Nick Storring
Various Artists. Sixty Interpretations of Sixty Seconds. One very strong impression that remained with me after listening to the duration of Sixty Interpretations of Sixty Seconds was that David Sait would make an excellent DJ. Perhaps that sounds like a trivial or flippant remark, but without that curator’s clever and highly musical[...] Read more
Seattle Phonographers Union. The Seattle Phonographers Union collectively weave together gathered field recordings in real-time to create wafting auditory mirages. As each piece hovers through different combinations of environmental sounds, a milky, dreamlike logic unfolds and establishes a certain gestural rhythm.[...] Read more
Eric Leonardson & Steve Barsotti. Rarebit. Leonardson and Barsotti have both fashioned their own peculiar sonic contraptions that provide all manner of congruently peculiar noises over the span of this disc. Each track encompasses its own world, constructed of noises that are both highly physical and also difficult[...] Read more
Toddler Body. Survival Smokers. Recently the mainstream of independent pop and rock has introduced certain safe yet conspicuously weird tics into their already carefully tweaked lexicon of self-conscious poses. Given that pseudo-psychedelic, fake lo-fi pop geared to fashionable teens is at an all-time high, it’s[...] Read more
Linda Catlin Smith. Ballad. Something about Linda Catlin Smith’s music has always struck me as paradoxical. On the one hand, her work is irrefutably about tone colour, yet her focus on melody and her avoidance of extended techniques undermines this impression. Her work also comes off with the utmost clarity, as[...] Read more
The Allison Cameron Band. The Allison Cameron Band. Toronto’s Rat-Drifting label has long been committed to releasing sneakily hybridized and organically concept-informed music. Work that is deliciously fraught with odd details and the idiosyncrasies of the community from which it springs. Cameron’s[...] Read more
Tim Lawrence. Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–1992. As the result of a string of reissues at the beginning of 2004, Arthur Russell has risen to posthumous prominence as a ravenous pluralist and unsung innovator who did not achieve due recognition prior to his untimely death from AIDS in 1992. With each re-pressing or unreleased gem it[...] Read more
Debashis Sinha. Anudrutam. Lean, economical and crisp, Anudrutam infuses a minimalist techno sensibility with acoustic percussion and naturalistic field recordings (collected by Sinha himself in Kolkata). While the bareness used by some similarly oriented artists tends to emphasize the cold, machine-like precision[...] Read more
Brian Ruryk. Cycle of Fords. While the ingredients in any recent Brian Ruryk release are basically the same—rapid-fire editing, rubbery cassette-tape contortions, anxious Sonny-Sharrock-on-amphetamines acoustic guitar scribblings, torrents of debris (aural and actual) flying across the stereo field—[...] Read more
Louise Gray. The No-Nonsense Guide To World Music. At a mere 167 pages, this little guide might justifiably raise suspicions about exactly what nonsense was jettisoned to make this book so compact. While it is scanter on information than the books put out by Rough Guides, Gray’s guide offers a compelling issue-and-topic-driven[...] Read more
Saint Dirt Elementary School. Ice Cream Man Dreams. This newest effort from St. Dirt offers the most vivid image of this Toronto-based “junkyard jazz” combo. Whereas their two previous discs offered a rawer live feel and catchier tunes, the overall sophistication and nuance of Ice Cream Man Dreams showcases both the[...] Read more
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