Albums and Singles
These two albums mark the beginning of Analog Africa's new "Limited Dance Edition" series, veering away from compilations into reissues of long-deleted full albums by artists that played an integral role in shaping founder Samy Ben Redjeb's aesthetic. The endeavor is off to an excellent start, adding some strong rarities to the available oeuvre of one of the milieu's best-known bands and unearthing an absolutely killer effort from the amazing but seldom heard Rob.
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Akron's one-man debut nods to influences such as Delia Derbyshire and Joe Meek but cannot begin to approach the originality or spirit of experiment of those legends. Yet the best of these pieces are odd exotic bleeping echoes which did transport me to other worlds, just perhaps not the ones intended.
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The large majority of Brooklyn based Zs' output consists of their work as a sextet—a varied body of work focused around rhythmic intensity and textures based on duality. To reexamine the group's early recordings is to make a sonic map of the changing attitudes of New York new music and how the talent in the area learned to hybridize their surroundings and their musical skills. In that sense, Zs are the New York avant-garde personified; their role as a bridge between loft bands and chamber musicians, lo-fi and "high art" represents a lot of the essential artistic ideologies in 21st century New York.
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After a terrific debut EP in 2010, Bell Gardens finally return with a full album of mostly new music. As usual, the musical arrangements are lush and saturated with beauty as Brian McBride and Kenneth James Gibson try to recreate the moods and sounds of the golden era of pop studio recordings without using the typical computer-based short cuts and technological workarounds that have become de rigour for modern studio work. The end result is a triumph of song writing, musicianship and integrity, highlighting just how good humble songs can be without the need for following trends or to be striving to be the next big thing.
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Scott Ferguson has a unique voice. Of course, like fingerprints, every voice is unique to a degree. But Scott has found his voice, and conformed it to his introspectral lyrics. Whether it is hiding submerged beneath the shadows of etheric guitar work, or rising triumphant into the light above the steady tambourine pulse and murmur of electronics, the experience is haunting. Listening to this succinct EP is like brushing up with a ghost in the haunted Midwest landscape. While the machines of industry may be dead or dying, something invisible still moves among their rusted skeletons, in the empty homes. And now I can hear them.
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