Alhaji Bai Konte - Kora Melodies From The Republic Of The Gambia, West Africa

From Kora Connection:

Documenting the late Gambian kora legend, Alhaji Bai Konte, this 72 minute CD captures the spirit and beauty of the Mandinka kora. The original LP features performances recorded at his home in Brikama. The CD reissue includes two previously unissued bonus tracks of Bai playing live in concert. Bai's musical style ranges from intimate to lively and has performed at folk festivals through out the world. If there were only one kora recording in your music collection, this would be an excellent choice.

John Fahey - Visits Washington D.C.

From AllMusic:

John Fahey's final album of the 1970s was also his first studio album in nearly five years, his prolific pace in the first dozen years or so of his recording career slowing notably by the middle of the decade.

He pretty much just picked up where he left off on Visits Washington DC, however, offering another set of acoustic guitar instrumentals with stellar picking and an eclectic range of influences. A good share of the material this time around came from other sources, as he put together a medley of Doc Watson's "Silver Bell" and Bill Monroe's "Cheyenne" for the first track; incorporated Leo Kottke's "Death by Reputation" into the second, and also covered Bola Sete's "Guitar Lamento."

On his originals (and to some degree even his interpretations), echoes of Appalachian folk, bluegrass, blues, ragtime, and flotsam and jetsam of Americana (with Stephen Foster liberally quoted in Fahey's composition "The Discovery of the Sylvia Scott") blend and merge. Some of his characteristic moodiness emerges in passages from "Ann Arbor" and "Melody McBad," and Richard Ruskin, another artist on the Takoma label, adds second guitar to "Silver Bell."

The Harmonic Choir - Hearing Solar Winds

From CD Baby:

Twenty-five years have passed since the hot, hazy summer night in Provence when David Hykes and The Harmonic Choir sat together in the Thoronet Abbey and created their remarkable recording of Hearing Solar Winds.

Twenty-five years is an eternity in the world of music. An entire generation comes of age in that time, bringing with it new currents of musical taste and style. Rare is the work that speaks to successive generations with an abiding freshness and feeling of revelation that endures after repeated listening. "Hearing Solar Winds" is such a work.

Two-and-a-half decades after its first release, it still offers an astonishing window into a different world of perception. It deserves to be regarded as a key work of the late twentieth century, both for the originality of its vision, and for the abiding influence that its revelatory approach to working with sound has had on diverse communities of musicians and artists, not to mention a broader circle of scientists and seekers, healers and musicians.

David Hykes was himself influenced by many kinds of music, notably the overtone-singing traditions of Mongolia, Tibet and Tuva, which were far less known in the 1970s and early 1980s than they are today. Yet Hearing Solar Winds represents not a simulacrum of Tuvan or Mongolian overtone singing, but the product of a global sensibility inspired by music's most powerful universal: the harmonic series.

Just as Tuvan and Mongolian overtone singing are rooted in the natural environment of mountains and grasslands that the south Siberian herders hold sacred, the Harmonic Chant of Hearing Solar Winds evolved in the environment of sacred indoor spaces, including New York City's neo-gothic St. John the Divine Cathedral, where the Harmonic Choir was in residence from 1979 until 1989, and the Thoronet Abbey. The Choir's music is perfectly suited to these spaces, which bring to life both the literal and metaphorical harmony created by well-tuned overtones.

Stars Of The Lid - Live At Holy Trinity Church, Leeds, UK, 25-05-2008

A review of the show:

What better venue for an evening of ambient music that Holy Trinity Church? Though it may not have the best sound for a concert in Leeds I would doubt anybody's claim for a venue with better ambiance. The phrase 'pull up a pew' has never been more apt than tonight as the church fills to the brim with a crowd that knows it made the right choice in braving the cold weather to be here, with or without canned lager in hand.

