wnyc.org: "Hold on to your samplers, for on this edition of New Sounds, you’ll hear something from one of Annie Gosfield’s crazy new pieces incorporating satellite sounds, static, machine noise and microtonality. Also, you’ll experience the “bubblecore” sound with ambient space rock from the one-man project known as Icecake. Plus, listen to some trippy, Frippy-soundscape works involving guitar and electronics from Richard Pinhas." Listen here
Boston Globe: 'Josephine Foster is a self-described 'opera school dropout' whose downbeat folk stylings build without effort or affectation into shrieking, valve-blowing arias. Her new album with the Supposed, "All the Leaves Are Gone," is explosively electric. Foster fronts a full, amped-up, and extremely inventive band, and her voice billows and soars through a 12-song sequence that was originally conceived as a rock opera. A neo-quirk-folk-rock opera? Foster -- although she is louder than any of her contemporaries -- represents the quintessence of the new folkies. Their wellsprings are in the ancient and arcane, but they are breaking new ground. Their music can be recondite, but it admits no limits. There is a word for this, it fits perfectly, and it was coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins in a poem about his favorite composer, Purcell: 'arch-especial.'
insound.com: Jaga has become something of a musical phenomena in Norway since they started 9 years ago. Not only is this 10 piece instrumental band regarded as one of the most exciting and innovative in Norway, the members are all involved in other musical projects and have in one way or another contributed to almost every significant recording to come out of that part of the world in the last five years. With no boundaries and an arsenal that includes trumpets, trombone, electric guitar, bass, tuba, two bass clarinets, Fender Rhodes, vibraphone and a rack of electronics, Jaga create timeless music. Melodic, hypnotizing, delicate and subtle.
allmusic.com: "Some call him a genius, others claim he's certifiably insane, a madman. Truth is, he's both, but more importantly, Lee Perry is a towering figure in reggae -- a producer, mixologist, and songwriter who, along with King Tubby, helped shape the sound of dub and made reggae music such a powerful part of the pop music world. Along with producing some of the most influential acts (Bob Marley & the Wailers and the Congos to name but two) in reggae history, Perry's approach to production and dub mixing was breathtakingly innovative and audacious -- no one else sounds like him -- and while many claim that King Tubby invented dub, there are just as many who would argue that no one experimented with it or took it further than did Lee Perry." Read more
epitonic.com:"Voice Crack is a challenging listen, but an endlessly intriguing one. For nearly two decades, the Swiss duo of Norbert Möslang and Andy Guhl have been making ominous noise tapestries our of, well, junk -- "cracked everyday electronics," as they call it. Things they find in the garbage. Leftover building materials, shortwave radios on the fritz, broken calculators, whatever they can get their hands on. They transform these unwanted objects into functional electronic instruments and use them to create enigmatic sound collages."
TheWIRE 255: "From the Max Ernst-style Merz of the cover of Fake Universe Man to the International Corporation’s zoned out PR sheet, which comes under the guise of a big business communiquй complete with analysis detailing the temporal point-origin of each vertical stratum of the CD in relation to its position along the recording’s timeline, it’s evident The Lickets are not some tepidly traditional collective. The ten tracks of Fake Universe Man smudge and bleed into one another. In the opener, “Big Happy Bubble,” the listener enters an impossibly dense forest, ponds choked by gigantic fronds, the sky blotted out and peopled by a thousand different varieties of bird and frog. “Reconstruction Research” is reminiscent of Hal Blaine’s paisley shirted grooves and the longform tickertape rhythms on Faust’s So Far; doppler-donkey horns trot past." Read more
allmusic.com: "Despite the constant shifts in name (from Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel to Foetus Uber Frisco to Foetus All Nude Revue) and the less frequent variations in aesthetics (all focused around the same unforgiving sonic attack), the music manufactured under the prolific Foetus umbrella was solely the product of one J.G. (Jim) Thirlwell. A native of Melbourne, Australia, Thirwell relocated to London in 1978, where he conceived the basic Foetus concept -- impenetrable panaramas of extremist noise built on tape loops and syncopated rhythms -- as an alternative to the constraints of rock music." Read more
allmusic.com: "Picking up the pieces from At the Drive-In, Cedric Bixler and Omar Rodriguez formed the Mars Volta and wasted little time in branching out into elements of hardcore, psychedelic rock, and free jazz that expanded on the boundaries of their previous work. Although their previous band's demise ultimately arrived before they were able to truly capitalize on their mounting commercial triumphs, the Mars Volta immediately impressed with their willingness to eschew conventional logic and push themselves into new artistic directions instead of opting for the more marketable sounds." Read more
mikmusik.org: Mik.Musik.!. is the record label, very small one, run by Wojt3k Kucharczyk with cheerfull companionship of Piotrek Połoz and Bartek Kujawski.
Acts on the borderline between unofficial and official culture, preferes to create a new system, feels no lack of self-character.
Mik.!. has become known from its music all the time avoiding easy associations, preference for nontypical actions and unusal publishing and releasing ideas, great care about covers, activity and uncompromise, provoking "scenes" to think.
With Electrelane's driving instrumentals earning the band a reputation as the young things to watch, high profile gigs with Sleater-Kinney, Death In Vegas, Broadcast, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Primal Scream, and Le Tigre followed, along with a US deal with radical indie label, Mr. Lady. The release of Rock It To The Moon, followed by an EP, 'I Want To Be The President', confirmed the rumors. By now, sell-out gigs were the norm as a swathe of art rocker fans of Godspeed You! Black Emperor! and the Velvets, pure popists in love with X-Ray Spex or the B52s, indie kids who'd seen through the packaging of Britpop, poured into venues from Athens to London to New York.
from anniegosfield.com "Annie Gosfield has created a body of work that includes large–scale compositions, chamber pieces, electronic music, video projects, and music for dance. Her work often explores the inherent beauty of non–musical sounds, and is inspired by diverse sources such as machines, destroyed pianos, warped 78 records, and detuned radios. She uses traditional notation, improvisation, and extended techniques to create a sound world that eliminates the boundaries between music and noise, while emphasizing the unique qualities of each performer. Annie lives in New York City and divides her time between performing on piano and sampler with her own group and composing for many ensembles and soloists." Read more
from discogs.com :
"Daniel's recording alter-ego Frivolous captures a romantekly influenced montage of the most cutting edge production technics with an old soul mentality. Along side his still rather bizarre performances, is the incorporation of classic instruments and vocals into an environment built on experiments with glitchy cut-up funk and found sound."
Two Insiders on the Dark...
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WNYC: "Former journalists Alan Huffman and Michael Rejebian talk...
With Electrelane's driving instrumentals earning the band a reputation as the young things to watch, high profile gigs with Sleater-Kinney, Death In Vegas, Broadcast, And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Primal Scream, and Le Tigre followed, along with a US deal with radical indie label, Mr. Lady. The release of Rock It To The Moon, followed by an EP, 'I Want To Be The President', confirmed the rumors. By now, sell-out gigs were the norm as a swathe of art rocker fans of Godspeed You! Black Emperor! and the Velvets, pure popists in love with X-Ray Spex or the B52s, indie kids who'd seen through the packaging of Britpop, poured into venues from Athens to London to New York. 