I know next to nothing about Paul Hares, aside from the fact that he’s released two delicious cassettes through Rotifer out of California, and appears to be affiliated with an experimental Russian hip hop group called Balakovo Flava. Yet Hares is one of my very favorite underground artists at…
Thirty thousand wallets collectively sighed upon word of Thee Oh Sees’ potential hiatus, and collectively rejoiced at the chance to buy disparate garage, psych, and pop releases. Already 2014′s release schedule suggests that a gang of outsider/truly enlightened pop minds were raring to expand…
In my 2013 year-end feature, I included the gorgeous Mary of the Shrines cassette from Toronto-based, genre-agnostic songwriter Black Walls, a.k.a. Kenneth Reaume. The tape was quite a departure from Acedia, his full-length debut under the Black Walls banner, with Reaume’s intricately assembled…
My dear Decoder readers, have you been on the lookout for some groovy ambient music? Look no further than Sadler, a six-track cassette release from Wilmington, Delaware’s William Clay Martin. It’s been a while since a release, let alone an ambient release, has hooked me the way Sadler has,…
Although this certainly isn’t the first time melancholic soundsmith Marcus Fischer and modern classicist/cellist the OO-Ray (a.k.a. Ted Laderas) has teamed up, the Portland-based collaborative duo has never quite come off this warm and gentle. Fischer and Laderas’ initial outing came in…
A new Chromadadata track dropping into my SoundCloud feed is always a treat, so a full-length LP from the Kansas City-via-St. Augustine producer is an exciting prospect to say the least. As of now we’ve got two songs from the forthcoming album: “In The Sky” and “The Makings Of You.” Chromadadata…
“Shadows” is the third single to drop in anticipation of the February 18th release of New York singer/songwriter Evan Ønly’s debut EP, No Matter What (via Underwater Peoples). While slower than the title track, “Shadows” is nonetheless a fun synth pop slow jam with catchy…
Flipping through London-based sound artist Janek Schaefer‘s output is like a roll call of the top-tier movers in modern sound design and experimentation. From Room40 and Apestaartje to Asphodelle, Line, Spekk and Fat Cat – among many others – Schaefer has graced the catalogs of tried and…
Brooklyn producer Andy Petr’s first two EPs for Mixpak Records, 2011′s Rapper Turned Singer and 2012′s Obsession, were exercises in sensory overload, albeit in a very satisfying manner. Fusing hip-hop, glitch, IDM, and house, Petr took listeners to many unexpected places over each…
Pitchfork announced this week that Lefse Records would be releasing a compilation of tracks incorporating audio from space, recorded by the Voyager 1 & 2 probes; a special offering along the lines of their tribute to Japanese video game composer Yasunori Mitsuda, available on Bandcamp. That the…
With a now continuously expanding scene of contemporary experimental electronic music, many cassette labels have managed to push artists into new international appreciation. This has been the case with young L.A.-based producer Neil Reinalda, who has experimented with electronic music under his PHORK…
Taken from their debut full length, The Highs & Lows of Jacques Caramac & The Sweet Generation, due out on Everyday Life Recordings/Rocket Girl at the end of the month, “Kream Puff” continues the candy-obsessed Franco-Scottish-Bolivian band’s adventures in the obscure. American…
Featuring beautiful and expressive instrumentation, this new Tara Jane O’Neil piece finds the songwriter exploring a traditional musical heritage and gentleness of sound that is at once striking and honest. As a work of art, what is most moving about “Elemental Finding” (taken from…
Eric Stephenson has been booking shows around Ann Arbor and Detroit for years, organizing festivals and events such as Ultra Mega Awesome Extreme and Codename: Dracula, and hosting hundreds of shows, events and Ann Arbor Free Skool workshops at his place of residency, Far House. He has a strictly DIY…
As part of Digitalis Industries’ first batch of tapes for 2014, Saturn Eye is the latest cassette release from Eden Hemming’s Mass Ornament project. Mashing up samples beyond recognition and layering her own equally warped, echoed vocals within the mix, Eden’s new tape is made up of…
The Québécois musique actuelle movement emerged in the 1970s as a way for the province’s various streams of avant-garde music to come together as a community. The label was chosen to eschew the various pigeonhole genre distinctions such as jazz and classical, which didn’t seem to fit the…
Miguel A. Garcia (also known as Xedh) is an active member of the emergent Basque avant-garde music scene, and Nick Hoffman (whose solo output appears under the Katchmare moniker) is an improviser and composer from the United States. This gorgeously packaged CD (featuring drawings by Hoffman himself)…
Sparsely arranged, seductively distant pop isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “Oneida side project,” but that’s precisely the kind of vibes hosted by Nurse and Soldier, the husband-wife duo of Robertson Thacher (Bobby Matador of Oneida) and Erica Fletcher….
Ice Cream is a new project from Toronto featuring Carlyn Bezic and Amanda Crist, both longtime players in several bands from the local garage and experimental rock scene. With this project, their songwriting has taken a minimalist pop approach that draws a line into one of Crist’s old bands, Huckleberry…
Hailing from Fort Collins, CO, Matthew Sage creates dreamlike sonic portraits that are both elegantly fragile and densely immense. Sage’s latest set of dreary movements comes in the form of Limit Invitations, an already-sold-out tape issued via Exo Tapes. Although the cassette is already sold…
