Once again a remaster job with meticulous attention to detail along with a set of bonus material and copious first-hand accounts have allowed me to appreciate a release much more than I originally had. Sugar's last album can still be a difficult listen but I think I'm ready to love it.
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The length of time elapsed between Kannon and the last Sunn O))) album proper, Monoliths and Dimensions, is over six years and the longest gap in the band’s career. This pause is unsurprising given the grandiose stylistic decisions the last album reached as far as production goes: choruses, strings, and horns made for an artistic peak that stopped just short of crossing that fine threshold between epic drama and self-absorbed pretentiousness. Kannon in some ways is a reboot of the project, returning back to the foundational sound of Greg Anderson and Steven O'Malley and their massive wall of amps. But rather than a cliché "back to basics" move, it is a record informed by their legacy, as well as their recent collaborations with Ulver and Scott Walker, that displays strong and significant artistic growth and development.
Roberto Opalio's latest solo opus is an intriguing companion piece to My Cat is an Alien's recent Abstract Expressionism for the Ears, achieving its own uniquely altered state in a much more spontaneous, stripped-down, and (comparatively) brief fashion. Although it also contains a shorter piece built around Roberto's processed voice, the clear raison d'être for Aurora Coelestis is the 30-minute title piece, a shimmering, dream-like tour de force birthed from perhaps the least likely of sources: a glockenspiel.  Aurora is certainly a more modest effort than anything that MCIAA has been up to lately, but it is unquestionably its own strange and unique entity with its own pleasantly warped reality.
Every once in a while, a familiar artist takes me completely by surprise. One Sunday night, I was making the long drive home to Dublin from my then fiancée’s place in Northern Ireland. On the radio was the weekly contemporary music show on the national classical music station. This particular edition was dedicated to a work in progress by Roger Doyle; different segments being played with an interview with Doyle interspersed between them. I have always been fond of Doyle’s music but listening to parts of what would eventually become Chalant was a revelation. Built around old answering machine messages, Doyle weaved his own past through his music and combined bittersweet memory with an overreaching arc of life’s progress and the construction of the artist’s cannon. Throughout the next few days and weeks, the music and themes of the work resonated within my head. This was a deeply moving and thought-provoking composition and I could not wait to listen to the album properly.
After last year’s Ways of Meaning, I have a hard time hearing Kyle Bobby Dunn the way I once did. There was something dark and deceiving about that record, something that didn’t show up in the music so much as it did in the subtext, but which changed the way the music felt nonetheless. On his latest album, a two disc set with over two hours of new music, Kyle continues to complicate his message. His ascetic approach is intact and as beautiful as ever, but the same enigma that haunted his last album is all over this record, too, and it’s even more noticeable.
This three track EP given to attendees at a live performance in Germany earlier this year, is now available for those who did not attend. Each of the legendary artists contributes one piece to this all-too-brief release, which comes together just as brilliantly as if it were a stand alone release.
Köner's solo work has always been characterized as having a definite cold, frigid quality to it, both sonically and through the imagery he has employed. This new work is no different, titled after a Russian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean where nuclear testing occurred. His his approach to the sound is as desolate, but fascinating as ever.
On his third full length release, Paul Thomsen Kirk continues his modernized take on the late 1990s/early 2000s electronic music that is as much about dissonant textures as it is captivating beats and rhythms. It perfectly balances that sense of familiar and fresh, and it helps to renew my faith that electronic dance music can still be artistically relevant.
Daniel Menche discussed on his now infamous 
