Merry Christmas in advance, happy holidays and all that, thanks for reading along with us another week, another year… welcome to 2014′s final Week in Review. This Saturday we thought we’d kick things off by sharing a tidbit from last week, that is, Brooklyn producer Jacob 2-2′s…
Last year, Vancouver’s Young Braised (a.k.a. Jaymes Bowman) released Japanese Tendencies via the untouchable electronic imprint 1080p. While Japanese was a startling set of curious lyrical imagery (“It was a punani tsunami”) stricken by a genuine affinity for established hip hop…
Samy Ben Redjeb’s Analog Africa imprint can do no wrong, and here’s another mesmerizing compilation to prove it. For the first time in its storied catalog, we get a taste of the vibrant Congolese funk scene in the late 60s and 70s. Perhaps more so than Accra or Lagos, Kinshasa was the epicentrer…
If 2014 showed anything, it’s that bedroom pop producers with lo-fi aesthetics are alive and well. Through sincere songwriters like Jerry Paper and Ben Varian and up to relatively “big” names like Ariel Pink and John Maus, pop music in the lower tiers has been riding a rewarding wave…
There’s a tragic sense of longing in Underwater Death’s All I Have Of You Are Radio Waves cassette, a certain vibe of loss and need. Comprised of layers of drone and haunted broadcasts, similar to the Caretaker’s melancholic suites, Underwater Death’s sounds here use hyper-affected…
Although he’s not making as big of waves as the various acts on Modern Love or other purveyors of dark, experimental music, William Selman (formerly known as Warmdesk) has had quite an impressive year. Starting with January’s fantastically bleak Chaîne Opératoire on Digitalis and checking…
Kendra Steiner Editions procures yet another batch of patiently augmented audio, this time a substantial chunk of glitched banjo music from fellow Texan sound artist Marcus Rubio entitled Cities Sinking Down. Following up on his most recent full length Land of Disenfranchisement, a collection of equally…
The name Glacial23 was unknown to me before this 12-inch showed up at my doorstep, but poking around Bandcamp and Discogs reveals a pretty extensive discography – a treasure trove of space-exploration drone and techno. This no-frills vinyl release distills the project’s sound into something…
Although the project is quite young, Monte Burrows’ debut Fantasy Living cassette suggests a sprawling variety of sounds and ideas in its all-too-brief duration. The tape’s opening duo of “1430 (Detritus)” and “Cretins Abound” juxtapose elusively errant broadcasts…
When we last heard from John Daniel, his Forest Management project had just issued two new sets of listlessly beautiful drone music and was embarking on a tour of the East coast and into Canada. Now, Daniel returns with yet another suite of drifting desolation with Reservation, a concept cassette channeling…
Though North Carolina ambient/experimental recorders Zachary and Denny Wilkerson Corsa, who go by Lost Trail, had a busy year and a staggeringly packed 2015 planned (if you scoot around a bit you’ll see their upcoming releases on Facebook, and know what I mean), their The Afternoon Vision collection…
Although the EP’s cover vaguely resembles a nightmarish version of Jackson Pollock painting your living room on Christmas morning, Sparkling Wide Pressure‘s latest offering is a actually positive affair. Released digitally via Heligator, a label whose essence is genuinely philanthropic,…
We’re starting to break into list season and although Decoder’s 2014 features will run early next year, we kicked things off a bit early this week with Experimedia founder Jeremy Bible’s favorites from the preceding year; check that out here. We also debuted a new column focused on…
Noise is an elastic genre, syncretizing various elements to itself in the manner of an accreting astral body. Artists and their sounds establish themselves and spread outwards like sonic fungus, grasping passing objects and concepts like an amoeba’s pseudopod, drawing them into themselves to create…
I’ve been sitting on this gem of a release for some time now, as it’s a gorgeous listen that is best appreciated on a high end sound system. It took awhile for me to get enough time on my home stereo – with headphones on – to really appreciate it. A work of electro-acoustic sound art,…
Once again, Frankfurt-based cassette imprint SicSic issues a sonic missive into the ether, this time with a split cassette by The Original Flowering Earth and Kyle Landstra. The split’s A-side is comprised solely of The OFE‘s “Diamonds from the Skym” a three-part suite consisting…
It’s 2014 and snobbery is finally dead, a dinosaur now extinct and laid to rest as the sediment piles on. The playing field has been leveled, opening the way to an era of creative freedom like no other. Infinite influences and styles are being thrown together in an eclectic stew of sounds. What…
More Records‘ latest set of five cassettes may have been the hardest batch of tapes in 2014 to actually single out a favorite among the whole. Cassette labels in particular tend to issue batches of anywhere from two or four cassettes on a day, while others opt for 11 or more (cheers, Bathetic)….
#1 – 12/1/2014 – Mark Templeton has teamed up with filmmaker Kyle Armstrong for Extensions, an LP+DVD tribute to media soothsayer Marshal McLuhan. Due out on the brand new Graphical Recordings label on January 28 next year, Extensions – which was previewed at this year’s WNDX…
A true master of synthesis and modulation, loscil can spin the fibers of sound in the tightest, most fluid strands. He demonstrated this to me on Strathcona Variations, my first encounter with the producer. I remember the experience because it was like being visited by a UFO, descending, out of the…
