electronic albums
Album Review: Battery Operated Orchestra – Radiation
Initially out in September, we hang our heads in shame that it took us until now to discover and write about Battery Operated Orchestras second album, Radiation. Much as you’d be right to be wary of well-turned-out folk touting synths these days (by now Half Man Half Biscuit’s Adam Boyle will have further ditched the …
Album Review: analogue creatures living on an island – Immersion
The ambient project of Wire’s Colin Newman (along with his partner Malka Spigel from Minimal Compact) has been in existence since 1994, and after a hiatus of seventeen years, Immersion is back. Pre-album release track ‘Fireflys’ is a beautiful, hypnotic vortex of arpeggios and repetitive synth loops, rising and falling and washing over the listener. …
Album Review: Brad Laner – Micro-Awakenings
Brad Laner is one of the most creative musical minds you’ve probably never heard of. He’s a California guy that’s been deep in the experimental music scene since the mid-80s. From cassette excursions with Debt of Nature and Steaming Coils, to the monumental noise pop provocateurs Medicine in the late 80s and early 90s, to …
Album Review: Cellophane Garden – Illuminations
When you think of a musician holed up in the Ozarks of northwest Arkansas creating music amongst those storied wooded hills, the sound that comes to mind is a particular one. That sound probably isn’t of the atmospheric and spatial variety, but more of the old time-y, bluegrass variety. In fact spatial, atmospheric, dreamy, and …
Album Review: Ashley Bellouin – Ballads
After the needle drops on Ashley Bellouin’s debut album titled Ballads you know right away this isn’t going to be a sappy collection of odes to lovers and significant others. The pastoral drone of harmonium, glass armonica, and other assorted spectral toys hit your ears and seem to open a portal that leads into some …
Album Review Mac Quale – Mr. Robot Original Soundtrack
For the longest time TV shows just bored me. I felt that TV had become this vacuous void where art and commerce said “F*ck it, let’s take a dump on the viewing public and see how long it takes them to say anything.” Of course the only “art” involved was the art of selling. Not …
Album Review: Yello – Toy
Electronic pioneers Yello release their thirteenth album ‘Toy‘ Recorded at Yello Studios (Zurich). Toy features guests Fifi Rong (vocals on Kiss the Cloud, Dark Side) Malia (vocals on Cold Flame, Starlight Scene, Give You The World) Heidi Happy (vocals on Dialectical Kid), Jeremy Baer (all guitars). Yello are a Swiss electronic band formed in 1979, who (minus a …
Album review: Collected Works – John Foxx – Cathedral Oceans I – II – III: 5 vinyl LPs in album-style deluxe 12 X 12 book set
Edsel records have released The Complete Cathedral Oceans – all three editions of John Foxx’s ambient classic.This marks the first ever vinyl release for the trilogy of Cathedral Oceans (1997), Cathedral Oceans II (2003) and Cathedral Oceans III (2005). The music is spread over five 12”s and is accompanied by 12 X 12” art print …
Album Review: SURVIVE – RR7349
Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein seemed to know what they were doing when they formed and created the score to the Duffer Bros Stranger Things. They captured a feeling in those synth-heavy pieces that you can’t just get from a plug-in you use in some computer-based program. These were hands-on pieces; meticulously strung together using …
Atticus Ross/Leopold Ross/Bobby Krlic : Almost Holy S/T
Almost Holy is a documentary directed by Steve Hoover, and it’s about Pastor Gennadiy Mokhnenko, a rogue man of the cloth that works and lives out of Mariupol, Ukraine. In his city there was a massive influx of homeless, drug-addicted children and “Pastor Crocodile”, as Mokhnenko likes to call himself, felt it was his duty to help …