Hold Steady and Mount Carmel live

Went to see these guys a week and a half ago, great show, write-up at Blurt now.

The Black Swans

Another band that I've been writing about for a long time...The Black Swans' fifth album, Occasion for Song is the strongest since they lost Noel Sayre in 2008.

I personally like Who Will Walk in the Darkness with Me? the best. I did a piece about it and the band for Neumu a long time ago when it first came out.

Anyway, here's my review of their new album, which came out a week or so ago on Misra Records.

The Black Swans
Occasion for Songhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
(Misra)

There’s a swimming pool on the cover of Occasion for Song, an image that, for most bands, might convey lighthearted summer themes. For The Black Swans, however, it’s a reminder that, in 2008, violinist Noel Sayre drowned in that same pool. Sayre’s playing was an integral part of The Black Swans’ early sound. Classically trained and constitutionally incapable of cliché, he played beautiful, chilling, sustained notes that bent The Black Swans from quiet country blues into something otherworldly.

Since Sayre’s death, the band’s other founder, Jerry DeSicca, has struggled personally and musically to move past the tragedy. Words Are Stupid, in 2010, incorporated Sayre’s violin playing posthumously into the mix and included an oddball “Black Swan Tango” song that Sayre wrote and sang before he died. Don’t Blame the Stars, last year, dipped into reminiscence through a series of excruciating spoken word intervals, but avoided the subject of Sayre’s death.

Occasion for Song is The Black Swans’ best post-Sayre album, at least partly because it addresses Sayre’s death head on.

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Black Swan Runners

Rainy Sunday, out for a little run, and I really, really got into Black Swan Runners' An Aside, a disc of spiky, bristly, catchy power pop that reminds me of early Spoon (like Telephono), and also very remotely, Teenage Fanclub (whose Bandwagonesque has snuck its way onto my currently listening folder).

But Black Swan Runners, let's see, there are four of them, they live in Northern California, they like the Replacements...it looks like this is their first record and it's a good one.

Drivin' N Cryin' R.E.M. tribute

I've been listening to this new Drivin 'N Cryin' EP for a couple of days and liking it in general, but especially the song that references pretty much ever R.E.M. song ever, which is called, oddly enough, "R.E.M."

Mountain Goats new one a killer

You might have heard that the Mountain Goats have a new album, Transcendental Youth coming out on 4AD this fall. It is, not surprisingly, a really good one, sharp lyrically but, I think, about as interesting musically as anything Darnielle has done to date. Anyway, the first single is up now on soundcloud, so check it out:

Janel & Anthony

Extraordinarily beautiful, new age-ish, post-everything cello and guitar music.

“Janel & Anthony - guitars and 'cello respectively - play a haunting and humbly virtuosic form of music wherein the elements of electronics, looping, and lo-fi timbres live both in intimacy and in majesty in the same house as acoustic instruments and folk/blues inspired melodies. As such, it is both timely and timeless, drenched as it is in intoxicating atmosphere; wan, quiet voices submitting to waves of sonic drama. Who could possibly resist it?” – Nels Cline (Wilco, Nels Cline Singers)



Their second album, Where Is Home is out now on Cuneiform.

Bizarre new vid from Django Django

Indie rock Sisyphus rolls the flaming rock right up to the top of architecture that would be odd even in Singapore, and the whole upscale, business-friendly environment is strangled by mercury-ish, shape-shifting silver pipes...yeah, kind of strange, but strange isn't such a bad thing.

Black Twig Pickers

After my writing deadline passed, I learned from Mike Gangloff (via Jonathan at Thrill Jockey) that Whompyjawed is"a local term that means ramshackle or off-kilter. Local synonyms include catawumpus (or cattywhompuss) and sigoogly." So I just had to share that.

My review runs today at Dusted.

The Black Twig Pickers
Whompyjawed
Thrill Jockey

“Brushy Fork of John’s Creek” squeals to life in a sawing fiddle riff, its Appalachian lilt undergirded with the hard punch of hands on wood, the thump of feet on floors. The song, which dates to the Civil War era, hurtles forward with fresh, unruly life. At this speed, intricate patterns form and unform as whorls of fiddle, plunks of banjo and scratchy scrapes of washboard intersect. Yet, the sense of joy, of celebration, of dance overwhelms the complexity. As the tune gets going, the players cannot suppress their hoots and “yeahs.”