Stars Of The Lid are a difficult band to capture in words, they make their way to the stage to a choir of Disney-esque ambiance, and from then on you know that this show will be out of the ordinary. Adam Wiltzie & Brian Edward McBride direct the beautiful orchestra-lite, and they play through cuttings of their 'Tired Sounds' and more recent 'Refinement of the Decline' albums. It's a wash of sound, a couple of violins have never sounded so big especially when the cello grinds up from the deep to create a roar of noise, you're listening for the distortion but it's not there. Sombre tones build and the projections on the church walls echo it, from green primordial swamps to the creation of the universe in its celestial magnitude, it's all painted on the ceiling tonight.

This is one amazing show. There is real majesty here, so much so that a crowd that only dares to squeak open beer cans between songs demands an encore and still wants more once it's gone. It would be futile to name what songs are played tonight and it's one of those shows where everybody who was there will remember for years into the future.

Three Eduard Artemiev Soundtracks

Three bootleg-ish versions of Eduard Artemiev's soundtracks to Andrei Tarkovsky's films Solaris, Zerkalo (The Mirror) and Stalker.

If you haven't seen these films, you should probably do so, they're some of Tarkovsky's best work and three of the best movies I've seen.

Two CDs in one zip file.

Tarkovsky Wiki Article

Various Artists - Ritual Mouth Organs Of The Murung, Bangladesh

The Murung are people living in the hills of West Bangladesh, near the Burmese border. Consisting of a population of around 50,000, they have their own language and were able to avoid being converted to the neighboring religions.

Their main musical instrument is the plung, a mouth-organ (whose origin is from the region of Burma and Cambodia). It is made of a wind-chest made of a calabash gourd, several bamboo pipes (between three and five), and a bamboo mouth piece. Each pipe has a hole and contains a free reed which vibrates when the hole is closed by the fingers of the players. The reed will vibrate either when inhaling or exhaling.

A plung ensemble can contain between ten and 20 instruments of different sizes. The music is repetitive and rhythmic; it creates more tone-color melodies than real melodies. It is heard during particular events (weddings, funerals, or other celebrations or ceremonies). There is also another version of the plung, called the rina plung. It accompanies litanies, lists of names of ancestors, or love poems, which are half-sung and half-murmured. These songs are accompanied by ecstatic dances.

This record was produced in France during the Festival de l'Imaginaire. The Murung music was heard for the first time outside of their native hills of Bangladesh.

Kyoto Imperial Court Music Orchestra - Gagaku: The Imperial Court Music Of Japan

""Elegant" music, likely the oldest existing form of orchestral music in the world, Gagaku is presented here in a richly authentic performance recorded in Kyoto, Japan. Rarely performed in public (and even more rarely in the West) this is profoundly intense and affecting music exquisitely performed by the Kyoto Imperial Court Orchestra. Prepare yourself for Gagaku of Japan - haunting, powerful, and unforgettable music of ceremony!

Includes Etenraku (music of divinity), Hassan (crane dance), and Nasori (dragon dance)."
From Lyrichord.

The above review doesn't exactly do justice to this recording - It needs to be heard to be believed.

Bonus video:

Yoshi Wada - Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile

From Boomkat:

Best known for his work as part of the Fluxus collective, sound artist Yoshi Wada only released two albums, the rarest of which is reissued here. 1981's Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile contains two pieces: one half-hour vocal drone focusing on overtones in a reverberant space, and another, slightly longer piece based on a bagpipe-like homemade instrument, which drones in a magnificently aggressive fashion exhaustively.

On this piece you can certainly hear the connection between Wada and cohort La Monte Young, but there's also a real similarity between this latter composition and Jim O'Rourke's early organ drones. These pieces present a similar illusion of featureless, complete temporal stasis, with sustain spiraling off into infinity. Which, in case you're unclear on the matter, would be a good thing.

Abner Jay - True Story Of Abner Jay

From Volcanic Tongue:

Describing himself as "the last great Southern black minstrel show", Abner Jay was a travelling one-man band and revenant folk spirit who performed lugubrious versions of original blues and traditional American spirituals alongside his own material in a baritone several leagues below Johnny Cash. By slowing his source material to a laggard, awkward lollop, Jay rescued it from decades of blacked-up virtuoso mimicry, refocusing attention on its ragged edges, emotional depth and complex humanity.

