Kelli Frances Corrado
Yeong Die
Medici Daughter
Bad Tracking
Allen Ravenstine
John M Bennett
Dark Sky Burial
Richard Skelton
Kelli Frances Corrado
Wendy Eisenberg
Maria Moles
Spermchurch
Trees Speak
Valery Vermeulen
Fionnlagh
Lolina
Kinlaw & Franco Franco
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Kelli Frances Corrado The Mighty Mermaid vs Murky Water
‘Kelli Frances Corrado is a quilt of memories and mysticism. Growing up in Chicago, she would sneak out during school nights to see hip hop shows and spend weekends learning prayer rituals taught by a Romani grandmother. This set a unique musical foundation, leading her to pursue opera training, string arranger, beat making and classical poetry. Giving voice to her spiritual beliefs. These patches of history bring together a musical broth of magical realism and urban life ripe of lucid dreams and superstition.’
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Yeong Die Dig Up Dawn
‘Yeong Die is a central figure in a growing ecosystem of experimental Korean producers who are poking fun at the sometimes sterile world of dense and theoretical experimental music (I’d recommend the Intimate Ghosting compilation as an intro to this sound.) Weather Z starts with Yeong at her most solemn and fragile. “Dig Up Dawn” is full of gently undulating textures, before a bleep that sounds like a heart monitor interrupts the calm.’
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Medici Daughter Flop
‘This debut EP from Medici Daughter (real identity unknown, biographical information unforthcoming) is an impressively dank and crepuscular set of mutant IDM that looks to the future while nodding back to the state of the genre at the turn of the century. The seven tracks here draw from many different strains of electronica. Lovely, crystalline synth melodies and drifting ambient passages brush up against bursts of noise, frenzied beats, and industrial sturm und drang. It could feel chaotic – and does at times – but there’s a distinctive sonic fingerprint, a sort of over-caffeinated clutter that serves to unify this mass of sound. Opener ‘Flop’ is a wash of synth pads, the gurgle of corrupted MP3 artefacts and knackered technology whirring into life before drill ‘n’ bass beats slam in. It manages the impressive task of being both pretty and unhinged.’
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Bad Tracking Eriksson
‘Known in town for upsetting local MPs and lisencees with their live performances as ‘naked technology sex slaves’ [think cassette-induced self harm, total nudity, blood from ears], Bad Tracking are the most visceral thing we’ve seen in this new wave of Avon experimental – a breath of life into the longstanding tradition of industrial performance art (and an antidote to idle BR club culture). Lyrically touching on censorship and tech // sonically they use feedback as a punishing instrument of anguish and expression. Widower EP is truly chewed nail sonics, more human than all your noise records, genuinely more scary than your edgelord power electronics nonsense, more forward than all yer government funded experimental think-records.’
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Allen Ravenstine Brothers Grimm
‘Allen Ravenstine’s turbulent futurism behind the synthesizer was a key ingredient in American post-punk innovators Pere Ubu’s distinctive sound. Just as Brian Eno’s malevolent modulations had adulterated the glam-rock swagger of Roxy Music before him, Ravenstine’s corrosive tones oozed through his band’s songs like radioactive seepage, illuminating their otherwise guitar-driven landscapes with a strange chemical glow.’
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John M. Bennett The Shirt The Sheet (1986)
‘Poetry is a versatile old dog. It can serve as solace, as cheer, as a bawdy glimpse into adult life. It can rattle our preconceptions and warm our hearts, gift us a home in a barren land, and bore our undercrackers right off. And, sometimes, it can rewire our brains. Through incongruent word-twists synaptic lightning links unsuspecting neurons across previously untravelled brainscapes. With prose that tumbles like raindrops from a shook tree, John M. Bennett does this with at least two plombs on A Flattened Face Fogs Through. So, be warned, this is a space for those who don’t like having their hands held.’
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Dark Sky Burial Beware Your Subconcious Destroyer
‘“Vincit qui Se Vincit“ is the 3rd album from Dark Sky Burial, the new musical venture from Napalm Death’s Shane Embury. The dark ambient soundscapes and unsettling industrial noise textures, with disorientating, electronic moments were composed by Shane Embury with the help of long time friend, collaborator and producer Russ Russell and were tweaked into shape for the album at Parlour Studios earlier this year.’