The Black Twigs Pickers — primarily Mike Gangloff, Nathan Bowles and Isak Howell — have been breathing fresh air into archival material for about a decade now, both in their core trio formation, and augmented by like-minded musicians, including Jack Rose and Charlie Parr. On this EP, they are joined by some frequent live collaborators — fiddler Sally Morgan and Sam Linkous and Joe Dejarnette switching between guitar and bass.

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Daredevil Christopher Wright

They've sort of missed the year of high male harmonies (that was 2008 with Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear etc...) but Eau Claire's the Daredevil Christopher Wright is worth a listen even in periods when indie barber shop is out. Their second album The Nature of Things is out now on File Under, and you can listen to the whole thing here, if you like.

There's also a video


Daredevil Christopher Wright is pretty great live, too...saw them a couple of years ago in Keene of all places, and they had everyone singing in three parts.

Here are dates:
Aug 01 Subterranean Chicago, IL
Aug 02 The Mill Iowa City, IA
Aug 03 Motr Pub Cincinnati, OH
Aug 04 Mahall's Lakewood, OH Tickets
Aug 07 The Horseshoe Tavern Toronto, Canada
Aug 09 Dooryard Arts Festival Woodstock, Canada
Aug 10 The Capital Bar Fredericton, Canada \
Aug 11 MESStival 5 West Salisbury, Canada
Aug 12 The Bus Stop Theatre Halifax, Canada
Aug 14 Knitting Factory Brooklyn, NY Tickets
Aug 15 Great Scott Boston, MA Tickets
Aug 16 The Oak and the Ax Biddeford, ME
Aug 17 Local 121 Providence, RI
Aug 18 Billsville House Concert Williamstown, MA
Aug 19 The Thought Lot Shippensburg, PA
Aug 23 The Old Dog Tavern Kalamazoo, MI Tickets
Aug 24 The Bird House (house show) Grand Rapids, MI
Aug 25 The Brass Rail Fort Wayne, IN
Sep 13 The Park Theatre Hayward, WI
Sep 14 Rock The Cause Kimberly, WI
Sep 15 Radio Radio Indianapolis, IN
Oct 31 V1 Backstage Concert Series Eau Claire, WI
Nov 02 Der Rathskeller Madison, WI
Nov 16 Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church:

Couple of things I've been listening to

I've been on some deadlines lately, listening pretty hard to records that I have to write about quickly. Live show reviews, in my view the most rushed of music writing projects (because you have to write before you forget what you saw and can't make out your handwriting), have taken up more than usual of my time.

So, I haven't been listening to as much random stuff, but there's been some, namely:
The Swell Maps, Jane From Occupied Europe...truly mental proto-post-punk from 1980. I like "Blenheim Shots" the best, sort of a straightforward banger, but there's very little that's straightforward about this album.



Rangda, Formerly Extinct...haven't really gotten to the bottom of this one, since it's not out until September-ish. It's a second album from Richard Bishop, Ben Chasny and Chris Corsano has, like the first one, a jawdroppingly beautiful long track ("White Nile") right in the middle. I don't think there's any free audio anywhere yet.

Arbouretum, Covered in Leaves...Rob sent me this live album from one of my favorite bands, and I'm liking it a lot, especially the cover of Pure Prairie League's "Amy" (Arbouretum spells it "Amie").



I'm also kind of enjoying the new Mojo compilation The Roots of the Rolling Stones...a bunch of early rock and blues tunes that everybody's heard ("Suzy Q" "I Just Wanna Make Love", "Not Fade Away") but nobody could mind hearing again.

Guardian Alien

Really kind of blissful, mind-altering, long-form psychedelia from the former drummer in Liturgy. My review ran in Dusted yesterday.

Guardian Alien
See the World Given to a One Love Entity
Thrill Jockey

Greg Fox left Liturgy in September of 2011, about the same time the band and its frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix got caught in a shit-storm of black metal purist backlash for, among other things, embracing the transcendent (and, er, slipping long passages from Marcus Aurelius into online interviews). With Guardian Alien, Fox plunges even farther toward gnostic psychedelia, alternating blistering intervals of top-speed kit rolls with woozy altered voice epiphanies and quieter found sound intervals of bird song, sheep bleating and gongs.

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Mission of Burma ... like they've been here all along

I've been covering the Burma revival since almost before it started. My first interview with Clint Conley was about Consonant as much as it was about Burma, and I've talked to him (and Peter but never Roger) a couple of times since, seen them live 4-5 times and reviewed every record.

