Showing posts tagged Techno

Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden packed a couple of his own new productions into this new free mix that he loaded onto Soundcloud this week, according to FACT. When Domino issued his fifth solo LP in 2010, I wrote about it for Blurt Magazine: On There Is Love In You, Hebden explores more of the refined and understated house and techno that characterizes his 2008 Ringer EP, with a generous bundling of the organic elements that have so often enriched his work. Read more.

On Tycho’s subtle and fluid Dive

Scott “Tycho” Hansen has been making wordless electronic music for years, building each piece with organic accompaniment that’s often treated to make it sound both warm and worn. The acoustic guitars that roll through Dive, his debut LP for Ghostly International, mimic the temperate folk progressions on the early Simon and Garfunkel LP Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. Sea-spray sonics and unearthly keyboard squiggles splinter off into endless directions, sometimes finding their way around impossibly cylindrical basslines. Read more of my piece on the Tycho album at The Brooklyn Rail.

Go check out ‘THE BEST ELECTRONIC MUSIC OF 2011’ from PopMatters.

Even as they’re busy with equally provocative electronic records in separate solo side projects, New York City producers Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma dealt an aurally dense and lively full-length as Sepalcure in 2011. I wrote about their absorbing EP called Fleur earlier this year, and the self-titled LP follows strongly the ambient house/bass-driven beat sound they’ve been turning out since 2009. Read my PopMatters piece on Sepalcure’s debut LP

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I wrote about HTRK, Walls, I Break Horses, Tropics, Max Cooper, Balam Acab, and Martyn for Blurt Magazine. Check out BEATS WORKING now.

I wrote about HTRK, Walls, I Break Horses, Tropics, Max Cooper, Balam Acab, and Martyn for Blurt Magazine. Check out BEATS WORKING now.

Infinitirock and library music

Brooklyn-based teenager Chester “Infinitirock” Anand’s beat music is jolting and scatterbrained — he follows audacious experiments in Asthmatic Kitty’s Library Catalog Music Series well with Music for Primordial Recollection. It’s one of the strongest chapters yet — a rich and divergent compendium of psychedelic, wordless grooves, and weighty sound collages. Read more of my piece at PopMatters.

PopMatters review: Kate Simko’s ‘Lights Out’

The only prominently available full-length that bears Kate Simko’s name is Music from the Atom Smashers, a hypnotic and specifically not dancefloor-oriented 2009 film score built on trailing ambient forms with crackling electronics. However, the Chicago producer has been active within the dance music community for years, having issued well-received house and techno singles and EPs for a handful of labels such as Ghostly International’s Spectral Sound imprint. Read my review of Lights Out at PopMatters, and my post about Music from… is here.

Mike Dennhert’s Framework has been a slow-cooking techno staple for me in 2011, but the vastly unpredictable What Have We Learned from labelmate producer Rabih “Morphosis” Beaini gets a bit more regular play in my headphones of late. Its occasionally campy classic sci-fi film flourishes, analog drum machine clicks and cold, maddeningly repetitive techno configurations won’t likely get old anytime soon. “Gate of Night” ripples with hand drum sounds and whirring drones that go long into the night, but check for yourself why “Silent Screamer,” with its worming bass grooves and subdued screeches works so well as a tense album opener.