This is the first LP by this Northern California sound artist, but he has been active for almost a decade and is most closely associated with the scene around the excellent Root Strata label.  Students of Decay is another appropriate home for Davis though, as Ask the Dust (a rare John Fante reference!) offers up quite a bit of warm drone that also dabbles its toes a bit in stuttering electronic chaos, field recordings, and more formal composition.  Ultimately, it is a bit too chameleonic and intermittently pastoral to fully work for me as a complete work, but several of the individual pieces are quite wonderful.
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Eternal Tapestry's album on Thrill Jockey is their first widely available recording, coming on the heels of a slew of limited-press LP and CD-r releases the last couple years. It's a charming, low-key improvisational rock record that I found a bit of a "comfort food" listen, playing exactly to my tastes. While it doesn't strike me as especially innovative or mind-blowing among its peers, I find it a satisfying album, easy to get lost in start-to-finish each time I put it on.
Although a similar CD was released by Sub Rosa 20 years ago, this is not a reissue but a re-recording, an amendment to that 1990 release. Here, Jean-Luc Fafchamps revisits one of Morton Feldman's most popular pieces and casts a new light on it. The themes, which Feldman had developed throughout his life as a composer, are all consolidated into one perfect piece of music. He picks up the delicate beauty of the piece in a different way to his previous recording, a truer rendition of the score but by no means negating the original release.
I have traditionally been a sucker for J Mascis—his songs with Dinosaur Jr capitalize on my favorite aspects of rock music, overflowing with hooks, distortion and blistering guitar solos. After two surprisingly excellent albums with the original Dinosaur Jr line-up, Mascis' first studio album under his own name asks listeners to take out their earplugs for a scaled-back, primarily acoustic effort.
This young singer-songwriter takes inspiration from Dinosaur Jr frontman J Mascis, among other folks, and will be opening his US tour this spring. In a refreshing twist, Vile has released the better album this year, outshining Mascis on his latest album (and most stripped-down to date).
This surreal and wildly ambitious project began quite humbly in 1988 when Greif found an old three-LP audio book of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland at a thrift store and began idly warping and enhancing it.  Sometime afterward, he submitted an unrelated cassette to Staalplaat with some of those experiments on the back side and they offered to release the Alice material instead of the intended work. Originally released only as a series of five limited-edition albums in the early '90s, this sprawling epic quickly became Greif's most well-known and enduring work.  Appropriately, it has now been reissued as a rather striking box set for the second time.
As much as I enjoyed Pedestrian Deposit's first "post-noise" effort (2009's Austere), I didn't think it was nearly on the same level as what Jon Borges and Shannon Kennedy were capable of delivering live.  That disparity has now been conclusively remedied, as this expanded reissue of a 2010 Housecraft cassette captures the duo at their mesmerizing, crackling, and eerie peak.
This is probably one of the most nauseating, disgusting sounding recordings I own, which isn't a surprise given the artists involved. It has a sound that drips with blood, saliva and phlegm and is more than a visceral experience from both of these two modern aktionists.
Two musicians are jointly credited for this album: Jamie Smith, the sound sculptor behind 2009's buzz band du jour, the xx, and Gil Scott-Heron, the legendary spoken word poet and musician who should require no introduction. This project, a full-length collection of remixes that draws primarily from Scott-Heron's first recording in eons, 2010's triumphant I'm New Here, has been touted as a collaborative effort. A cursory listen, however, makes one thing immediately clear—this is Jamie's show.