So, naturally, I reviewed Unsound, and it struck me that this is the record where they stop being a reunion band, where they stop making up for lost time, where they simply start thrashing onward wherever their sound might lead, as if they'd been playing together the whole time.

Mission of Burma
Unsound
(Fire)

Mission of Burma is not a reunion band anymore, if it ever was. You could read OnOffOn as a tentative reclamation of the noise melodists' art. You could listen to The Obliterati and The Sound the Speed the Light as increasingly confident, even triumphant expansions on the band's earliest principles. But Unsound, coming a decade into Burma's second run, sounds like the kind of record an adventurous band that's always been together might make, like Sonic Youth in the early 1990s say. It's grounded in a distinct, historically-rooted aesthetic, but not tied down to it. Listening to Unsound gives you a glimpse of a band that's not confined by its legacy.

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So here's what I could be working on now, music-wise, what do you think I should do?>
1) Thinking of questions for Ariel Pink
2) Thinking of questions for John Dwyer
3) Writing a review of last night's Hold Steady/Mount Carmel show
4) Reviewing Mark Fosson's Digging in the Dust
5) Screwing around listening to stuff I've dumped on the iPod and playing web sudoku

Grupo Fantasma/Debo Band write-up

Last item for a while about the Debo band...my review of a show last week at the Iron Horse in Northampton.

I said, "Two big bands bring the funk to Western Mass., one the 11-piece Ethiopian-crossed-with-proggy-jazz Debo Band, the other Austin's mighty nine-man Grupo Fantasma. You wouldn't think that 11 or even nine people would fit on the Iron Horse's modest stage, but both bands pack them in. Debo's guitar player is almost entirely invisible behind the horn line, the bass and sousaphone players bob up and down, partly obscured by a lavish two-violin, one accordion electric gypsy band. Grupo Fantasma obscures its red-hot guitarist, too, behind a front line of timbales, bongos, singers, sax, trombone and trumpet players. But the sheer size of these bands, especially in such a constrained space, generates an an overwhelming, body-moving, surrounding sound. You can't not move to the beat. It's all around you."

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This video is from a couple of years ago, but still...




We're going to see the Hold Steady and Mount Carmel tonight, too. More on that later.

Me with my mom and dad

My mom sent me a couple of photos from my marathon trip to Indiana last months, and I look so skinny, I thought I'd post them just for the hell of it.

You can see my great little car in the background which was getting 41 miles to the gallon on the highway and going 400 miles between fill-ups. And it's red.

Koozies, Woodies and Beer

Sounds dirty, doesn't it? Actually it's a compilation put together by Brah Records, an imprint of Jagjaguwar run by the Oneida guys. They maintain that "koozies" are those foam wraps that keep beer cold, "woodies" are a kind of organ (the musical kind) and beer is...well, you know what beer is, don't you? Anyway, my review runs today at Dusted.

Various Artists
Koozies, Woodies & Beers: A Brah/Ocropolis Benefit Compilation for Japan Relief
Brah

Koozies, Woodies & Beers documents the restless, genre-slipping scene that grew up around NYC art rockers in Oneida, gathering 19 tracks from bands closely (and loosely) associated with Oneida. All were recorded in the now defunct Ocropolis (the second of Oneida’s home-built studios to be squeezed out by gentrification), each band getting free run of the studio for four hours of recording and four hours of mixing. Like the all-day psychedelic freak-out which closed out Oneida’s tenure at the Monster Island facility, this compilation tests listeners’ willingness to jump boundaries, their ability to consider music and noise as a continuum (or maybe the same thing) and, most of all, their endurance. But it also demonstrates the reach, the relentless inquiry and the fuck-it-all self-actualization of the community that grew up around Oneida in the mid- to late-2000s.

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Can't find any youtube or soundcloud or downloads, sorry!

Mount Eerie's Clear Moon

Man, that Phil Elverum can do anything...Clear Moon is one of his quieter efforts, but still pretty intense. It's a prelude to the upcoming Oceans Roar, both recorded in the same church with the same instruments and people, but said to be quite different. (We'll see, won't we?)

Anyway, my review ran at Blurt today.

