brainwashed

I have always had a love/hate relationship with Edward Ka-Spel's work–he has written some of my all-time favorite songs (Tear Garden's "Romulus & Venus," for example), but he's also recorded an avalanche of stuff that I was not so enthusiastic about.  Consequently, I became an increasingly casual LPD fan over the years and haven't heard their last few albums at all.  That being the case, I was totally unprepared for how excellent this album is–I can't think of another band in history that has managed to write some of their best songs 30 years into their career.  The Dots' best days are definitely not behind them.

Jack Dangers has been bitten by the dubstep bug and there are no two ways about it.  Answers Come in Dreams finds the long time innovator giving in to (or perhaps trying out) the style du jour for a strange distillation of his own sound.

It has only been three years since Sublime Frequencies released the inaugural entry in their Guitars From Agadez series, but so much has happened since then that it is a near miracle that Group Inerane even managed another album.  The biggest event: second guitarist Adi Mohamed was killed in the uprisings that followed the coup d’état that ousted Niger’s president.  Thankfully, frontman Bibi Ahmed narrowly avoided the same fate and recruited Taureg guitar legend Koudede to fill the void.  Unsurprisingly, the new Group Inerane are a darker and noticeably different band.

In 2005 Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom released Days of Mars, a suite of sprawling, futuristic soundscapes played on Gavin Russom’s home-built synthesizers and recorded live onto tape. While sparsely praised at the time, the album has held up remarkably well, enough so that DFA decided to press a single of a previously unreleased track culled from those sessions.

Although only active for around six years, this Shanghai based noise project already has a sprawling discography that rivals many of the long-standing artists that inspired them, with a multitude of limited cassette and CD-R releases.  However, I think this may constitute the band’s first solo, mass produced outing.  And with this opportunity, the band does exactly as they should:  a 73 minute single track of grating, painful dynamic noise.

This three disc set sees the reissue of Charlemagne Palestine’s masterpiece for the piano along with two previously unreleased versions of the piece for harpsichord and string ensemble. "Strumming for Bösendorfer Piano" is a landmark of modern composition, a return to first principles typical of that generation of minimalist composers. Eschewing complex forms and technique, Palestine instead chases the pure sound lurking within the piano and uses the instrument in a way that was revolutionary then and remains just as stunning now.

While often pigeonholed as a "shoegaze" band, the duo of Lovesliescrushing is something entirely different.  Ostensibly doing similar things:  Scott Cortez's heavily treated and layered guitar noise and abstracted, mostly unintelligible female vocals from Melissa Arpin-Duimstra, LLC took these and pushed them to the furthest reaches, making little to no concessions for traditional musical style or structure.  Here, a selection of pieces between 1990 and 2000 are presented, some for the first time, reworked and shaped into even more abstract forms of glorious noise.

Aachen, Germany-based Christoph Heemann has made a name for himself as a musician, composer, remix artist, and engineer through groups like HNAS, Mimir, Mirror, In Camera, and collaborations with Charlemagne Palestine, Jim O'Rourke, Merzbow, Organum, Nurse With Wound, Current 93, and others. His artwork has graced covers for Edward Ka-Spel, The Tear Garden, Aeolian String Ensemble, Ragnar Grippe, and Ultra, and through his Streamline label he has issued music by John Duncan, Little Annie, Keiji Haino, Intersystems, Limpe Fuchs, Xhol Caravan, and more. Heemann is making a rare trip through the USA with 8 live shows scheduled beginning in Boston on Friday, October 8th. This brief interview is only a snapshot of what he's currently up to.