Jay joined Silas Greens Minstrels in 1932 on the back of a huge repertoire of banjo and old-time songs learnt from his grandfather, who had been a slave in Washington County, Georgia. He went on to lead the WMAZ Minstrels on Macon radio from 1946-56 before going solo and touring the country in his portable 'log cabin', complete with its own PA system, from where he would perform and sell cassettes and LPs, when not in residence at Tom Flynn's Plantation Restaurant in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

Jay died in 1993 and since then his LPs have become almost impossible to track down. Anthony Braxton described Jay as an "American master" and his banjo, guitar and harmonica playing is every bit as idiosyncratic and unmediated by the tyranny of 'correct' technique as Braxton's own. And the tongues given voice to here are drawn from deep within the murk of centuries, combining almost Velvets-styled barbed wire drones with gut-bucket paeans to drugs, depression and women.

This is classic private press/real people Americana of the caliber of Arthur Doyle and Mississippi have done a great job of compiling the best of Jay’s underground oeuvre - including classic tracks like “I’m So Depressed”, “Vietnam”, “Ol Man River” and “My Mule” – while cutting out his sometimes distracting ‘comedy’ routines and packaging it in a sleeve that could almost pass for a Brandie original. You need to hear this: some of the most amazing avant/primitive blues music of the 20th century.

Holy shit this fucking rules - Aaron

Erkin Koray - Elektronik Türküler

My friend Mic told me to listen to this guy because he is supposedly the 'Godfather of Turkish Psychedelic'. Upon further investigation, I have found that this guy is totally ballin'.

Erkin Koray (born June 24, 1941), has been in the Turkish rock music scene since the late 1950s or early 1960s. He is widely acclaimed as being the first person to ever play rock and roll in Turkey; in 1957, he and his band gained notoriety by playing covers of Elvis Presley and Fats Domino. He was also one of the first Turkish musicians to embrace the electric guitar and modern amplification.

By the late 1960s, he was already a major figure in Turkish psychedelic music and Anatolian Rock, beginning with his first psychedelic single Anma Arkadaş in 1967. Koray followed this with a number of singles, both by himself and in collaboration with others, that established him as a force to be reckoned with on the Turkish rock scene. Koray became a controversial figure in Turkey during the 1960s and 1970s; he was actually assaulted in Istanbul, and on one occasion stabbed, for having long hair.

Badass.

Emeralds - What Happened

From Brainwashed:

The album opens with "Alive in the Sea of Information," an eight minute excursion which fits snuggly into Emeralds’ previous oeuvre. The trio is unflinching in their alliance with the forms of '70s synth explorers like Cluster and Klaus Schulze, and they display their fine capabilities in that realm here as the soft ringing of Hauschildt's Moog gradually thickens with Elliott's Korg MS-10 bass tones. The liner notes state that "this recording is a collection of improvised songs recorded live to tape 2007-2008," an important indicator as to the group's process and one which is on fine display here. Each line undulates along in a soupy mix of analog psychedelia that captures perfectly the group's capability for spontaneous improvisational composition. As long vocal drones are spread across the weighty synth backdrop it does become a song of sorts, exploring its parts with a careful and confident hand

One of the paradoxes surrounding Emeralds is their close-knit affiliation with the underground noise scene. Despite the high-fidelity and overt beauty often explored on their works, the unit has continued to sharpen their abilities in the tape, vinyl and CD-R culture of labels such as Fag Tapes, Ecstatic Peace and their own Wagon and Gneiss Things imprints. This influence is readily apparent on "Damaged Kids," which starts off with synthesizer gestures that bubble about among thick and mossy tones, sounding more like John Olson's remixes of Elliott's solo work than the traditionally vibrant Emeralds sound. As it builds however, it meshes into a series of mobile synth gestures that are carried along by McGuire's guitar pulse before lightening its load in favor of crystalline drops of guitar tone and synthesized garble that drift off into a quickly pulsing end. Given that the group takes 15 minutes for the piece, it is still surprising how frequently they are able to smoothly transition from one mode to another.

