MP3s

[Music] Various Artists – Decay, Death and Darkness – Aural Visions Of Beksiński’s Art

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Zdzisław Beksiński was a Polish multimedia artist whose utopian realist works stood in stark contrast to his rather jovial personal demeanor.  He may have been an artists whose work could scare the hell out of you, but he was also quite a decent man who had a fondness for classical music, as well as some rock (his son, Tomasz, was a noted DJ who committed suicide in 1999).

Once again, the brilliant folks at Eighth Tower Records, a subgroup of Unexplained Sounds, have released a compilation whose subject inspired some of the most brutally dark ambient music artists active to come up with some bleak aural monstrosities.

[Music] black (w)hole – altered states

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black (w)hole are an Austrian drone-psych band who are covering similar ground to Masaki Batoh’s legendary group Ghost.  Don’t think that this is their only influence, however.  One can hear shards of Blue Cheer, The Melvins, and other Japanese psych bands like High Rise and White Heaven. This is well-recorded, powerful, and drone-laden enough to let your mind melt for a few moments. Recommended.

[Music] Various Artists – ELECTROFRAMEWORK

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Unexplained Sounds empresario Raffaele Pezzella is on a quest to make sure the best in experimental and electroacoustic music gets published.  It seems like, week after week, he is releasing a compilation of stunning quality from a specified region, a broad retrospective, or his own delightfully noisy work as Sonologyst.

These tracks might melt your headphones a bit, but the sounds are, in their own way, blissful.  Familiar names such as Sonologyst, Stefan Schmidt, Fahmi Mursyid and Thomas Grenzebach appear alongside a slew of new artists whose career trajectory will be interesting to follow.

Another masterpiece of a comp.

[Music] Hviledag – Minder i Fire Satser

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Hviledag is the moniker of Anton Friisgaard, who has an EP due for release on September 22.

Listening to it, it seems Anton has captured the spirit of the best of 1970s Kosmich Musik out of Germany (think Cluster/Kluster and the solo releases by Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius [RIP], Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze during their peak in the mid-1970s, and even pre-robot Kraftwerk).

Don’t think, however, that this is some boring copy of the masters.  Anton brings fresh ideas to the genre.  The recording quality, however, is so familiar and comfortable to me that if this release were to come out on vinyl, I would be thrilled to listen to it and place it along with the greats mentioned earlier.

[Music] Ataşehir – Colorful Places to Live and Play

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Ataşehir is the side project of Sumatran Black, an expatriate residing in the Anatolian side of Turkey.  The music roaring out of my speakers sounds, in part, like a black-ambient version of a 1950s B-Movie sci-fi soundtrack (trust me, this is a high compliment, considering my brother and I grew up as fans of the film genre and the music it produced) and a touch like the end of the movie Solaris, where film composer Eduard Artemiev goes into a drone which grows louder and louder until it crescendoes.

There is an amusing irony that the song titles, as Ataşehir mentions on his site, “are taken from aspirational advertising slogans of various residential developments from around the world.”

There is a bleak, black beauty to this album.  It ends with a progressive-rock length final track clocking in at 48 minutes. Colorful Places to Live and Play Bandcamp Exclusive Compilation Version. . As it turns out, it is the least brutally dark track on the album, making for a pleasantly drony listening experience.

[Music] Abd al-Rahman al-Khamissi – عبد الرحمن الخميسي – Music from the Soundtrack “Respectable Families”

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Welcome to the world of easy (cheesy) listening out of… Cairo?!  Yes!!  According to the bio over at his Bandcamp page, “Abd al-Rahman El Khamissi (bio in Arabic only) is an Egyptian poet, writer, journalist, dramatist, radio producer, film director, composer and talent scout for famous Egyptian actors such as Soad Hosni.  He has been seen as a great romanticist and one of the finest Egyptian poets.  Khamissi’s versatile talents as an artist and story teller portrayed in many ways the aspirations of Egyptian society.”

There is an elegance in this release mixing tango, the aforementioned easy listening and the better elements of soundtrack music.  Many thanks to the folks at Radio Martiko who selflessly dedicated their efforts into releasing this gem.

[Music] Silent Island – Stormvalley

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I want to thank István Csarnogurszky, guitarist of Silent Island and musician in several amazing post-rock bands, for this new little gem of an album. His guitar playing is as fluid as ever, and as much as I like instrumental guitar albums, Csarnogurszky is ably supplemented by Gábor Károlyi on bass guitar and Mike Vecchione, who provides drum loops.

Dense, but not overwhelming. A very pleasant album to think to, but it can take you places if you want to concentrate solely on the music.