Electronic
-
Hüseyin Evirgen’s latest under the Magna Pia name sports a title that’s believed to be of Sumerian origin. Daiauna is a reference to “having power over fertility” according to the album’s notes. The Greek word for demon or minor deity – daimōn – is one of its derivatives. This seven-track dark-ambient album begins with a…
-
The locked groove was introduced in the early days of vinyl record manufacturing for a purely practical reason – to prevent record-player needles from running onto the paper label if left unattended. These locks were silent. Unintentionally locked grooves soon followed. Damaged vinyl records, in addition to skipping, sometimes had flaws that caused the needle…
-
It is remarkable how little music instruments change over time. Percussionists still pound drums and various other found objects. Symphony orchestras, even those with the most modernist repertoires, are not fundamentally different than they were one or two centuries ago. And the synthesizer, arguably the 20th century’s most significant musical step forward is still operated…
-
Niet f-n and Giuseppe Fantini describe their Kaczynski Editions label as “permeated with true punk spirit.” The label’s name is a reference to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. The former math prof killed three and injured 23 Americans with homemade bombs between 1978 and 1995. By way of an explanation, he offered up an anti-tech manifesto that…
-
Artists who produce instrumental music – or to put it more precisely, music that doesn’t feature vocals – are often asked how they decide on titles. At the risk of sounding elitist, that always struck me as one of the dumber questions in music journalism. Sure, not all music lends itself naturally to a pithy…
-
French artist Sylvain Milliot will release his first album under the name Véhicule on Friday. Le Temps du Chien is a detailed, carefully assembled combination of acoustic and electronic sounds. Neither purely ambient nor new classical, it offers the listenability of the former and the refinement of the latter. It sounds too advanced to be…
The Moderns 