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Richard Skelton The Motion of the Indivisible
‘Richard Skelton’s A Guidonian Hand is a metal album. Not in a sign-of-the-horns and headbanging sense, but in the way the songs sound metallic, like they might be actually forged from iron. These ten compositions of fused acoustic and electronic textures conjure the elegance of furnaces, geological processes, and the pranging, creaky beauty of their products. Smothering drones and occasional jagged edges make listening akin to donning a rusted Victorian diving suit and being swallowed into the depths.’
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Wendy Eisenberg Don’t Move
‘Innovative guitarist Wendy Eisenberg’s new album Bent Ring is sparse with its instrumentation but bold and unique in its execution. The songs on Bent Ring are often compact, sonic wonders, embracing vocal harmonies, rural Americana, odd sonic blips, and unusual lyrical observations. They’ve stepped away – just slightly – from the realm of improvisational free jazz and embraced somewhat more traditional songwriting, although, like anything coming from Eisenberg, “traditional” is an extremely relative term. The album always seems to come at the listener sideways.’
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Maria Moles In Pan-As
‘Most of the pieces are inspired by listening to Kulintang music of the Philippines; some of the compositional techniques are applied to the combination of synthesizer, percussion, tape loops, and drum kit.’
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SpermChurch What Street Is This
‘Trevor Dunn’s eclectic tastes have led him to bands such as Mr. Bungle, Fantomas, Tomahawk, Secret Chiefs 3 and The Melvins, but with his recent release with new project Sperm Church Dunn has managed to outdo even himself in terms of niche music. Uniting with electronic artist Sannety, Dunn has released merdeka atau mati, an album containing elements of abstraction and trap music, battling cultural conditioning with non-traditional tunings, glissandos, percussion, and a max/msp patch.’
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Trees Speak Prism
‘If you ever wanted to hear Can, Hawkwind, Destroy All Monsters, Pere Ubu, electric eels, John Cage, Liquid Liquid, Tangerine Dream, Suicide, Neu!, Laurie Spiegel, Art Ensemble of Chicago, John Barry, Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, Sun Ra, Stockhausen, John Carpenter, Electro-Acoustic and Musique Concrete and Mars in one band – then this is it! Trees Speak are Daniel Martin Diaz and Damian Diaz from Tucson, Arizona and their music often draws on the cosmic night-time magic of Arizona’s natural desert landscapes. ‘Trees Speak’ relates to the idea of future technologies storing information and data in trees and plants – using them as hard drives – and the idea that Trees communicate collectively.’
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Valery Vermeulen Mikromedas AdS/CFT 001 03
‘Belgian mathematician, lecturer and musician Valery Vermeulen has released an album made up of data from black holes. Vermeulen worked with Dr Thomas Hertog a colleague and long-time collaborator of the late Stephen Hawking on the electro album titled Mikromedas AdS/CFT 001. The electronic album was produced using data streams generated by various simulation models of astrophysical black holes and observational data of regions in space with extreme gravitational fields. The data Vermeulen used for Mikromedas AdS/CFT 001 includes gravitational wave data, data generated by black branes and neutron star data to name a few.’
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Fionnlagh Across the Pacific
‘Born of previous shared experience as a guiding light in dark times, What Came Before aims to go further than nostalgia, placing emphasis on the acknowledgment of history’s true nature. Soaring synths over dark, brooding sub tones crescendo in a style that already seems a unique hallmark of the artist, with an immediacy that is as transfixing as it is unsettling. Nevertheless, the turbulence of the album as a whole could be met with any number of experiences, and what arises will be unique to each listener.’