"Up in the Air" is, as its title suggests, a lofty affair that serves as a brief intermission in the album. It is the most overtly gentle work on the disc, providing a respite before the next two tracks make up the last half of the album. "Living Room," the longest piece here, begins with an organ-like line that recalls Terry Riley or La Monte Young's "The Well-Tuned Piano" more than Neu! or Tangerine Dream. McGuire's guitar lends a church bell quality to the work as it drifts toward a starker, more static area. The trio's abilities as a whole are on display, with each member circumventing the whole with well placed and unselfish playing far beyond the maturity of most musicians in their early-twenties. Which isn't to quantify Emeralds' talents in terms of their age; these improvisations would be impressive for anyone. The proximity of their work to synthesizer legends of the past serves as testament to this. Never mere impersonators, the group manages to find its own worlds of sound through the means of decades past, but with the ears of today.

The closing "Disappearing Ink" slides across the speakers with monolithic grace as it unwraps its own sonic world. McGuire's guitar tones stand out in their lulling rhythms, staying warm without ever slipping into post-rock wankery. As the piece evolves, it emerges as a wall of vaporous, spectral beauty, as rich as an Eno instrumental with the weight of Popul Vuh or Ash Ra Tempel's best work.

In interviews, Emeralds often speak of the importance of volume in their music. To see the group live is to understand the true capacity of their music to physically manifest itself. Too often their albums are heard with this crucial factor lacking. For the complete experience, What Happened is a fine example. Each song materializes as it is meant to while Elliott, Hauschildt and McGuire, chisels in hand, continue in shaping the walls of sound before them.

Donny Hathaway - Everything Is Everything

From AllMusic:

Already a respected arranger and pianist who'd contributed to dozens of records (by artists ranging from the Impressions to Carla Thomas to Woody Herman), with this debut LP Donny Hathaway revealed yet another facet of his genius -- his smoky, pleading voice, one of the best to ever grace a soul record.

Everything Is Everything sounded like nothing before it, based in smooth uptown soul but boasting a set of excellent, open-ended arrangements gained from Hathaway's background in classical and gospel music. (Before going to Howard University in 1964, his knowledge of popular music was practically non-existent.)

After gaining a contract with Atco through King Curtis, Hathaway wrote and recorded during 1969 and 1970 with friends including drummer Ric Powell and guitarist Phil Upchurch, both of whom lent a grooving feel to the album that Hathaway may not have been able to summon on his own (check out Upchurch's unforgettable bassline on the opener, "Voices Inside (Everything Is Everything)"). All of the musical brilliance on display, though, is merely the framework for Hathaway's rich, emotive voice, testifying to the power of love and religion with few, if any, concessions to pop music.

Like none other, he gets to the raw, churchy emotion underlying Ray Charles' "I Believe to My Soul" and Nina Simone's "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," the former with a call-and-response horn chart and his own glorious vocal, the latter with his own organ lines. "Thank You Master (For My Soul)" brings the Stax horns onto sanctified ground, while Hathaway praises God and sneaks in an excellent piano solo.

Everything Is Everything was one of the first soul records to comment directly on an unstable period; "Tryin' Times" speaks to the importance of peace and community with an earthy groove, while the most familiar track here, a swinging jam known as "The Ghetto," places listeners right in the middle of urban America. Donny Hathaway's debut introduced a brilliant talent into the world of soul, one who promised to take R&B farther than it had been taken since Ray Charles debuted on Atlantic.

Black Dice - Broken Ear Record

From Delusions of Adequacy:

Sometimes there are bands that either outright defy classification or cause so much confusion that no one can slap a label on no matter how hard they try. The New York-based outfit Black Dice does a bit of both on 2005’s Broken Ear Record. This seven-track disc clocks in at less than 50 minutes of music that will either leave you thrilled or exhausted - or a bit of both depending on your feelings about noise-rock in general.

