Electronic
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It’s difficult to imagine Toshimaru Nakamura with anything as conventional as an electric guitar slung over his shoulder. Since developing what he calls the “no-input mixing board” in the mid-1990s, the Tokyo-based noisemaker has earned a spot among his generation’s most influential avant-gardists. But it’s true, he started out playing old-time rock and roll. Clearly…
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Drone recordings that fail to inspire often do so because they lack texture. There is a kind of flatness that the genre sometimes inspires that can be especially difficult to sustain in long compositions. This second effort by Thighpaulsandra and Massimo Pupillo is so far removed from that criticism that I hesitate to even associate…
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Sicilian Skrima writes about growing up in his Italian home, fascinated by the far-off, sometimes muffled sounds that would find their way into his bedroom. He recorded those sounds with a number of devices (of varying quality), and then applied modifications to his indoor field recordings. For years, this was a kind of passion project…
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Don’t be misled by the pastel pink cover, Anders Brørby’s new Traumas is every bit as dark as its title suggests. These 10 new tracks are by turns sad, menacing and captivating. From the album’s notes: “Like a cracked mirror held up to the stages of grief Traumas buries deep into the scores of the…
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This is Thomas Bey William Bailey’s first recording for the Elevator Bath label in Austin, Texas. The sound artist, researcher and book author has released two version of his new work “La Production Interdite.” One is an instrumental. The other features a fascinating spoken word addition, on the subject of autoscopy. Defined in the album’s…
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The weekend before Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency, I was out with a group of friends discussing the state of politics around the world. While not a single one of us thought Trump had a chance. His candidacy alone was enough to dominate much of the evening’s conversation. The gist of our little salon-styled…
The Moderns 