wikipedia.org: "The Advisory Circle is an alias of electronic musician Jon Brooks (along with Georges Vert and King of Woolworths). His releases as The Advisory Circle are on the Ghost Box Music label.
An extensive feature in The Wire magazine explored Brooks' fascination with public information films from the 1970s. He describes his sound as "Everything's fine, but there is something not quite right about it."
WIRE 299 - Jan 2009: "In 2006, UK promoters Arika invited John Butcher to tour a number of out of the way spaces in Scotland. The venues, selected for their extreme acoustic properties, included a mausoleum, a wartime fuel storage tank and a cave. This resulting album grows out of the saxophonist's interest in escaping the acoustic confines of conventional venues - work with resonant spaces is documented on the earlier The Geometry of Sentiment and Cavern with Nightlife. Butcher plays tenor and soprano saxophones, sometimes adding feedback and amplification. Such site-specific performances are unrepeatable, of course, but the CD shows that you didn't have to be there to get what he's doing." Read the whole review
allmusic.com: "With Saint Dymphna (titled for the patron saint of outsiders), GGD has a made another left turn but this time by turning right, away form the hippie/patchouli saturated post-psychedelic tribal music and toward the more structured forms of electronic beat music like dubstep and grime." Read the whole review
wikipedia.org: "Earth is an American drone band based in Seattle, Washington. Although they have played various styles of music, they are best known as pioneers of a minimalistic, long, and repetitive form of heavy music known as drone doom. The band's early albums could be seen as a variation of the experimental doom-influenced metal of The Melvins." Read on
wikipedia.org:"Lukas Ligeti is a composer and percussionist. His work incorporates elements of jazz, contemporary classical, and various world musics. Ligeti was born in Vienna, Austria. He is of Hungarian ancestry and the son of the noted composer György Ligeti. He travels frequently to Africa and has performed together with musicians from Côte d'Ivoire, Egypt, Zimbabwe, and several other African nations. His current group, which brings together electronica and Burkinabe popular music, is called Burkina Electric." Read on
kenhollings.blogspot.com: "Ken Hollings is a writer based in London. His work appears in a wide range of journals and publications, including The Wire, Sight and Sound, Strange Attractor.
He has written and presented critically acclaimed programmes for BBC Radio 3, Radio 4, Resonance FM, NPS in Holland and ABC Australia. His new book, Welcome to Mars: Science and the American Century 1947-1959, is out now from Strange Attractor Press."
RAND corporation
"A BBC Radio 3 Sunday feature about the RAND corporation, the first think tank, once dubbed the ‘malevolent university’ and influencer of presidents." Download here
Welcome to Mars
Between 1947 and 1959, the future was written about, discussed and analysed with such confidence that it became a tangible presence. This is a story of weird science, strange events and even stranger beliefs, set in an age when the possibilities for human development seemed almost limitless. With electronic sound production by Simon James. Download here
The WIRE 299: "The first release in the Jahtari organisation's new seven inch series reviving the cheapo casio driven and early generation syndrum rhythms of the mid eighties."
In The 7th Moon, The Chief Turned Into A Swimming Fish And Ate The Head Of His Enemy By Magic - #15 in The WIRE's Top 50 of 2008
crammed.be: "Using a spectacular mixture of traditional acoustic instruments, electric guitars, distortion-laden thumb pianos and soulful vocals, Kasai Allstars is a collective revolving around 25 musicians all based in Kinshasa, DR Congo, but originating from five different ethnic groups, each with their own language and musical tradition.
Kasaï Allstars' music is powerful and sophisticated, driving and raw. Compared to Konono N°1, Kasai Allstars use a broader array of instruments & textures, and wilder, more complex, polyrhythms." Read on
raster-noton.net: "after finishing the transall cycle and introducing the series of xerrox, alva noto makes a move back to his more rhythmic approach in unitxt. it could be seen as a kind of continuation to the transspray ep from 2004."
As every year German "Radio Borderline" features the WIRE's Top 50. Each week they play 10 songs. Every show is archived as a real audio stream. Also available is The WIRE's Top 50 of 2007.
XLR8R TV: "On his new album, London Zoo, Martin- (a.k.a. The Bug)- retooled dubstep and dancehall into something bleak, apocalyptic and jaw-dropping. His gritty, bass-heavy assault on the future is helmed by an all-star squad of MCs, from Flowdan and The Spaceape to his current touring partner, Warrior Queen." Watch The Bug and Warrior Queen interview
touchshop.org: "Philip Jeck works with old records and record players salvaged from junk shops, turning them to his own purposes. He really does play them as musical instruments, creating an intensely personal language that evolves with each added part of a record. His is genuinely moving and transfixing music, where we hear the art, not the gimmick.
Sand was recorded live in Holland and England in 2006/2007 and edited in Liverpool in January 2008 using Fidelity record players, Casio SK keyboards, a Behringer mixer and Sony mini-disc recorders. Sand is a set of seven new compositions that highlight Jeck's mastery of vinyl manipulation and personal and collective memories."
Quaristice scored number 16 in THE WIRE's Top 50 of 2008
dustedmagazine.com: "Autechre's Quaristice is decidedly not dance music, even though many of its songs are based around some sort of rhythmic construct. It's also not blissed-out drone music of an ambient nature. The sounds are at times friendly, at others ominous and threatening, but always artificial." Read on
aumfidelity.com:" Bill Dixon: composer, trumpeter, teacher and all-around musical force. His contributions to the body of great Black American Music first began in the 1960s: as a producer for Savoy Records; producing the groundbreaking October Revolution concert series in NYC 1964; as architect of the Jazz Composers Guild. In the late 60s he left ‘the scene’ but continued leaving an indelible mark on the music by devoting himself to teaching from 1968 onward, creating the Black Music Division at Bennington College, VT in 1973." Read on and download "Contour Three"
wikipedia.org: "Stephan Mathieu (born 11.October 1967) is a German musician and sound artist whose work is based on digital and analog processing techniques. He lives and works in Saarbrücken, Germany." Read on
die-schachtel.com: "Radioland is Stephan Mathieu's 5th full length studio work, following his acclaimed The Sad Mac CD from 2004. Exclusively based on real-time processed shortwave radio signals, Radioland takes the listener on a carpet ride across endless, majestic shimmering landscapes. Radioland is a mesmerizing reflection on the bubble of information thats all around us, all the time, by one of the truly unique minds in today's abstract digitalia." Read on and listen to excerpts
Radioland scored number 20 in The WIRE's Best of 2008.
The WIRE: "Margins Music is the debut visual feature from Blackdown and director Jonathan Howells, soundtracked by dubstep and grime from the forthcoming Dusk + Blackdown CD, Margins Music, out now on Keysound Recordings. It features grime MC Durrty Goodz, singer Farrah and a cameo from Blackdown himself, and was shot on location on the edges of London, including Southall, Green Lanes, the Isle of Dogs and Edmonton." Download the video here
