Tag: electronica
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Dementio13 – The Hobbyist (electronic post-rock)
‘Style’ is frequently contested territory in popular music. Widely circulating ideas of authenticity have it that for a creative musician to think about style is to privilege the superficial surface of their work over the deep substance. Musicians are supposed to just be ‘true to themselves’, and the music that…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
Heavy rock music of various sorts has a long standing relationship with the avant-garde, and the more ‘serious’ end of ‘popular’ music (I may put a lot of ‘things’ in quote marks, but it’s not my ‘fault’ if every term in ‘music’ means something other than its ‘literal’ definition!). Metal’s…
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::M∆DE:IN:HEIGHTS:: – APORIA: IN THESE §TREETS (electronica)
It has become something of a cliché to describe a vocalist as ‘using their voice like an instrument’. It’s usually intended as a compliment, but it’s a pretty much empty statement, or even a self-contradictory one. After all, in music, whatever is used to produce sound is an instrument, and…
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Various Artists – Singles & EPs
Marley Butler makes music of remarkable clarity: his soundscapes are usually clean, open affairs, in which the boundaries between sonic elements are clearly defined; his rhythms are regular, precise and simple; ideas have room in which to breathe, and although he does not overuse spatialising effects such as reverb and…
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Sargasso Trio – Get To Grips (alternative dance)
Some songwriters tell it how it is, laying their raw emotion directly on the line with simple language and an impassioned delivery; others burnish their lyrics with so much metaphor and wordplay that we feel an ironic distance from their subjects, irrespective of the ostensible pathos they may describe; some…
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ELIKA – Snuggle Bunnies (shoegaze/ dreampop)
Shoegaze and dreampop are genres that, because they are so sonically mediated, offer artists an opportunity to work in a way that is conceptually or semantically layered without seeming inaccessible. Because they offer an established language which is both amenable to manipulation, and widely understood, they lend themselves to very…
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datapuddle – MonkeySkyMonkey (indie/ folktronica)
This is an entertaining and individualistic album, that makes you laugh one minute, with its absurdist, science-fiction tinged humour, and then, while your mouth is still open, slaps you with something altogether less superficial. This is music with something to say, and it says it without going to either extreme,…
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lextrical – Deletia (electronica/ indie/ folktronica)
Deletia opens with ‘Lunchbox D’, which begins with an obviously electronic backbeat; this is joined a bar later by a saturated, analogue sounding synth melody, and simultaneously by a guitar. This sets the pattern for the album: it is a predominantly electronic construction, but it is a highly organic one,…
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pje – hidden stone (ambient)
The sound of pje can be uncontroversially described as ambient, but it explores a number of avenues under that rubric. ‘diffract’ has strong drone elements, while ‘scattered’ incorporates a strummed acoustic guitar pattern, and ‘memory key’ is characterised by percussive elements, in a beat that is never quite fully articulated.…
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Archangel – Project Rave (8-bit/ IDM/ techno)
It’s unclear how much of this album might have been created using the genuinely simple digital resources it seems to utilise, and how much use was made of rather more sophisticated plugins standing in for them, but either way, there’s a lot more processing than would be permissible on purist…
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Marley Butler – Procras The Sample (ambient/ electronica)
Marley Butler had something to do; but, he also had a new software sampler he’d downloaded for free. The something didn’t get done: but he did record this EP, which strikes me as some pretty darn constructive procrastination. Each tune was written, recorded and mixed in a single evening, and…
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Yonks – Yonks Marluk (electronica/ ambient)
This is the second release from Yonks, hence the name. What do you mean you don’t know what marluk means? It means ‘two’ in no less than three languages. Admittedly they’re only spoken in Greenland, but still. The guitar plus electronics duo continue to plough their distinctive and highly listenable…
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Artificial Sun Project – 62204 (ambient/ electronica/ IDM)
self released, 2011, DD album, 68m 8s £name your price http://artificialsunproject.bandcamp.com/album/62204-2 http://www.facebook.com/pages/Artificial-Sun-Project/224311699231 ‘Ambient’ is a term that has carried many meanings in music. As originally coined by Brian Eno it referred to an approach which placed intentional sound in the habitable environment without necessarily making it the focus of…
Oliver Arditi 