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Lolina Mark Ronson’s TED Talk Intro (Using Computer Remix)
‘Lolina is an electronic and digital musician, also known for her past projects as Inga Copeland. She was a member of the band Hype Williams between 2009 and 2013, collaborating with Dean Blunt on music, videos and performances. Copeland’s first solo album “because I’m worth it was self-released in 2014. ‘Fast Fashion’ is her first album with Deathbomb Arc. “These are all annoying sounds—in a more traditional album, they might be intolerable—but when Lolina deploys them, she tweaks the subliminal cues by which discerning listeners learn to sort the “bad” sounds out from the “good.”’
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Kinlaw & Franco Franco No Chill
‘Cybornetic Industrial rap duo Kinlaw & Franco Franco teamed up for repeated spontaneous neural-freestyle sessions within the gorges and dungeons of Avon some time in 2018. The duo blends Italian ill-rapped nervously apathetic tales from the present and the future with decraniumatossically blasted beats stuffed with nuclear reactor failures and Aztec whistles.’
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p.s. Hey. ** David, Yeah, very tough stuff. I don’t know what death’s like, obviously, but you certainly don’t seem like you’re dead. ** Dora, Oh, you’re spam. How did you get in here? ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, maybe in a scene where Foucault is doing a fight scene in pitch black. ** Misanthrope, Hm, well, it certainly does seem like your dentist is an A-1 rip off artist, it’s true. Lie and tell him your lawyer is drawing up papers to take legal action against him? I don’t know. Seems illegal, though. ** Sypha, I can’t believe you would like ‘Batman vs. Superman’, but then you do like things that I can’t believe you like fairly often, ha ha. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Okay, I’m going to the store tomorrow. End of story. I’ve got a friend lined up to go with me. So, barring the apocalypse occurring in-between, I’m there. I too would take a bean and cheese burrito over a big dick any day of the week. No contest even. Ha ha, not being a fan of Croc clogs — actually, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone wearing them, but it is winter — I second your love with a cherry on top. Love trying to melt a pad of butter with a magnifying glass because he’s a weird nerd, G. ** T, Hi. I miss crazy golf. It’s depressing to me that the French aren’t into crazy golf courses. There are only about six in the whole country, and they’re not crazy in the slightest. It’s definitely not weirdly hot in my arrondissement. I’m still wearing my scarf. Curious. That is kind of eerie: that spitting thing. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, I only dream about people trying to kill me, so thank god your dream-to-real thing hasn’t happened to me. Uh, not too much going on with me. Writing, applying for a grant, blog post making, making plans. I’ll let you know what I think of ‘Drive My Car’. I have to watch it by a week from Saturday. Might be a while before I see ‘Worst Person in the World’. No motivation thereby at the moment. Thanks for the elephantine rock! I hope your Wednesday snaps its fingers and magically reverses global warming. xo. ** Maria, Isabella, Camila, Malaria, Gabriela, Hi. I haven’t seen two fused dogs like that in forever. I really, really need money for my new film, so I pray that I’m the fated one. I’ll keep my eyes fixed on the ground. And on the sides of every chair. Thank you, swami. ** Shane, Me too, re: one of those slides. It wasn’t long enough. That’s all I can remember. There’s a log/water ride in Dubai that lasts 45 minutes! I’m almost tempted to travel to that horrible city just to ride it. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Everyone,Steve has reviewed the new Big Thief album hence. Well, yeah, go back to that monologue.Seems like a total keeper of an idea, especially since you’re fired up. ** Brian, Hey, Brian. ‘Moonfall’ was supposed to be the first in a trilogy?! Oh, no, that it surely won’t be is so violently depressing! I’m not kidding! The Quandt book on Bresson is the major book, I think. There are a bunch of others, of course, some excellent, but the Quandt is really great and comprehensive. Needless to say I’m thrilled to my bones that you loved ‘L’Argent’ so much. And got the special Bresson effect. I usually can’t talk for hours after I’ve watched a Bresson film. I’m a goner. Don’t be prettified, man, even though, yeah, I’d be petrified. But not you. You can do it! Do, don’t think. The golden rule. I’m going to rev my mid-week’s engine and see what happens. I’m waving a chequered flag at yours. ** Okay. I made you a gig of some music I’ve been listening to and digging lately, and I hope you’ll find things therein that conform with your own personal tastes. See you tomorrow.