Cannot say much beyond what I’d expect from Alva Noto on the usual high standard.
Alva Noto – HYbr:ID I
Hand of Kalliach – Samhainn
It’s been quite a while that my attention was pinned down by a death metal album. Although this one ranges from death to black and melodic metal territories.
It’s so rare that speed gets put into such a great context and it’s not just going fast for the reason of technique showcase or mindless agression. I distinctly remember when I first starting listening to Slipknot as a teenager and I couldn’t listen to anything else anymore because other bands were just too slow. And that was also a case when speed has meaning and flavor. In the case of Hand of Kalliach I feel the same. The fast paced drums, guitars, and sometimes vocals flow so naturally with the overall sound they create, it just sounds amazingly fit there.
Eris Drew – Quivering In Time
Some fun moods and uplifting sounds on the house-breakbeat axis. It’s your afternoon stage music in a festival, which could either be the warm-up for the evening or the afterparty from the previous night.
Nightmares On Wax – Shout Out! To Freedom…
Nu jazz sound, chilled, relaxing, smooth. Shape The Future was a huge Nightmares on Wax come-back in my life. This one is not as strong but a fair follow-up.
Kontravoid – Faceless
The last album from Kontravoid I found mainly EBM while this one is primarily cold wave. It’s not as great as the previous one but still worth noting.
Christoph de Babalon – 044 (Hilf Dir Selbst!)
Starts with a dark ambient note but most of it is actually jungle beats and breakcore over some atmospheric sounds. Most of the time I imagined a cyberpunk heist movie rolling with this soundtrack. This could also be a spiritual successor of the Splinter Cell soundrack by Amon Tobin, but with less sophistication and a darker tone. Oh btw, I loved this record a lot, I could easily listen to it five times in a row.
Dark Nights: Death Metal Soundtrack
This is a soundtrack album to a pretty dark and grim comic book series, consisting of all original songs. I just want to taste this sentence for a little while and think about how awesome that is. And then start listing that collaborators include Mastodon, Rise Against, HEALTH, Chino Moreno, Greg Puciato, Chelsea Wolfe, just to name those closest to me. This is pretty rad.
F.S. Blumm & Nils Frahm – 2X1=4
It’s been a long long time since I last listened to a pure dub record. Not dubstep, not dub techno, but simply dub. And I came across this one and it delivers just that. Moody, wandering, lost in thoughts and walks in the rain.
Machinedrum – Psyconia
Broken beat, drum and bass, hiphop, IDM, the common denominator is smoothness and a light heart. Like if it’s drum and bass then it’s liquid, if it’s hiphop then it’s soulful. These 26 minutes contain a whole summer’s many flavors in six tracks. It’s not a consistent record at all, more like a promo sampler for a festival, but there’s fun in all those tracks.
Space Afrika – Honest Labour
So cinematic, so nostalgic. It’s like listening to the moody, calming score of something on a VHS tape. Ambient with some IDM noises and occasional voices. I make some loose spiritual connection between this one and Sound of the City vol. 3 – Berlin.