From the perspective of someone who generally doesn’t “get” a lot of experimental music, honing in on the crux of an album like this is a tough task. With no discernible melody or rhythm save a few constant notes here and there and with almost no vocals, Broken Ear Record is a bit of an enigma. The soundscape here is created with a variety of electronics and samples and the occasional drum beat or guitar loop. There’s little terra firma to be found anywhere here, and the off-kilter bursts of various sounds are almost completely alien.

Broken Ear Record’s shining moments are those tracks that seem to take a bit of shape, like “Smiling Off.” Although this song is the longest on the album at almost nine and a half minutes, it is easily one of the more cohesive. Perhaps this is due to the use of a thick bass beat and tribal-type percussion throughout as well as one of the disc’s only instances of vocals in the form of some sort of chanting that fits well with the drums. The final track, “Motorcycle,” is a vastly different song, but it also stands out for being a bit more consistent. Here odd squeaks and percussion are intertwined with a lovely bit of guitar that acts as the guiding force for the first half of the song.

Unlike many instrumental bands, Black Dice puts enough into each piece to keep things interesting and original. Although music lovers who normally don’t appreciate experimental noise will find some things of interest here, this is really an album for people who dig material a bit more avant-garde. Those with a true love of purely unconventional music will absolutely enjoy each of the tracks on Broken Ear Record.

Natural Snow Buildings - Slayer Of The King Of Hell

From Digitalis Recordings:

The fall of civilization never sounded so sweet to these ears, but french duo Natural Snow Buildings have soundtracked the end days in a way that has me crossing my fingers and hoping for the worst. Slayer of the King of Hell is epic in every way. These 90 minutes are filled to the fucken gills, with steam sneaking out through the cracks of this pressure cooker. It's dense, and at times beautiful. But it's always cohesive and cathartic and pushed to the limit.

Natural Snow Buildings seem mythic in their approach and their output. They exist on an island in rural France, seemingly basking in the glow of a world of music and art. But Slayer of the King of Hell is down and dirty, as real as it gets. This is the best kind of sucker punch, straight to the gut.

Arnold Dreyblatt & Orchestra Of Excited Strings - Animal Magnetism

From AllMusic:

Arnold Dreyblatt's 1995 Tzadik release, Animal Magnetism, includes many juxtaposed sections of repeating, skip-like structures that come off in a simple, lovely way. It is entirely likable with a lilting, pots-and-pans schizophrenia that insists we hear what normally doesn't work, what normally isn't called art.

Embedded with quirk-pop elements, the pieces resemble deconstructed dance tunes reflected in a room full of mirrors. Slightly carnival moments, tweaked ska counter rhythms, percussive foregrounds overlying slide effects backgrounds, barely-contained marching band funk - all these are part of Dreyblatt's musical world.

Arnold Dreyblatt's compositions have been recorded for such leading avant-garde music labels as Hat Hut, Tzadik and Table of Elements. The New York native studied film and video at SUNY with Woody and Steina Vasulka, and earned his masters from the Institute for Media Studies. In the mid-'70s, he studied composition with Pauline Oliveros and LaMonte Young, then learned from Alvin Lucier until getting his masters in composition in 1982. By that time, Dreyblatt had already been directing his own music ensemble, the Orchestra of Excited Strings, for three years.

Kool G Rap & DJ Polo - Live & Let Die

From AllMusic:

A strong case could be made for Live and Let Die as Kool G Rap & DJ Polo's crowning achievement. Who can really say for sure if the controversy surrounding the cover artwork -- which shows the duo feeding steaks to a pair of rottweilers, in front of two noose-necked white men -- clouded a proper consensus?

With across-the-board stellar production help from Sir Jinx and Trakmasterz, G Rap (who also produces) thrives on his no-holds-barred narratives that peaked with Wanted: Dead or Alive's "Streets of New York," but most everything on this album comes close to eclipsing that song. "Ill Street Blues" is practically a sequel to it, and it manages to use more swanky piano vamps and horn blurts without making for a desperate attempt at capitalizing on a past glory. Few tales of growing up in a life of crime hit harder than the title track, in which G Rap displays the traits -- unforced frankness, that unmistakable voice, and a flow that drags you involuntarily along -- that made him a legend.