Mount Eerie
Clear Moon
(P.W. Elverum and Son)

A gorgeous hush in the midst of monumental turmoil, tranquility in a hurricane, Phil Elverum's Mount Eerie has always had a knack for evoking nature's harshest and most beautiful elements, often at the same time. Clear Moon, one of two Mount Eerie albums set for release this year, is said to be clearer, cleaner, less tumultuous than its sibling Oceans Roar (coming in September). Yet there's plenty of heft in these nocturnal musings.

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A Curva Da Cintura

I recently stumbled onto this really excellent cross-cultural collaboration that came about, apparently at Rio de Janeiro's Back2Black Festival in 2010. Master Kora player Toumani Diabate hooked up with singer composer Arnoldo Antunes (best known for Titas and his collaborations with Marisa Monte) and left-handed guitar virtuoso Edgard Scandurra and, eventually, made this album.

I am, personally, a bit out of my depth once I've finished saying how lovely this album is, so I'm going to reference a review from Sam Backer of Afro-Pop Worldwide, who wrote:

Recorded primarily on electric/acoustic guitars and koras, Curva offers a listening experience that is subtle and yet remarkably rich, full of complexly layered arrangements that reveal more of their details with every listen. Many of these songs only give up their sweetness with effort, as the intricate structures and complex chords tangle with Arnaldo’s dead-pan vocals to create a peculiar, yet ultimately thrilling flavor of pop music. Focusing on a handful of primarily acoustic instruments allows for an intimate style of recording, one in which the sonic field is small and uncluttered, the backbones of the songs emerge from the simple interplay of one or two acoustic guitars. This feeling is maintained even when the guitar parts that form these backbones are draped in overdubs- the percussive sound of fingers plucking strings makes up a crucial part of the album’s soundscape, effortlessly replacing the absent rhythm section.

You can read the rest of the review here.

Here's some footage from the Back2Black Festival


Everyone seems to think this is the best track.


But I like "Bamako's Blues" better.

Dead Rat Orchestra's documentary soundtrack

Saturday again, and we're going up to Concord to see Sean in the Tempest this afternoon. He is the Boatswain, a small but fairly entertaining part by my read. (He's got a really big part in Titus -- Titus himself -- so they try to even things out so that no one has too many lines to memorize.) Anyway, looking forward to that. I do love the Tempest, but I'm mostly looking forward to seeing my boy again, at least for a little while.

Also, this review went up Wednesday or Thursday at Blurt.

Dead Rat Orchestra
The Guga Hunters of Ness
(Critical Heights)

In their soundtrack for a BBC documentary set in remote northern Scotland, the Dead Rat Orchestra manages to convey foggy expanses of indefinite sea, the high keening of birds, the rhythmic thump and grind of physical labor. The Guga Hunters of Ness was composed in support of a film on a dying tradition - the annual hunting of gannets, a kind of sea bird, on a desolate rock off Scotland in the North Atlantic. Arranged for organ, strings, guitar and rough-housing drums, it borrows heavily from traditional Celtic sounds, yet it is also quite modern, minimalist and atmospheric. It was quite clearly written to supplement imagery and narrative, and yet it stands well on its own in a half-melancholy, half-uplifting sort of space.

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Debo Band live

The Debo Band


Grupo Fantasma

So I went to see the Debo Band and Grupo Fantasma last night and it was really, really fun. I will have a write-up later at Blurt (just finished writing it), but for now, here are a couple of photos and my review of the Debo Band's self-titled first album.

Debo Band
Debo Band
(Sub Pop/Next Ambience)

The Debo Band, with its eleven members and full, big band brass and reed sound, digs into "Akale Wube," a traditional Ethiopian folk song made famous by the great saxophonist (and sometime Ex collaborator) Getatchew Mekurya. Like Mekurya, the Debo Band takes a certain amount of liberty with the tune, underlining its swaggering funk rhythms with a decidedly not-Ethiopian sousaphone, executing its crazy, keening flourishes with a Celtic-leaning electric violin. Like bandleader Danny Mekonnen, born in the Sudan to Ethiopian parents, resident of North Dakota, Texas and, recently, Boston, a frequent visitor to East Africa, these songs are well-travelled and not wholly anchored geographically. Yes, they draw from the Golden Age of Ethiopian jazz - the Haile Sellassie-sponsored 1960s and 1970s heyday chronicled in Buda Music's Ethiopiques series - but no, we are not talking about museum quality reproduction. The Debo Band is a live band in every sense of the word, and even here, on record, you can hear them creating on the fly, bending well-loved tunes into new shapes, and injecting everything from Irish folk to East European oompah brass into the slink and strut of their materials.

