[Music] Troum – Acouasme

Stefan Knappe is a man who wears many hats. He runs Drone Records, which releases some of the best in dark ambient and experimental music, and serves as both a mailorder and distributor of music not directly found on his label as well.

The talent we wish to concentrate on is as a composer with his project TROUM. In this release from 2015, Knappe unleashes a cascade of some of the darkest experimental music I’ve heard in some time. It is dark, however, in a way that is not vulgar or cheap, as too so-called ‘noise’ bands are wont to be. You won’t hear any children with vile fetishes for rapists or serial killers who turn on their vacuum cleaners and try to sell this as ‘music’. No, in this case, Knappe actually goes through the process of crafting something worthy of being a soundtrack to a very intense film. There is a lot of sub-bass throbbing and pulsating, but all of it done with the precision of a master surgeon who knows how to weild his scalpel. TROUM is always releasing music of note, or collaborating with others to do the same.

If you have a Bandcamp account, follow his work. You will find no disappointments there.

[Music] RLW / PAAK – Zur Arbeit I

From Attenuation Circuit’s Bandcamp site:

Ralf Wehowsky and Peter Kastner, aka RLW and PAAK, present their third collaborative album in a series of concept albums dedicated to various subjects. This record, their first on attenuation circuit, is about work, and as on the previous records (about food and religion, respectively), the titles, liner notes, and the sound itself suggest a rather sarcastic take on work, or more precisely, the situation of working people today.

Ralf Wehowsky has been a fixture on the international experimental scene since his 1980s work with P16.D4 and related projects on the Selektion label. The fusion of electronic sounds and non-musical, musique concrète material is characteristic of much of his work. Peter Kastner, working both in improvised sound and visual arts, brings a low-fi approach to jerrybuilt sound objects to the collaboration. By contrasting everyday noise that might well have been recorded in a factory, or factory canteen, with startlingly artificial, almost deliberately cheesy harpsichord and mellotron sounds, they create a tension between a nostalgia for beauty and the barrenness of everyday life, in three pieces, or perhaps movements. The liner notes leave no doubt as to what the three movements stand for: The 19th century with its mass exploitation of industrial workers (courtesy of a quote by Karl Marx), the 20th century with its progress toward more social security for working people, and the 21st century, which sees an erosion of solidarity as neoliberal policies take away social benefits such as rent-controlled housing.

Crap Marxist verbiage, but great music, as always.

[Music] Benjamin Aït-Ali – Ballet and Other Works

This release, by French experimental music composer Benjamin Aït-Ali, is, and probably always will be, the shortest release I’ve had the privilege to review. Ballet and Other Works clocks in at around 3 minutes, but as with the legendary Cinéma Pour L’Oreille series released by Metamkine in the early 1990s, the compositions waste no time in getting to the point.

Aït-Ali is among a new vanguard of composers who will take the flame from the legends of electroacoustic music such as Pierre Henry, Pierre Schaeffer and François Bayle. It sounds like a tall order, but I’d challenge you to study his work. You can listen to Ballet and Other Works here, via OBS Records, based in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, or at Benjamin’s Bandcamp site. More samples of his work can be heard via Soundcloud.

[Music] FIMAV 32 Review — Avant Music News

Source: Musicworks. A little late, but… The Festival International Musique Actuelle Victoriaville (FIMAV) arrives with the late, brief spring of Quebec’s central region, an energizing jolt between winter and summer that sees the flowering of older vines and new life bursting through the earth. This year’s instalment of FIMAV did what it has done very […]

via FIMAV 32 Review — Avant Music News

[Music] Machinefabriek & Philippe Petit – Angry Ambient Artists Vol​.​1 — Yeah I Know It Sucks

artists: Machinefabriek & Philippe Petit title: Angry Ambient Artists Vol.1 keywords: ambient drone electro-acoustic industrial noise Manchester label: Forwind http://www.forwind.net/ On side a there is the very angry ambient artist named ‘Machinefabriek’ with an angry ambient track named ‘Graniet’. The high pitched beeps do certainly hit a nervous angry nerve in my very angry ambient […]

via Machinefabriek & Philippe Petit – Angry Ambient Artists Vol.1 — Yeah I Know It Sucks

[Music] Various Artists – Summer (from a closer listen blog)

Earlier this year, the Bigo & Twigetti label asked its artists to contribute a personal reflection of summer. This compilation is the result. Summer is a potpourri of presentations that opens up the question, “What does summer sound like?” For this listener, summer sounds like the opening track, Pavel Karmanaov‘s “Michael Music”: ebullient, with sparks and ocean droplets […]

via Various Artists ~ Summer — a closer listen

[Music] Enrico Coniglio ~ Bragos series: Astrùra / Solèra — a closer listen

There are different schools of thought when it comes to the production of “soundscapes.” There is R. Murray Schafer, who coined the term, and his World Soundscape Project, which approaches the soundscape as “acoustic ecology.” Some have criticized his approach as nostalgic, with romantic notions of pre-industrial life, constructing a division between nature and […]

via Enrico Coniglio ~ Bragos series: Astrùra / Solèra — a closer listen