Music
January 13, 2016
Consuming records is a source of both joy and conflict: joy, where my undying love and obsession with music can be reified for physical engagement; conflict, where my uneasiness with consumption, desire for justice, and the crutches of hanging onto physical objects meet. Obviously, the former wins out…
January 8, 2016
In a year filled with over-hyped rhetoric, it feels a little surreal to try and parcel up my take on the experience. Honestly though, I may have felt similarly last year, if the title of my year end posts signals anything. America’s long-winded election is in full-swing… a year+ long leer…
January 4, 2016
Pastel Voids, the label-collective founded by Brooklyn artist Metropol, has announced their winter batch of releases, due out in a variety of formats on January 20th. The releases range from the stripped-down percussion of Ascetic House affiliate Jock Club to the hardcore hardware jams of U.S. Hard…
December 2, 2015
Last weekend, some three dozen diehard experimental noise fiends packed into Seattle’s Hollow Earth Radio to indulge in a post-Thanksgiving performance by Portland, OR multimedia duo MSHR and Baltimore-based musique concrète wunderkind Max Eilbacher. Despite there being no local bands on the…
November 19, 2015
I’ve posted about Chambray Records on Decoder before; they’re one of the Detroit electronic scene’s best-kept secrets, and everything they put out is quality. Much of their releases are digital-only at first, but the best ones eventually make it to vinyl, and they’re always worth…
November 5, 2015
No No, the new album from Baltimore-based Matt Papich, aka Co La, is an album that conflates and emphasizes contrast. Though reactions to the maelstrom of samples he conjures has been a little polarized, and elsewhere it’s suggested that No No is unstructured and “avant-garde at its core,”…
October 27, 2015
Since first recording as Loscil in 1998, Scott Morgan has produced some of most sincere and striking music fluidly floating across minimal techno, ambient, and super-subtle experimental territories. With albums and EPs released by the likes of Kranky, Ghostly International, Gizeh, and Glacial Movements…
October 8, 2015
Last year, RVNG Intl.’s band of aural cultural archivists set its sights on the work of Kerry Leimer, the Canada-born musician and producer who developed his signature brand of isolated, serene minimalism in Seattle throughout the second half of the 70s and first half of the 80s. Now. RVNG continues…
October 1, 2015
In 2015 Goldrush Music Festival descended on Denver, Colorado for its fifth year. This year, the fest was held September 18-19th, 2015 at the historic Savoy at Curtis Park, a Victorian structure built in 1887, almost 30 years after the Colorado Gold Rush and only 11 years after Colorado became a state….
September 29, 2015
Terry Malts are on a perpetual tour of California. They pop up at punk shows in LA and the Bay Area almost ceaselessly and after running into them three times in five months, I’m almost convinced they’re inescapable (not that that’s a bad thing by any stretch). When Hookworms had to…
September 22, 2015
Several days ago, at about 2:00 am I turned on the tap in the kitchen of my childhood home. Water failed to flow out as a deep rumble jerked upwards from the belly of the sink. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a veritable cannon of a water stream shoots upwards from the right faucet handle like a fire hydrant,…
September 17, 2015
Andrew Weathers is a guitarist, banjo player, and mastering engineer based in Oakland California. He leads the Andrew Weathers Ensemble and regularly performs with Talk More. He’s recorded and performed with Kirtan Choir, Weathers/Glover, Tethers, Parties, Acid of All Ruins, Bicameral Mind, Northern…
September 3, 2015
In this series for Decoder, I talk with some of the musicians in The Spacesuits collective on the role of chance and randomness in their work. The Spacesuits is an international collective of musicians working in tandem to generate new creation myths, taking their cues from pioneer Afrofuturist,…
August 28, 2015
Back in early July, Angelo Harmsworth reached out with a brief and simple message alerting us to Lime Lodge, a new imprint he’d recently founded. Jumping over the freshly minted Lime Lodge site immediately revealed a modest but powerful new imprint with a subtly striking and wholly arresting…
August 26, 2015
Heather Woods Broderick released her first solo record in 2009, the earthy From The Ground on Australian imprint Preservation, later to be issued on vinyl by Digitalis – one of Decoder’s spiritual motherships. Broderick fans likely knew she wouldn’t be writing the gorgeous, cabin-in-the-woods…
August 12, 2015
It seems redundant to admit my significant positive bias toward my subject matter here. The Stag Hare oeuvre has been profoundly important to me over the past year, so I would be risking dishonesty — or worse, insincerity — if I dared to write without acknowledging the personal weight behind…
July 28, 2015
In 2011, a time when the term “summer festival” had already come to connote the massive, multi-stage, corporate-sponsored events which have since become the norm, Rafael Anton Irisarri envisioned Substrata – a different kind of model for showcasing live music. The first edition of Substrata…
July 15, 2015
Even being from the state, if all you knew about Voice of the Valley Noise Rally was that it took place in Millstone, WV, you might wonder — how unusual is a gathering of noiseniks in the backwoods? I’ve been writing about weirdo music for a bit now, but I only came across the event a little…
July 13, 2015
This is a mix of my favorite music composed for and/or played (or improvised) on a synthesizer, any synthesizer. It is not meant to be a comprehensive list in any way, it is certainly not a complete history of synthesizer recordings and it is not meant as a best-of list in any sense. What it is is a…
July 9, 2015
Canary Records is the roving imprint of Baltimore-based Ian Nagoski, a maven producer and researcher, and at the time of the label’s foundation in 2008, a record store employee with a long list of interesting and gone-from-print international oddities accumulating. Since then, Canary has become…
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