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It's Broken

Pretty cool, trippy, synthy, psychedelic disco from 1980...the long-out-of-print It's Broken by Bob Chance. Says DJ Jonny whose Trunk Records unearthed the disc:

Walking a strange line between the asylum and the dancefloor, welcome Bob Chance. Yes, this is an album like no other. But then again Bob Chance isn’t like anyone else. Put together in 1980, It’s Broken represents Bob’s creative juices flowing and then possibly overflowing all over the place. I first came across the album as one of the strange slabs of vinyl I write about for my column in Mojo. I described it as the musical equivalent of Curry House DIY, an unusual and unexpected flow of ideas that maybe shouldn’t work together but actually do in a most unorthodox and functional way. And if I have to describe the album musically to people I explain it has a touch of Giorgio Moroder, a bit of the Beach Boys and a sprinkle of Glen Campbell as a serial killer. Whilst writing about the album a couple of years ago I had it on repeat for at least a day, and found myself singing the songs, enjoying the harmonies, reveling in the musical ideas present. How can you not love a nine minute post-disco oddity called “It’s Broken”? Why would you not want to thrill at a five minute instrumental journey into Bob’s jungle? And how about a short trip inside a stalker’s van? Exactly, it’s all irresistible. And now, thanks to this reissue more of us can enjoy the genius that is Bob Chance and his music.

J. Wes again...donkey style and lots of keyboards

OK, this came out in February, and I probably would have reviewed it then if Goner was still sending me records, but they aren't, so I'm very late.

John Wesley Coleman
Last Donkey Show
Goner

With Last Donkey Show, John Wesley Coleman continues his mad rampage though country-hiccupped, psychedelic garage rock. This third solo album, aided by The Gris Gris’s Greg Ashley, as well as members of Strange Boys, Bad Sports, Sir Lord Raven, Golden Boys and Fleshlights, again juxtaposes, cheery, loosely strung but avidly attacked jams with faintly macabre subject matter.

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Still Careful

About a year and a half ago, I reviewed the really quite lovely, ethereally oddball debut Oh Light from Careful, a one man experimental pop outfit conceived by Eric Lindley. Lindley's one-sheet caught my eye, because we both went to Dartmouth (different decades)...and he's got a really interesting background, a double major in music and physics, a fascination with robotics. None of that would have mattered, however, if Oh Light had not been quite so beautiful.

Now, a couple of years later, Lindley has written a follow-up, Because I Am Always Talking, just as pretty, just as ineffable, but oddly tinged with commercial rap's favorite audio trick, auto-tune.

I like it anyway. It's out August 21. Here's the first single.


Also, if for any reason, you want to read my review of the debut, it's here.

Now I'm looking for bands named "Blurt" and "Philadelphia Weekly"

There's a slight cognitive dissonance involved in reviewing a band that has the same name as one of the places you write for -- although as Dusted Editor Otis Hart pointed out, the Wire has Wire, and they're both doing okay. But in this case, the album was pretty good, so we're probably not going to sue for the right to be the real Dusted...(though we are, we totally are). Anyway, here's the review:

Dusted
Total Dust
Hand of Dracula

Dusted’s haunted, fuzz-encrusted songs fall about as far as possible from Brian Borcherdt’s other project, Holy Fuck. Where Holy Fuck cranks intricate, interlocking grooves, Dusted nearly eliminates rhythm altogether. Where Holy Fuck is collaborative, communal, celebratory, Dusted has the hollowed out aura of deep introspection. Borcherdt is not alone in this project — the main difference between Total Dust and a previous solo EP called Coyotes is that he is working with producer Leon Taheny — but he sounds like a guy working things out on his own. His songs have a blistered, wasted beauty, like Neil Young but maybe even more like Scout Niblett, as fragile melodies are subsumed in a detuned roar of guitar.

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We had Sean home for the weekend, which was really nice (though probably boring for him). He's away most of the summer at the St. Paul's Advanced Studies Program, doing Shakespeare, specifically the Tempest and Titus Andronicus. He got the role of Titus in the second play and now has roughly 600 lines to memorize in the next couple of weeks. But it was great to see him...he seems to be taking absolutely full advantage of the program, learning to play squash, practicing "Hallelujah" (the Leonard Cohen via Jeff Buckley song) for the talent show and hanging out with what appear to be some very impressive kids. So, yay for Sean, off into the world and doing just fine.

