The Type label supplements its regular releases with a series of podcasts. That’s not unusual for a record label. What distinguishes Type’s series, as exemplified by a new mix by Aeioux (aka one of Type’s two founders, Stefan Lewandowski), is how a typical podcast may mix upcoming music from the label amid other recordings, like […]
There’s a gap between the Touch Music record label and its ongoing MP3 series, TouchRadio. While Touch album releases generally focus on processed sound, the sound on TouchRadio is generally unprocessed. The recent entries on TouchRadio have been raw field recordings, framed by the discerning ear of the recordist and by the broader context of […]
The 22-track, various-artist String Ambient collection benefits from a more literal enaction of its title than some record labels may have elected for. There are, indeed, harps and ukuleles and acoustic guitars put into action on this set of varied atmospheric music. But there are also electric guitars, as heard on Djinnestan’s “C Plus A,” […]
The leader of Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor, announced this week the release of a new NIN album, and it’s available entirely for free. He did so with a simple statement: “Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years — this one’s on me.” The album, titled The Slip, contains 10 tracks, […]
The latest podcast from tablist.net — that’s “tablist” as in “turntablism” — collects about 20 tracks by the unsung home-studio strivers who are regulars on the tablist.net website, alongside some accomplished beatmaker players. The contents range from rhythm-heavy studio production to rap-ready instrumental hip-hop to goofy scratch-happy hijinks, leavened with the inevitable jokey soundbites.
As the […]
Courtesy of musician Steve Roden’s blog, inbetweennoise.blogspot.com, a five-minute recording of Henri Chopin, the pioneering poet who passed away earlier this year. Roden has ripped to MP3 format the 7″ that accompanied the 1987 Chopin catalog published by Galerie J&J Donguy.
Roden describes the track: “made with mouth and tape, [it] resembles very much a typewriter’s […]
Nine extended industrial drones comprise the album Underneath, credited to Quiet Covenant and made available for free download courtesy of the estimable netlabel Dark Winter. Each track is a decaying sine wave, a dreary call signal, a wavering thing that seems well on its way toward dying.
The sound is mournful, sorrowful, not dark so much […]
Chat rooms have a bad rap. They’ve gained a touch of the aura that used to hover around the word “hacker.” Though today it means something closer to “entrepreneur,” hacker used to be equivalent to “dangerous anti-social malcontent.” Chat rooms are social by definition, so they can’t be truly anti-social; but they still are saddled […]
In the current moment of hybrid music, of field recordings mixed with live performance, of remixes that can pass as first-draft compositions, of laptop-enhanced traditional instrumentation, it can be informative, not to mention entertaining, to listen before you look, or read. A case in point is “First Vertical/First Horizontal v.1,” a tape work collaboration between […]
A fifth anniversary entry from the Turntable Radio podcast features Japanese figures DJ Baku, Exsample (Ken-One, Naoki and Shige) and Miyajima. Like the best abstract turntablism, the work captured during a Shibuya-district session emphasizes texture as much as it does beat-matching, with cut-up vocal samples, droney underlying melodic patterns, and dynanic counterpoint (MP3). The Turntable […]