• Music

    Sunset Wings and Brodsky – Songs of Love, Madness and Sleep

    January 25, 2022 - By 

    From Kaliningrad, Russia (formerly my material ancestral Linn homeland of Koenigsberg, East Prussia) hail one of the most impressive psychedelic folk records I’ve heard in some time.  From the cacophony of the violin starting the album, it morphs into a Beatlesque horn arrangement.  Those few seconds set the tone for what I figured would be a very heavy listening experience. Sunset Wings, led by singer and multi-instrumentalist Aleks Popov team on this album with fellow singer Evgeniy Brodsky.  What makes the album crucial listening, along with the impressive instrumental array you will see below, is the adaptations by poets and…

  • Music

    BlindººCoyote – Along The Cracklefield Wash

    January 24, 2022 - By 

    Our dear friend Drem Bruinsma, the BlindººCoyote in question, provides a 20-minute track of ambient loops, eerie rhythms and and enchanting soundscapes.  From his Bandcamp site: “Inspired by personal hikes into various shadowless desert arroyos, to meet with silence, coyotes, antelope, dust and rocks, leveling with tumbleweeds and sagebrushes from a different perspective, walking on those eroded, shallow dry riverbeds, meandering arid nature’s hidden trails when you lose track of time and where you encounter hiding parts of your identity. This track simulates the immersive, enveloping experience of slow- changing minimal landscapes observed from a ground-level perspective, the shallow dry…

  • Music

    Jan 疆 Hasker – Pastoral Song – 牧歌

    January 23, 2022 - By 

    Jan 疆 Hasker is a folk musician out of Xinjiang, China, but this is a bit of a twist, as he uses Altaic and other folk melodies for his musical base rather than Uyghur.  From his Bandcamp website: “Jan made this album collecting, sorting and adapting musical elements from China Xinjiang’s Altai nomadic horse people’s culture. Pastoral song’s lyrics are all about the attachment and nostalgia for this homeland and its folk culture. Jan sings in several Altai languages including Kazakh, Tuva (Russian Altai), Kirgiz and Oirat (Mongolian tribe). These nomadic folk songs and melodies travelled through lands and time.…

  • Music

    Various Artists – Artoffact Records 2021 Sampler

    January 22, 2022 - By 

    2021 was a very solid year for electro-industrial record label Artoffact Records out of Canada.  Some of the more incredible cuts from this compilation come from The Hafler Trio & Reptilicus, Cevin Key (from Skinny Puppy), Kælan Mikla with Alcest and of course, Canada’s own Front Line Assembly-related project, Noise Unit.  A really good introduction to a pivotal record company.

  • Music

    a world wondered full – มุม

    January 21, 2022 - By 

    This album is magnificently weird.  Imagine a band out of Thailand with minimal, ghostly musicianship, slightly ghoulish, off key vocal dronings, the plinky-plonking of piano and spoken words that sound like it might have been influenced by Godspeed You! Black Emperor.  This sublime mixture comes from the band a world wondered full, and I have to saw that the album is creepy gorgeousness to it.  I’m now a convert to their music.

  • Music

    Dino – Pulsations

    January 20, 2022 - By 

    It is with a heavy heart that we have to report the passing of Dino, one of the pioneers of Taiwan’s noise scene.  This squealing, squelchy noise masterpiece was released on Bandcamp in May of 2021 on Karma Detonation Tapes out of Taipei.  May his memory be eternal. HT: Stacy Lipp.

  • Music

    Cergy-Pontoise – CP01

    January 17, 2022 - By 

    This is a curious release.  Cergy-Pontoise are an Italian duo, and their albim starts out with drone-y ambient sounds but then falls into atmospheric progressive-folk at times, sounding like a better recorded lo-fi artist out of New Zealand, perhaps.  There are also elements of space rock, prog and psychedelic music in this.  It’s a mixed bag in the positive sense of the word.

  • Music

    Esmez – Drifting

    January 16, 2022 - By 

    From July of 2021 we have a release from the French ambient project Esmez.  The gentle, dulcet sounds of each of these four tracks have made for very pleasant Sunday listening, and would really appeal to fans of Brian Eno’s earlier ambient works. For Esmez’s motivations on making the album, consider visiting their Bandcamp site.

  • Music

    Atli Örvarsson – Wolka

    January 15, 2022 - By 

    Iceland is one of those countries who seem to produce musicians at an incredible rate in comparison to the size of its population.  Atli Örvarsson is one of a handful of gifted soundtrack composers to hail from the island nation, and is the first one I can think of who doesn’t originally come from the capital, Reykjavik.  He is now a Los Angelino pursuing a career in composition, and is becoming well-known for his scores. The standout track for me on this album is one titled Anka & Robert, which reminds me of a meaty slab of post-Industrial ambient.  The…

  • Music

    Jeff Gburek + George Christian – Thrown Extremes

    January 14, 2022 - By 

    During the next few weeks, I’ll be catching up on releases I could not get to in 2021.  This one is really a gem that I’m surprised I didn’t get to earlier, but thanks to Jeff Gburek reminding me of it, I can happily present this release he did in collaboration with another one of the blog’s dear friends, George Christian. The two tracks which go under the name The Charles Ives Observatory (Parts 1 and 2) bookend the centerpiece of the album, the 28-minute opus Magellanic Clouds.  The CIO tracks have the feeling of classic-era electroacoustic music imbued with…