Awesome, especially the first five minutes

Cravats

Another great, lost late-1970s punk band resurrected by the awesome Hyped To Death label, which is putting out an expanded (45 tracks) version of long-out-of-print Cravats in Toyland. Here Cravats are in these latter, lesser days, playing a show with the Nightingales.

Shannon Stephens

I may be the only writer in the blogosphere to have covered all three of Shannon Stephens' albums, but what the hell, it's good stuff, if wildly underheard and underappreciated...Anyway, #3 reviewed at Blurt yesterday.

Shannon Stephens
Pull It Together
(Asthmatic Kitty

Shannon Stephens' third full-length is a rougher, harder-rocking affair than either 2008's Breadwinner or the reissued debut. Stephens puts a survivor's swagger into her jazzy, sinuous soprano, swallowing the bitterest stuff life can throw at her, and spitting it out in defiance. All but a few tracks smoulder with a blues-rocking heat, whether in boisterous, boot stomping style a la "Care of You" or in the minimalist thunder of "Wax and Feathers", Stephens' take on the Icarus myth. A couple of the slow ones - "Cold November" and "Responsible Too Long" - make you wonder what kind of torch singer Stephens might have turned into given half a chance, but for the most part, she's not here to mope and pine.

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Wish me luck

So, I'm going up to Hanover tomorrow for my scary doctor's appointment.

Cross your fingers.

Easter Island's Frightened

Mentioned this one a few weeks ago, now my review is up at Blurt.

Easter Island
Frightened
(Self-Released)

For a two-person band, Easter Island makes incredibly lush, textured music, its multilayered guitars luminous like Explosions in the Sky, drenched in indefinite overtones like early 1990s shoegaze. From the video, it looks like both Payne brothers - Ethan and Asher - play guitar, which explains the many different six-string sounds on hand. It also appears that only one of them sings, in a sweet, diffident, tremulous way that sounds undressed next to the band's gleaming, post-rock guitar edifices.

This combination - of indie pop vulnerability and glistening expanses of pedal-altered tone - sounds odd in theory but works amazingly well on Frightened.

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"Independence"

One for the 4th...Spider Bags

Too late for 4th BBQs, but undoubtedly very fine outdoor, beer drinking, meat charring music is Shake My Head. This really good new album from Spider Bags is coming early August and in the general vein of Limes (one of the songs is called "Shawn Cripps Boogie"), Reigning Sound, Bad Sports and John Wesley Coleman III (who seems also to have uploaded this video).



Careful round those firecrackers, eh?

Ty Segall's Slaughterhouse

The very prolific Ty Segall has a new album called Slaughterhouse out now on In the Red, the first with his full touring band and a much harder rocking, more aggressive thing than Goodbye Bread or his split with White Fence...which is I think still my favorite Ty for this year, but hold on, he may release 3-4 more before the end.

Anyway, I reviewed the album for Blurt's spring issue, and it's up on the website now:

Ty Segall Band
Slaughterhouse
(In the Red)

With Slaughterhouse (In The Red), Ty Segall returns to the detuned blare of his first, self-titled album and early singles. The main difference? Segall has the support of a full band - Mikal Cronin, Charlie Moothart and Emily Rose Epstein - as he pushes things towards 11.

More (but not much more)

Holy Fuck...with kitties

So, I'm reviewing the new album by Dusted, a side project of Holy Fuck's Brian Borcherdt, and I figured I'd better listen to a little bit of Holy Fuck, just to get acclimated (it's totally different). In the process, I came across this video for "Red Lights", which, can't say I'm a big fan of kitty videos, but it did kind of crack me up.

Enjoy.

Moebius and Tietchens

Not sure I have the background to review something like this, but it's sort of amazing on its own terms, a collaboration from two giants in electronic music -- Dieter Moebius of Cluster and Harmonia and Asmus Tietchens, a pioneer in musique concrete. The two of them first worked together on the Lillenthal project (with Conny Plank, Okko Becker, and Helmut Hattlerin) in 1976 and have circled back more than 30 years later to revisit the partnership. It's a very subtle work, not something you can fully appreciate in, say, the car, full of abrasive, industrial rhythms and sweeping lyrical tones...quite beautiful, though in an abstract, not-exactly-open-arms-welcoming way.

Listening samples here: