featured releases
(Brassland) CD
Nico Muhly is a 27 year old contemporary composer based out of New York. There has been much stirring about his work over the last 12 months, due in part to the deft arrangements he contributed to Sam Amidon’s All Is Well earlier this year. He has worked alongside Phillip Glass, Antony, Björk & Will Oldham & has composed a litany of works (as well as scoring a few films along the way). Mothertongue is a nosedive into Muhly’s modern appropriation of compositional ideas & propositions. Opening with “Mothertongue: I. Archive”, clipped & cut vocal snippets swarm the sound field, augmented with a deep synthetic synth tone. The results are stirring, sometimes off-putting & pretty bloody interesting. Reich-ish rhythmic clatter & Muhly’s “chamber music + electronics“ approach litters Mothertongue, as do vocal contributions from Amidon, Helgi Hrafn Jónsson & Abby Fischer. With a few more producing gigs no doubt in the works, Mothertongue is a great document of this young outsider-music talent still new to the world of indie-recognition.
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7 October 2008 by Chris Long
| Avant-Garde
(Kompakt) 4CD
Wolfgang Voigt is the mastermind behind one of minimal techno’s largest stables: Kompakt. But before his brand was dominating global dancefloors, Voigt was exploring the deep dark realms of his German psyche as Gas. Drawing from German schlager music & Wagnerian classical influences, plus ambient staples like Satie, Aphex Twin & Eno, Voigt conjured clouds of throbbing ambience & drone, ceaselessly propelled by submerged kick drums. Nah Und Fern compiles the entire Gas output — Gas, Zauberberg, Königsforst & Pop — there’s slight remastering, but nothing that detracts from the nimble balance of tension & levity within Voigt’s most revered project. A brilliant document of one of the most important canons within the ambient techno world.
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28 August 2008 by Chris Long
| Avant-Garde, Electronic
(Warp) CD & 2LP
On Quaristice, Sean Booth & Rob Brown play with shorter song durations & self referential tonal terrain. Opener “Altibzz” alone bears more melody than the last two Ae albums combined, while “Simmm” plots a familiar trajectory from sinister chimes through jumbled machinery to loping ambient tones & rhythms. While still a stretch for even the most avid electronic music fan, it’s nice to see Ae acknowledge their own past & dig up some familiar, if not nostalgic, tones, rhythms & structures (see closer “Outh9X”).
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4 March 2008 by Jeremy Robinson
| Avant-Garde, Electronic
(Southern Lord) CD, LP coming soon
Dylan Carlson returns with a beefed up line up… legendary guitarist Bill Frisell is present on half of the tracks. Earth take the barren western-styled soundscapes of Hex: Or Printing In The Infernal Method & sink deeper; rocking American gospel is charged with improvisatory spirit & thick guitar sounds. The instrumental Americana within is Earth’s most accessible music to date.
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26 February 2008 by Jeremy Robinson
| Avant-Garde, Pop / Rock
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