Jónsi - Go (leak)

Released: Scheduled for April 6th, 2010

Label: XL Recordings (London)

Track listing:

1 - Go Do (4:41)
2 - Boy Lilikoi (4:27)
3 - Kolniður (3:56)
4 - Grow Till Tall (5:21)
5 - Animal Arithmetic (3:24)
6 - Tornado (4:15)
7 - Sinking Friendships (4:42)
8 - Around Us (5:18)
9 - Hengilas (4:14)


Album Download Link
MySpace (Jónsi & Alex)
MySpace (Sigur Ros)
Website
Last.fm


Notes: Since this album technically isn't out yet, and reviews are limited, I'll wait, no need to bore you with my words. For those that don't know, this is the solo album from Jón “Jónsi” Þór Birgisson, the guitarist/vocalist for Sigur Ros, who also has a release with his boyfriend Alex Somers under the moniker Jónsi & Alex.

Klimek - Dedications

Released: November 12, 2007

Label: Anticipate (New York)

Track listing:

1 - for Jim Hall & Kurt Kirkwood (4:02)

2 - for Ezekiel Honig & Young (pan) Americans (5:51)

3 - for Zofia Klimek & Gregory Crewdson (6:38)

4 - for Eugene Chadborne & Henry Kaiser (6:06)

5 - for Michael Gira & Vladimir Ivanovich (5:19)

6 - for Marvin Gaye & Russell Jones (6:03)

7 - for Mark Hollis & Giacinto Scelsi (6:48)

8 - for Steven Spielberg & Azza El-Hassan (5:00)

Album Download Link

MySpace

Website

Last.fm

Notes: You could probably file this under minimal, dark ambient, electronic, or any combination of those three and then some. It's more though. I'm not sure if "space country" is an actual music genre, but this album plays like a western out in the cosmos. It's what I'd be listening to if I had to walk across Valles Marineris, a gigantic canyon on Mars that is bigger than the entire continental United States, which in turn makes the Grand Canyon, not so grand.

"Somnambulant laptop jockey Sebastian Meissner returns with yet another disc of exquisitely textured ambience. The prolific multimedia artist has been a presence in the electronic music community for years, releasing albums on such highly regarded labels as Mille Plateaux (R.I.P.), Sub Rosa and, of course, Kompakt, whose own 'pop ambient' brand of furniture music he has practically become synonymous with via his work under the Klimek moniker. This time around, however, he is striking out from Cologne and taking it to New York - Dedications arrives on likeminded producer Ezekiel Honig's fledgling Anticipate imprint.

A collection of perfectly realized slabs of drifting tones, humming drones and rustling static, Dedications is primarily sourced from acoustic sound sources. The record falls in line with the first two Klimek LPs, which were admittedly a bit too similar sounding for comfort, but Meissner now presents the listener with a more refined, tweaked and polished revision of the aesthetic. The heavily processed samples recall the withered majesty of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, but the tracks - arranged with a painter's touch and awash in milky reverb - are not just about ambience: they're just as indebted to Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western guitar as Brian Eno.

Like so much of Meissner's work, this record comes complete with an overarching concept. In the past, Meissner has tackled topics as stiflingly heavy as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and urbanization, but thankfully, Dedications is less serious: it's a tribute album with each track dedicated to a pair of people that have influenced Meissner in some way. Some dedications are clearly musical reference points ('For Ezekiel Honig & Young (Pan) Americans'), while others hark back to Meissner's multimedia background ('For Steven Spielberg & Azz El-Hassan'), and still others touch upon his own family history ('For Zofia Klimek & Gregory Crewdson'). Regardless, when you strip away the conceptual framework, you’re left with a collection of tracks that stand out as some of the finest in a discography overwhelmed by excellent releases.

In the end, with ambient music it’s the listening experience that really counts, andDedications is as lush, engrossing and ultimately rewarding a record as you’re likely to come across. With this album, Meissner has broken the Klimek project out of its stylistic rut and pushed it to the next level, crafting an album that reveals its beauty gradually, layer by layer, with each spin of the disc. "

-Carl Ritger RA

The Seven Fields Of Aphelion - Periphery

Released: February 16th, 2010

Label: Graveface Records (Chicago)

Format: Vinyl Limited Edition (500 copies)

Track listing:

1 - Slow Subtraction (3:24)

2 - Grown (5:37)

3 - Pale Prophecy (4:36)

4 - Wildflower Wood (3:47)

5 - Cloud Forest (The Little Owl) (2:01)

