Emily Haines

Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton's Choir of the Mind

Choir of the Mind returns Emily Haines to poignant piano-driven ballads that meld with her mellifluous voice, a sonic continuation of 2006’s Knives Don’t Have Your Back. A member of Metric and Broken Social Scene, it should be no surprise that Haines’ solo work is a departure from Metric’s 2015 effort, Pagans in Vegas, which found the band skewing toward a heavily electronic sound. Choir showcases Haines’ less bombastic songwriting, where she chooses to leave the songs in a more naked state instead of turning them into guitar anthems.

Published at Pop Matters

Rock in a Hard Place

Rock in a Hard Place: Music and Mayhem in the Middle East

For most Westerners, music functions largely as entertainment, even when the songs are politically charged. However, in the Middle East, just engaging with music, whether as a musician or as a fan, can come with severe costs. This is the subject of Rock in a Hard Place: Music and Mayhem in the Middle East, a sober chronicling of music in some of the most conservative countries on the planet.

Published at Pop Matters

Dean Hurley

Dean Hurley's Anthology Resource Vol. 1: △△

Twin Peaks is far from Hurley’s first gig with Lynch. The multi-instrumentalist has worked with the director since 2005, including sound work for Inland Empire and several of the director’s musical ventures like Crazy Clown Time and The Big Dream. An accomplished producer in his own right, Hurley has worked with Lykke Li, Dirty Beaches, Zola Jesus, and the Veils (a featured band in the new season).

Published at Pop Matters

Noah Preminger

Noah Preminger Talks About His Bold Jazz Protest Album, Meditations on Freedom

At just 30 years old, Preminger is a prolific jazz force with eight leader releases and six more as a sideman. His first album Dry Bridge Road earned Debut of the Year in the 2008 Village Voice Critics’ Poll and was named one of the top ten albums of the year in JazzTimes, Stereophile and The Nation. Meditations on Freedom contains five original compositions about freedoms the saxophonist felt were vanishing: Native American freedom, women’s rights, racial injustice, income inequality, and the planet’s health.

Published at Pop Matters

Tony Conrad

Maximal Minimal: The Legacy of Versatile Artist Tony Conrad

Few artists contained the sheer range of disciplines as Tony Conrad. In a career that spanned half a century, Conrad tried just about everything, with explorations in music, video, conceptual art, and even teaching. Conrad’s legacy put him among the rare breed of artists not content to stay boxed within a singular medium, working method, or subject matter. He was experimental in the truest sense of the word.

Published at Pop Matters

KMFDM

KMFDM's Hell Yeah

Few projects are as brashly political as KMFDM. Throughout their three-decade career, the rabble-rousers have continued to deliver aggressive industrial music that opposes rampant injustice and corruption. Keeping with the Bush-era critique WWIII and the Arab Spring-influenced Our Time Will Come, the band’s 20th studio album Hell Yeah is a stirring, brutal rally cry against fascism, conformity, and America’s new administration.

Published at Pop Matters

Isley Brothers and Santana

The Isley Brothers and Santana's Power of Peace

At a time of substantial political and social upheaval, Peace positions itself as a message of love and unity over hate and division. The musicians clearly care about their chosen source material, and as a result, the album features faithful recreations of stirring originals like the Chambers Brothers’ “Are You Ready People” and “Love, Peace, Happiness”, Eddie Kendricks’ “Body Talk”, and Leon Thomas’ “Let the Rain Fall on Me”.

Published at Pop Matters

Nine Inch Nails

Nine Inch Nails' Add Violence

With many forms of media competing for our attention, releasing an album these days doesn’t have the impact it once had. For Nine Inch Nails, breaking up an album’s worth of music into a trilogy of smaller EPs sustains fan excitement and diffuses pressure on creating a singular, definitive statement. It also allows the duo of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to take bigger risks.

Published at Metal Sucks

World Listening Day

World Listening Day Remembers Electronic Pioneer and Deep Listening Creator Pauline Oliveros

This year’s World Listening Day celebrates Pauline Oliveros, the late pioneering electronic musician who conceived Deep Listening, a practice of intentional aural concentration incorporating aspects of meditation and improvisation. Often, Deep Listening is coupled with evolving electronic or electroacoustic music to strengthen its effects. The point is to pause and observe minute changes in the music, or if music is absent, the listening environment.

Published at Pop Matters

Gaudi

Gaudi's Magnetic

Gaudi’s entire career is one long love letter to dub music. Dub, characterized by sparse drums, murky bass, and generous amounts of delay and reverb, emerged from reggae and forms the bedrock of UK grime, has influenced Burial’s brooding, apocalyptic atmospherics, and spawned modern dubstep’s excessive onslaught of aggressive bass assaults. But Gaudi isn’t interested in these developments. He’s content to dig into the classic ‘70s sound.

