Tag: electronica
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Dementio 13 – Imperial Decimal (electronica)
Historically, the music released under the Dementio 13 aegis has been sufficiently consistent to sound like the work of a single project, but it has also developed and evolved in quite striking ways. The earlier work had a more signally electronic sound, and although it involved some remarkable explorations of…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
A combination of electro-acoustic and programmed sounds are used here to create a sound that pays clear homage to African polyrhythmic percussion music, unpitched attacks mingling with sounds similar to idiophones or lamellophones, although they might come from almost any source. Then there are the synths, guitars and lo-fi samples……
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Opening with an extended skit inspired by John Carpenter’s Darkstar, it’s obvious from the start that this Strange Gibberish mixtape is going to be heavy on the humour. It’s also heavy on the creativity and experimentation, with some of the beats straying well into avant-garde territory. It’s far too diverse…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Concept albums are something that are probably most often associated with complicated rock music and high-falutin lyrics dealing with such themes as the importance of dragons as a symbol of self-realisation. Well, this is very definitely a concept album, but the music it includes is not rock, not complicated, and…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
When we get to the fourth track, ‘Womb’, we learn that Cthulhu Detonator is capable of changing tack. There is still noise, in the sense of forcefully stochastic elements within the timbre of the music, but the principal sound is tonal, sonorous and enveloping. ‘Blinding White Light’ takes a similar…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
What I know about Alun Vaughan is limited: I reviewed a very nice solo bass performance album of his, and an EP in a similar vein, and I gather he gets up to quite a lot of jazzy malarkey. This short EP bucks that trend just a little bit. The…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Worlds collide in Dementio 13’s latest release, albeit without the biblical histrionics and cataclysmic consequences that usually dance attendance on such events in fiction. There has always been more to Dementio 13 than the electronica with which he has populated his records, and he has always been a musician of…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
Positive vibes abound on this perfectly formed EP produced by the estimable Rich Huxley, whose main gig Hope And Social sits in exactly the same affective territory; clear-sighted optimism is the order of the day, and because the songs are notably lacking in trite sentiment or spurious closure the effect…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
at one with the machine is the sophomore release and point of exit for Jason Norwood’s studio powernoise project code 000. Two albums have evidently been enough to scratch that creative itch for him, but he has made good use of his time in the world of electronic distortion and…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
There are ‘pieces’ that are undeniably rap, and definitely not poetry, such as The Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’, and there are others that are undeniably poetry, and definitely not rap, such as John Donne’s Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going To Bed. This emphatic distinction is a matter of customary…
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Pttrns – Body Pressure (electronica)
Simon Reynolds wrote an interesting book about the recycling of culture, particularly mass- and popular culture, particularly music (it’s called Retromania if you want to read it). His central point, that culture is revived and recycled on an every decreasing cycle until it reaches the point at which no new…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Sufficiently independent not to sound ‘indie’, yet aesthetically straightforward enough not to sound ‘experimental’, Neurotic Wreck’s schtick is a pretty accessible art-pop stew; a predominantly electronic production mashes up trip-hop, electro, shoegaze and other downbeat sources, into a melancholy and and carefully textured soundworld, freighted with nostalgia and regret. The…
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Paragaté – Spaceflight Pharmacology (ambient)
Possessed of a melodic simplicity that invokes naïvety, and a harmonic rhythm that deploys some erudition in the service of fairy-tale inevitability, ‘Friendship’, the brief G. Cook piano piece with which Tom DePlonty opens Spaceflight Pharmacology, is a scene setter. Quickly succeeded by a piece that might more readily be…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
The Interceptor (a creative alias of the musically promiscuous Chris Saunders, a man who seems to join or form a new band every week), is a purveyor of electronic music; there’s a definite 8-bit vibe but these tracks are far from purist chip-tune territory. Looking at the project’s fairly minimal…
Oliver Arditi 