6 - Mountain Mary (4:09)

7 - Saturation: Arrhythmia (5:04)

8 - Fever Sleep (1:24)

9 - Lake Feet (3:29)

10 - Sunburst Chemicals (2:52)

11 - Michigan Icarus (5:13)

12 - Starlight Aquatic (5:25)

Album Download Link

MySpace

Website

Last.fm

Notes: I'm not an incredibly huge fan of Black Moth Super Rainbow, but when a sticky note on the vinyl at Wall of Sound mentioned it was a side project of the female member of the band, Maux Boyle (who is also one hell of a photographer), I had to give it a listen. Exactly one song later, number 332 of 500 was in my hands and I haven't stopped listening to it all day. It's delicate and stunning, hazy, trippy, and one of the prettiest albums I've heard in quite some time. Jumps over Yellow Swans "Going Places" for my favorite album of the year so far. Spacey minimalism.

"Ambient music, like Buster Bluth's wallpaper-print shirt, can recede into the background or re-form it, depending on the attention one devotes to listening or looking. Some artists deliver sounds that seem to originate from the corner of the room, not the speakers on the shelf—many of Fennesz's pieces, for example, conjure skin-crawling, stridulating insects and test listeners' willingness to let recordings bleed into "real" life.

The Seven Fields of Aphelion, a member of Black Moth Super Rainbow, attempts a gentler art in her debut. She includes seven double-sided panels of her 35mm, multiple-exposure photographs in lieu of a booklet, and the 12 tracks feature their own kind of multiple exposures. A prominent echo applied to sparse, single-note piano playing in "Slow Subtraction" focuses on the dissipation and disappearance of sound. "Saturation: Arrhythmia" moves in the opposite direction—a crescendo of swirling synthesizers only breaks into a clean, quiet conclusion after over four minutes. "Wildflower Wood," "Mountain Mary," "Michigan Icarus" and "Lake Feet," which appeared on BMSR's Falling Through a Field, share Jon Brion's occasional affinity for wistful, out-of-tune and seemingly underwater piano riffs.

The album's name, Periphery, primes listeners to relocate themselves amid the tops of the clouds and pervasive power lines in the album's photographs. Periphery's reasoned, mood-making and mood-shifting music ends on an upswing in "Starlight Aquatic," which could lead you to wade through the whole thing again. Pair this album with a 47-minute task or make listening to this 47-minute album your single task at least once."

-Alex Dimitropoulos Flagpole Magazine

The Charles River Valley Boys - Bluegrass And Old Timey Music

Released: June 1962

Label: Prestige/Folklore Records

Format: Vinyl

Track listing:

1 - Rocky Island (2:36)

2 - White Dove (3:31)

3 - Front Porch Backstep (1:55)

4 - (When You See Those) Flying Saucers (2:09)

5 - Away Out On The Mountain (3:06)

6 - Foggy Foggy Dew (2:30)

7 - Easy Winner (1:52)

8 - Leavin' Home (3:02)

9 - The Auctioneer (3:00)

10 - Victim To The Tomb (3:25)

11 - Crazy Creek (2:27)

12 - Baby-O (2:42)

13 - There Ain't Nobody Gonna Miss Me (2:39)

14 - Soldier's Joy (2:17)

15 - Oh Me, Oh My (2:45)

16 - Short Life Of Trouble (2:50)

17 - Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes (2:24)

18 - What Have You Done (3:37)

19 - Comin' From The Ball (2:16)

20 - Sally Goodin' (2:40)

21 - Uncle Pen (2:35)

22 - Angel Band (3:30)

23 - Goodbye Ole Pal (2:03)

24 - I See A Bright Light Shining (2:35)

25 - One the Jericho Road (2:38)

26 - Cherokee Shuffle (1:59)

27 - My Gal's A High Born Lady (1:57)

28 - Cryin' Holy Unto The Lord (2:19)

29 - Before I Met You (3:15)

30 - Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar (2:20)

Album Download Link

Notes: It's nearly impossible to find any information on this album other than the incredibly long description that takes up the entire back of the vinyl cover which I'm immensely too lazy to type out, I've already been searching for two hours so I give up. Mike just happened to be playing this on the overhead when I walked into Wall of Sound earlier this morning and I knew I had to have it immediately, especially given my unusual upbeat mood and being the bright and sunny half-brisk day it is. It's running down the Appalachian Mountains kinda music, sit in a rocking chair on your front porch and drink sweet tea while playing Chess and whittling kinda music, drown yourself in barrels of whiskey while in a junkyard or field with abandoned cars on a hot day kinda music, throw rocks at trains while skip skappin' jamblin' kinda music, etc. Just fucking listen to it.

