Pete A. Nicholson
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- Four Records From The (Almost) Canon
- Four remarkable, little-heard records from two depressed Kiwis, a deep listening scholar, some truly radical post-punkers and a couple of Arizona desert rats. There's more.
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- Antony and the Johnsons: The Crying Light
- A review of Antony and the Johnson's 2009 lp The Crying Light, published in The Big Issue. There's more.
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- Sir Richard Bishop
- Bishop still moves through styles and obsessions at a rate faster than you can recognize them, as likely to break out into back-porch swing as a gypsy freakout. But for those for whom the Girls were always a bit too far out in the ether, Bishop's new record -- as open-eyed and accessible as anything he's ever done -- is a great entry point to the Girls' fourth dimension. There's more.
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- Deerhoof
- Listening to Deerhoof, San Francisco's wonderfully manic noise-pop trio, you often get the feeling you're playing with a child's toy, one that is all sweetness and smiles, and then, all of a sudden, sprouts a new head. There's more.
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- Popol Vuh: Mika Vainio / Haswell & Hecker Remixes 12"
- Popol Vuh's cavernous, immense drone is foreboding, as you would expect, but, pieced together from loops of a choir, it is also possessed of an otherworldly, almost transcendent quality, one that elevates the film into greatness before the conquistadors even reach the river. If there has been a better contribution to a film soundtrack since, or a better collaboration between a filmmaker and musician at the peaks of their respective careers, I haven't heard it. There's more.
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- Volcano the Bear: Amidst the Noise and Twigs
- For the celebrated British four-piece, now twelve-years young and piling up a heady discography, setting out with such a consciously wide, undefined scope means moments of unabashed prettiness (the almost saccharine vocal coda to 'Before We Came to This Religion') are as much flotsam as artless noise (the ceaseless overdriven yelling of 'One Hundred Years of Infamy'), all of it to be run through, played with, discarded anyhow. There's more.
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- Stephen O'Malley & Attila Csihar: 6°FSkyquake
- This piece, presented here as a room recording of a part of that work, clocks in at just over half an hour, but gives us enough a sense of what original might have been like: a piece, it seems, created very clearly with the sonics and context of a gallery in mind -- stretches of quiet, almost remote electronics, what sounds like processed TV static and a cold, distant wind giving way to O'Malley's droning, sub-Gregorian voice of the ancients intoning from somewhere below you, a thin, almost sharp pulse underlying it all. There's more.
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- M.B + E.D.A: Regolelettroniche
- De Angelis and Bianchi play with the kind of sonics that displace normal notions of time, progression and order, replacing them with something simpler, truer even. There's more.
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- Human Bell: s/t
- The self-titled debut from the collaboration between friends Nathan Bell (Lungfish) and Dave Heumann (Arbouretum), Human Bell is a play in restraint and exploration, the kind of patient, cyclic music of two friends on a back porch somewhere, friends who evidently share the same love of early U.S. folk and blues, friends who make music with clean electric guitars rooted in the unhurried simplicity of old Takoma records, songs that gain momentum but never really ignite. There's more.
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- Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band: 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons
- Falling out of love with Canadians who probably expect such things. From Hair Entertainment. There's more.
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- Club Transmediale '08
- A night in Berlin at the Club Transmediale Festival 08, theme: Outsiders. Held by the Spree on a windy night, it was suitably odd, compelling stuff from a well-picked roster of freaks. There's more.
Music Writing