Published at Pop Matters

Evan Caminiti

Evan Caminiti at Issue Project Room

 

Evan Caminiti’s Toxic City Music is a collection of heavily processed sound collages, contemplative drones primarily informed by the towering metropolis of New York City. But the record is also a personal expression of frustration and helplessness. Caminiti calls the album “a direct indictment of the world around me,” which can be interpreted both as a criticism of America’s teeming urban center but also at recent global shortcomings.

Published at Echoes and Dust

Suzanne Ciani

Suzanne Ciani: The Emotion of Sound

Suzanne Ciani has been on the electronic music frontlines since the seventies. A prominent figure on the West Coast, Ciani worked with Don Buchla as he developed his legendary Buchla modular music systems. Instantly enamored with its sonic possibilities, she became an expert in designing modular patches, becoming a lifelong devotee.

Published in Decoder Magazine's Second Issue

Cal Fish

The Whimsical and Grotesque Tape Manipulations of Cal Fish

The aim of Fish’s method is to parse the rampant media around us into an organized format for a new kind of consumption. Fish states that “Cassette Traveler is the convergence of my whimsical, existential, and practical expressions about everything going onto a magical magnetic medium.” Judge for yourself. “You’re kNot Next Door” introduces squelchy tape fast-forwarding and degraded, faint percussion. There are multiple elements that don’t jive with each other, as if everything were running at their own tempos and in clashing keys. 

Published in Decoder Magazine's Second Issue

Maelstrom

Maelstrom Chats Raar Label, Desert Raves, Self-hypnosis

French electronic producer Maelstrom specializes, as his moniker would suggest, in overt menace. Co-owner of the RAAR imprint, Maelstrom’s gritty distortion and aggressive synths are omnipresent in his latest effort, Her Empty Eyes, with antagonistic song titles like ‘The Murder of Jose Robles’ and ‘Woman Training for a Republican Militia.’

Published at Echoes and Dust

Moogfest

Moogfest Elevates Elecronic Festivals to Cerebral Heights

Electronic music festival Moogfest welcomes an exciting roster to Durham, North Carolina for its 11th edition. Among the 150 artists are Animal Collective, Flying Lotus, Mykki Blanco, Talib Kweli, Michael Stipe of R.E.M., Simian Mobile Disco, and Gotye. The schedule is packed from May 18th to 21st, with workshops, conversations, film screenings, live scorings, installations, and presentations by instrument creators. 

Published at Echoes and Dust

The Black Angels' Death Song

The Black Angels' Death Song

Their first album in four years, Death Song continues The Black Angels’ tradition of groove-based psychedelic rock and trippy op-art album covers. It’s familiar territory for their fifth full-length release, continuing the exploration of their last LP, Indigo Meadow, which itself was a return to the roots of their first album, Passover.

Published at Echoes and Dust

Architectural's "Metropolitan Opera"

Architectural's Metropolitan Opera

Architectural constructs minimal techno tracks asserting the traditional European sound. Releases like last year’s Elastic Layouts and Architectural 07 are competent dub and Detroit constructions, but Metropolitan Opera lifts producer Juan Rico’s imagination to another plane. Its seven tracks are distilled and attuned sound collages, more in the freeform vein of Murcof and Evan Caminiti than fellow European DJs Oscar Mulero and Mikkel Metal. 

Published at Decoder Magazine

Evoking Kerouac Dumbsaint's Cinematic Opus 'Panorama, in Ten Pieces'

Evoking Kerouac: Dumbsaint's Cinematic Opus Panorama, in Ten Pieces

In 1958, Jack Kerouac listed 30 guidelines for executing better prose, providing valuable insight as to how the celebrated writer approached his craft. A proponent of Allen Ginsberg’s “first thought, best thought” philosophy, Kerouac championed unedited writing as one way of accessing the subconscious, and his often raw prose shows it. Kerouac was also a fan of creating words, as in his sixth instruction: Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind.

Published at Pop Matters

NoinoNoinoNoino’s 8

NoinoNoinoNoino’s 8

“Supergroups” or even any true collaboration can be a hazardous propositions, but fortunately they often enough bear fruit. NoinoNoinoNoino’s 8 cassette for Caoutchou Records documents one exemplary success. The collaboration brings together Kiki Hitomi’s freaky avant J-pop, Dead Fader’s sinister bass music, DJ Die Soon’s skittering experiments, and DJ Hotel’s dark electro hip hop.

Published in Decoder Magazine's Second Issue