Akira Kosemura - Polaroid Piano

Released: October 20th, 2009

Label: Someone Good (Australia)

Track listing:

1 - Hicari (2:04)

2 - Faire (1:40)

3 - April (3:14)

4 - Would (3:06)

5 - Sign (2:20)

6 - Tale (1:56)

7 - Look (1:47)

8 - Tyme (3:38)

9 - Guitar (1:30)

10 - Venice (4:20)

11 - Ein Lied (3:50)

Album Download Link

MySpace

Last.fm

Website

Notes: "A person’s first foray into instrumental music is often cacophonous. Many of the post-rock staples of the past decade have made their money off the build-and-crescendo style of aural onslaught that drew many fans into the vocal-free arena. It’s easy to miss, or to forget, the exquisite and almost painful beauty that pours off a well-done minimalist project. Several subgenres of instrumental music have their heroes, be it William Basinski, Goldmund, or otherwise. It takes a practiced patience to come home from a day at the modern breakneck pace and slide eloquently into a simple piano arrangement. Tokyo’s Akira Kosemura offers us the chance to do just that.

The most pleasant and intimate aspect of Polaroid Piano, Kosemura’s third solo full-length, is a feeling of being there with the artist in the stark silence between notes as he plays. The unedited sounds that accompany the actual playing of the instrument are constant companions throughout the album. The slightly hollow echo of the strings vibrating too deeply for the microphone adds a warm sensation to already comforting key strikes. The occasional slight delay or off-note is left unperfected, an insider’s smile to the listener. Most touching, however, is that Kosemura manages to record the very sounds of the piano itself. It’s a classic piano, immediately identifiable by the lost sound of wood creaking under the weight of the pianist’s hands. The dull thud of unmuted foot pedals greets the end of almost every chord on the album, and the listener feels almost as if his own feet are doing the pressing.

The songs themselves are a complicated mix of demure and delicate. Each manages to come across as longing and wistful while having a hint of optimism from the occasional upswing. “Tyme” can at times urge the listener to lean forward, the chords and creaks ever so faint and plaintive. Only very rarely will one find sounds other than the quiet plucking of keys throughout the album. “Sign” combines the best of Kosemura’s talents while subtly incorporating the distant chirp of birds and a warped acoustic tinkering. The effect overall is almost pharmaceutical in its ability to wash the listener in peacefulness.

In only two or three minutes, the artist manages to say so many things that can’t be expressed with spoken word. Without attempting any kind of epic achievement in the combination of many sounds, Kosemura has shown how powerful a solo approach can be when executed with absolute earnestness."

-Brendan Kraft The Silent Ballet

Os Mutantes - Os Mutantes

Released: 1968

Label: Polydor (U.K.) reissued the album in 1992.

Track listing:

1 - Panis Et Circenses (3:37)

2 - A Minha Menina (4:42)

3 - O Relógio (3:29)

4 - Adeus Maria Fulô (3:05)

5 - Baby (3:01)

6 - Senhor F (2:33)

7 - Bat Macumba (3:09)

8 - Le Premier Bonheur Du Jour (3:36)

9 - Trem Fantasma (3:15)

10 - Tempo No Tempo (Once Was A Time I Thought) (1:47)

11 - Ave Gengis Khan (3:45)

Album Download Link

Notes: "1965: São Paulo, Brazil. Brothers Arnaldo and Sérgio Dias Baptista, having grown up listening to English radio broadcasts via shortwave radio, form a band under the influence of those recently-crowned kings of global popular-culture: The Beatles. Rebelling against the right-wing military dictatorship that had seized power in Brazil, the Baptista brothers make music mixing internationalist influence, libertarian beliefs, and political critique. In 1968, the same year their Tropicalista peers Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso are jailed by the military regime, Os Mutantes release their self-titled debut album; a record of hyper-modernist, genre-juggling, futurist pop that, still, sounds all those things to this day.

Whilst the history-lesson is important, you don't need to know any of it to enjoy Os Mutantes. A riotous, freakadelic fusion of culture and genre, high-brow and low-brow, pop-song and experimentalism, the album is as ridiculous as it is radical, as theatrical as it is musical. Inspired by the Beatles' use of the studio as an experimental tool, the LP finds Os Mutantes getting up to all manner of monkeyshines: overdriven guitars washing out a song with their electrified distortion, false endings fading in and out at random, traditional Afro-Portuguese rhythms broken down, deconstructed, and brought back to Frankenstein-ish life.

