• Music

    Psycho & Plastic – Soundtrack 2: Pappel

    September 11, 2021 - By 

    I seem to be running into a lot of Berlin-school style musicians recently, but this is the first one I’ve run into who is actually from the Berlin area.  From Psycho & Plastic‘s Bandcamp site: Award-winning German author Dalibor Markovi​​ć commissioned Psycho & Plastic to create an original soundtrack for his debut novel ‘Pappel. Die Geschichte eines Herumtreibers’ on the heels of their 2020 ambient masterpiece ‘Placid House’ and ‘Soundtrack 1: Schwelen’. Scheduled for a simultaneous release, book and album are deeply intertwined in form and content. ‘Soundtrack 2: Pappel‘ follows the novel’s tree-turned-human protagonist Konrad Pappel on his tour…

  • Music

    László Hortobágyi – The Amygdala Expedition

    June 22, 2021 - By 

    This is quite a momentous occasion for me, as áMARXE Records out of Galicia, Spain, release an album by Hungarian composer László Hortobágyi which has been shelved since 1989.  The album was programmed specifically for vinyl, and áMARXE are releasing a small edition of 250 copies, no doubt of high quality. The story with László Hortobágyi is quite an interesting one, as I used to work many years ago as an A&R manager for Tone Casualties, a record label run by the animator Gábor Csupó, he of Klasky-Csupo, who released such cartoons as The Rugrats and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, among…

  • Music

    Jeff Gburek/Akashic Records – Twin Oscillators ((An Electro-Isolation Suite for 2020))

    January 16, 2021 - By 

    At its heart, Jeff Gburek’s latest release on Bandcamp, Twin Oscillators, presents itself as astoundingly good experimental music.  I had the pleasure of writing about his works (13 mentions, the most, I believe, of any artist whose work I checked out) at my now-defunct blog, A Miscellany of Tasteful Music.  The quality of his work never wanes. In a just world, he would be recognized as one of the foremost improvisers to come out of America in decades, and perhaps as time passes, his work will become more widely recognized. This is one of the reasons I write about the…