Reviews: experimental

Once there was a very obscure but brilliant band called ?man is the bastard?, this band played a sort of grindcore with lots of influences from the (Japanese) noise scene. This band stopped recording one day, and one of its members continued as ?bastard noise?. Bastard Noise created very harsh, but interesting noise, and collaborated with Merzbow, Brume and others…

Brent Gutzeit is a member of the group Tv Pow, but is perhaps better known for his beautiful collaboration release with James Plotkin (Old, Khanate, Phantomsmasher) on the Kranky label. Furthermore, Gutzeit has collaborated with artists like Jim o?Rourke, Kazumoto Endo and Kevin Drumm. He also runs the Boxmedia label. The music of Gutzeit is hard to qualify…

Sometimes, I?m confronted with music that is totally unclassifiable. This album by Leafcutter John appears to be one of those unclassifiable albums. The artist behind the ?Leafcutter John? project is the composer John Burton. Burton uses electro-acoustic techniques to compose his works. The overall compositions on this album are made up from pieces of music from very different genres…

After one full-length album, and one EP, Tim Hecker is back again with a new album, this time on the highly aclaimed Mille Plateaux label. After his debut “Haunt me, haunt me, do it again”, a stunning drone-like record, he released his Ep “My love is rotten to the core”…

Allgrena is an project by Franz Nigl from Vienna. I first encountered Allgrena on the ‘Wo die Wilden Kerle wohnen’ split single, with Allerseelen, Novy Svet and Der Blutharsch. This cd “Tonräder” is already a few years old, but deserves some attention. This is real industrial music, with iron and steel percussion and factory noises…

Ekkehard Ehlers has done many things in his musical career, under several names like Autopoieses, März and Ekkehard Ehlers of course. This new cd contains his first completely composed works. The cd starts out with a piece for bass clarinet. The piece begins with a soft hissing bass clarinet, and builds up from there…

More experimental ambient soundworks by David Thayer aka Xeno Volcano, this time centered around dreams. Organic, electronic music, created mostly from samples and field recordings. This album really contains beautiful waves of sound, with some orchestral elements. Overall the music is rather tranquil. Perfect background music, which is not meant in a negative manner…

3 days, 21 hours, 38 minutes and 3 seconds. That is the total playing time of the new Farmers Manual release on Mego. The release comes as a hybrid DVD, in a lovely big DVD box. The Box contains every locatable live recording by Farmers Manual since 1995. You must excuse me for not having heard each single live recording on this DVD…..

This is the second album by Desormais, the collaboration between Montreal based Mitchell Akiyama and Cincinnati based Joshua Treble, again on the Intr_version label. The first cd by Desormais, a french adverb for ´from now on´, was a mix between the electronic glitchscapes of people like Oval, Tim Hecker and Fennesz, beat structures like Gas or Loscil, with a very organic sound…

Remember being a little girl? Remember that special day when you were being taken to the house of that strange man your parents always warned you about? Remember him giving you lots of candy and making him listen to his strange record collection,? while stroking you gently? You don?t? Well, then here?s your chance to catch up on the experience! Because artistic all-stars V/Vm just released th ..

Xeno Volcano originally comes fom San Francisco, but now lives in Switzerland. You could call him a multimedia artist, because besides music he is also occupied with projects for theatre, music, dance and tv. He is also a productive artist, having created eight full-length albums, with a few more in the making…

Francis Dhomont is a composer from France who has been composing ‘musique concrete’ and electro-acoustic music for over 60 years, along with composers like Pierre Henry and Piere Schaeffer. Besides composing, Dhomont also lectures at the University of Monteal and writes articles about music-theory…

I’ve never heard of Monique Jean before, but she surely made an impression with her first CD on the Empreintes Digitales label. Jean lives in Montreal and is a student of Francis Dhomont (reviewed elsewhere on this site). She works with dance, video and media installations. This is perhaps why her work is a bit soundtrack-like (in a slightly abstract way)…

I’m not hearing Russian music daily, but the artists that I’ve come across so far are usually to my liking. Not that I want to generalize Russian music, there is plenty of variety within their underground scene. Roricat, a new name for me, is certainly no conventional act…

A promo cd of Taba, an Italian musician who seem to be capable of playing various instruments and styles, and who is already active for a decade. At the moment he also has a cd out on the English Fiendrecordings label, with the title “Electronic transmission”. A lot is happening in the experimental music on this cdr, which is very hard to describe…

The first tones of this album give you the impression that The Way Blue Bucket don’t want you to take their music too seriously. The intro last 16 seconds and consists of laughter… The Way Blue Bucket is an experimental trio from Philadelphia. They have invented various creative descriptions for their music, like ‘Afroswedish tribal lounge with singalongs’…

Before one can listen to a CD one must confront the CD’s cover, one has to be able to see it, to be able to pick it up, to open it and finally take out the CD and put it in the CD-player. With this new CD by Florian Hecker that was a hard thing to do as it has one of the ugliest covers I’ve ever seen…

The German label Sonic-X is profiling itself as an electro label mainly, but this time we are treated to something quite different. Seij Minus aÇ is a project of the Japanese artist hAj, and my experencies with Japanese music is that it normally doesn’t sound very conventional…

To my surprise I received a cd out of Israel, a country of which you usually only hear news related to the tragic conflict with their Palestinian neighbours. My musical encounters with Israel are mostly confined to their contributions to the Eurovision Song Contest. So I was pleasantly suprised to find out that there is an interesting experimental/industrial scene in Israel…

Dorine Muraille is Julien Locquet, a French composer, who released an album on artefact onder the nam of Gel:, plus several 12″s on various labels. On this release Locquet is joined by the French poet Chloe Delaume. Locquets creates thick layers of sounds, by cutting up samples, and playing them in a what seems a random order. But it’s far from ramdom…