The Last American Poet, Shane Beck, collaborates with dark ambient composer and luminary Mike Benoit in a haunting, cinematic, Poe-like piece of spoken word.
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Helen Svoboda is a Finnish-Australian composer, double bassist and singer whose work reminds me in some way of Laurie Anderson’s work, but perhaps denser and more lush. This makes for a pretty phenomenal listen.
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Prepare yourselves for January 19, ten days from now! The legendary Scanner (Robin Rimbaud in real life) has a new album out, “…a tribute to the early 1960s library music culture, applying crude techniques of electronic composition, using a mix of hardware and software. It explores a kind of musique concrète, electroacoustic character, in an otherworldly cinematic fashion.” This will be a departure from his more experimental work, and should be a joy to listen to. It will be released on Alltagsmusik, “a new label to release Scanner albums.”
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Sergey Kuryokhin was as fine a composer as he was an improvisor. The Divertissement Orchestra, led by violinist Ilya Ioff, reinterprets one of Kuryokhin’s finest compositions from his album The Sparrow Oratorium. Well-played, indeed. Alisa Ten: vocals [1, 2, 4] Vera Chekanova: vocals [2, 3, 4] Lidia Kovalenko: violin [1], viola [2, 3] Mikhail Blekher: honky-tonk [1], celeste [2], piano [3, 4], harpsichord [4] Vladimir Volkov: double bass [4] Ivan Chernobaev: percussion Ilya Ioff: violin [1, 3, 4], drums programming [3]
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As Orthodox are still going through the process of Advent, we share our second post of the year in honor of the Birthgiver of God (Theotokos), as composer Scott Lawlor has titled this 2019 release. Time flies, but great electronic and ambient music maintains its station.
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No wishes, no hopes for the year, just a pleasant way to gently slide into 2024. We launch with Jeff Gburek’s latest release, of which he provides notes on his Bandcamp site: “Still Life with a Question Mark came together as an album rather quickly after I discovered loops unused from an older project fit very well with the latest work I’d done in seclusion at Dom Sztuk, Kęszyca. Captures of VLF radio (ionospheric geomagnetic crackling impulses), hydrophone recordings from Solacz pond, frame drums, zither played with ebow, looped guitar and string passages, synthesizer, shortwave radio, textures of leaves, wood,…
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Li Xing is a Shanghai-based psychedelic noise-rock guitarist who produces a sludgy, powerful album which is reminiscent of Keiji Haino’s mid-period guitar noise era.
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Deena Abdelwahed is an artist and DJ who hails from Tunisia and cut her chops in the music in the capital of Tunis before relocating to Paris, France. Her sound is brutal, slow, mixing a nearly tribal Industrial sound with authentic music from her homeland. Brutiful, if I can beg your pardon and borrow this portmanteau to describe such heavy music.
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Post Doom Romance presents a new album of some of the gentlest “noise” I’ve ever heard. The tones are low, sparse, and somehow calming. Perfect for cold-weather headphone listening.
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Russian experimental band Disen Gage have collaborated with some of the country’s most notorious experimental musicians. Alexei Borisov, for instance, has been featured on these pages before. MOX and Voronovsky are new names. The music is an impressive mix of early-era Tuxedomoon-influenced music supported by a avant-prog bass, drums and guitar. Experimental enough to be weird, but structured enough to be familiar to the ears.