal is discussed as a part of the natural rite of confession. Hm.
After the jump, TRAILER, a black metal-themed image explosion (courtesy of Peter Beste's grade-A photo essay book True Norweigan Black Metal), and a couple of songs.
Until the Light Takes Us opens in Pittsburgh at the Melwood Screening Room this Friday, January 29 until February 2. Opening night festivities include a live set by local black metallurgists Manahaga, accompanied by visuals by R. Henry and atmospherics by Forest Dweller. I will be there.
For those skeptical of the intellectual merits of black metal as a cultural phenomenon, the New York Times recently reported on an academic discourse on the genre that happened in Brooklyn. Read and be enlightened. Most interestingly, black metal is discussed as a part of the natural rite of confession. Hm.
After the jump, TRAILER, a black metal-themed image explosion (courtesy of Peter Beste's grade-A photo essay book True Norweigan Black Metal), and a couple of songs.