The Divine Comedy

Befitting literature's greatest-ever symbolic monster, Os Mutantes is a work of mismatched parts, stitched together, and zapped to frightening life via the powerful unreality of the recording studio. The band butchers up the Beatles and Batucada, The Mamas and The Papas and modern classical, psychedelia and sound-art. It's an explosion of cascading color, a succession of musical fireworks whose jagged patterns and whimsical zephyrs never fade, never grow dim.

Over four decades on, and it's clear that Os Mutantes' radical futurism, ironic sensibility, gentle experimentation, and global worldview was light-years ahead of its time. In those subsequent years, an ever-growing litany of artists out to explode the restrictions of genre —Talking Heads, The Flaming Lips, Beck, Of Montreal, Stereolab— have cited this album as an influence.

After being almost entirely unknown outside of Brazil for the first 30 years of its existence, Os Mutantes has now reached a strange canonical place: becoming one of the building blocks of any self-respecting alternative-minded record collection. Idiosyncratic, ironic, impossibly cool, wildly enjoyable, and defiantly rabble-rousing, it's required listening for anyone with any interest in pop music's outer limits and/or long-lost history."

-Anthony Carew About.com

Yellow Swans - Going Places with bonus CD Being There

Released: March 2nd, 2010

Label: Type (United Kingdom)

Track listing for Going Places:

1 - Foiled (4:23)

2 - Opt Out (13:09)

3 - Sovereign (5:42)

4 - Limited Space (6:55)

5 - New Life (5:21)

6 - Going Places (9:06)

Track listing for Being There (bonus CD):

1 - Foil (18:14)

2 - Comedy Hypnosis (16:29)

3 - Public Space (17:47)

4 - Inhabitants (15:58)

Album Download Link

Notes: As the review below states (and from other sources) Yellow Swans decided this would be their last album before it was recorded, and even though we're still in March, this is my favorite album of 2010 so far.

"When a band breaks up, it's tempting to hear their final record through the filter of hindsight-- to imagine they subconsciously knew their future was finite and planted hints in the music. But what if they actually did know? That was the case for the noise/drone duo Yellow Swans, who made most of Going Places after deciding to disband in 2008. So if you hear a sense of finality, reflection, or even fate in this album, that impression has some basis in fact. It's even there in the title.

The thing is, Yellow Swans' music-- dense drones that build like narratives-- has always conveyed these kinds of concepts and feelings. What makes Going Places so great is how it transforms them from explainable ideas into things that can't be easily captured in words. When "Opt Out" rises from underwater tones into thick howls, you can feel anger and catharsis, but there's something else there, too. The long tones of "Sovereign" are clearly wistful, but that's just the tip of the track's layers. Maybe Pete Swanson and Gabriel Saloman's awareness of their pending demise added those extra levels, but it feels like Going Places would sound this good no matter what the time or circumstances.

The closest analogue to the album's effect might be cinema, where pictures and sound create an experience more like dreaming than just watching and listening. Going Places is music that plays like a movie. The duo relies more on field recordings and tape loops than before, and it gives a picturesque quality to their abstract sounds. Every moment is tactile and visual, like paint strokes that are just color on their own but together create a meaningful image. The resulting pictures are also wide and expansive, like a slow Stanley Kubrick pan or a meditative Terrence Malick nature shot. Think of it as noise in Imax.

Whether or not these cinematic pieces tell stories is probably up to the listener. But, as with the album title, Yellow Swans leave clues in the song names. On the hyper-busy "Limited Space", it sounds as if they're trying to let out every sound they can make before time runs out. "New Life"'s beatific tones convey the optimism of rebirth, almost like noise-based therapy. And the title track feels distinctly like a takeoff, its whirring drones conjuring images of an airplane's wheels rolling, engines revving, and wings tilting toward the sky.

You might not hear those exact tales in these pieces, and that's one of the album's strengths. It gives you space to discover tons of themes and ideas without limiting you to specific ones. Still, this is no blank canvas, but more like a series of Rorschach tests where the shapes are in constant motion. The emphasis there is on constant-- this may be the last we'll hear of Yellow Swans, but Going Places doesn't sound like an end, or a beginning, or anything else tethered to the anchor of time."

-Mark Masters Pitchfork