The album is one story after another that draws you in without fail, and they come at you from several angles. Whether pulling off a train heist, venting sexual frustration, analyzing his psychosis, or lording over the streets, G Rap is a pro at holding a captive audience. All die-hard East Coast rap fans, especially followers of the Notorious B.I.G., owe it to themselves to get real familiar with this album and the two that pre-dated it. If you were to take this duo's best five songs away from them, they'd still be one of the top duos rap music has ever seen.

Alan Lamb - Night Passage

From Spyderbytes.com:

Night Passage is another release culled from Alan Lamb's renowned "wire" recordings, and then some. If you're unfamiliar with Mr. lamb's previous sound excursions, actual field recordings were made of a half-mile section of abandoned telegraph wires located in Western Australia's outback.

The wires, dubbed "The Faraway Wind Organ", are sometimes buffeted by heavy gales blasting across the barren landscape, and other times gently stroked by subtler breezes. The wind action results in an incredible range of sound. The first two tracks were originally recorded in 1984 and 1983 respectively.

In the almost-25-minute-long title track, the wires span the gamut of their repertoire... from subtle metallic pings, to resonant rocketship drones, to raucous saw-like buzzing. Occasional environmental sounds add an extra sense of place. The poles and cross beams creak under their continually straining load.

Last Anzac opens on a strong mechanical thrumming, sounding like a contact mic attached directly to an overloaded transformer. The powerful drone shifts through various phases of existence, sometime growing even more intense, other times fading to a soft, almost-tuned chorus. Squawling waves like feedback resound as no other stringed instrument could aspire to. Unfortunately, the Faraway Wind Organ was eventually decimated by lightning and termites.

The disc heads into new territory though, with Meditation on SPring8. This piece was recorded at a festival in Kobe, Japan to commemorate the opening of the world's largest electron accelerator. Rather than discovering the sound source, Lamb and friends actually created their own wind organ, the SPring 8 wind organ. Besides producing sound by natural wind, Lamb actually "plays" this instrument by bowing it with a two-metre long bamboo bow strung with nylon. This 12:11 interlude is comprised mainly of a continually phasing bass hum with a metallic shimmering, overall a "cleaner" sound. The section was recorded after a typhoon, and portions of the track include a faint crackling which, according to the liner notes, is the sound of water drying in the acoustic transducers.

If you've a predilection for drones and/or found sounds, the result is nothing less than fascinating. If you're into drones and found sounds, you'll simply be in heaven, though occasionally it's a pretty noisy place. An artful documentation of a natural and man-made phenomena, Night Passage definitely intrigues me. I raise my thumb high into the howling night winds.

The Skaters - Physicalities Of The Sensibilities Of Ingrediential Strairways

From Volcanic Tongue:

Brand new long-awaited 2008 full-length vinyl album from The Skaters and easily one of the major releases of the year, a record that fully delivers on their hallucinatory power-vision of channelled vocals inhabiting spectral environs transmuted via the imagined thought-forms of Sun Ra, Angus MacLise, Basil Kirchin and Brion Gysin then obsessively Xeroxed and treated with various entropic strategies in order to muddy the ritual to the point where it feels more akin to a sonic scrying mirror than a simple snapshot.

These five tracks represent some of Spencer Clark and James Ferraro’s darkest work to date, a nightside epic that takes in percussive Moroccan trance forms, hypnotic keyboard reveries, voices from the pit, the repetition of barbarous name as a mainline to oblivion and some of the murkiest, shadow-populated modern psychedelia ever to blow apart feeble terms like ‘noise’ and ‘drone’. A magical album from two of the most original and consistently mind-blowing underground thinkers.

Blank Realm - The Returner

From Bis Auf's Messer:

It gets said a lot (and for good reason) but shit is the internet ever weird. We’ve had the good fortune to get outta the city/state/USA plenty of times but life’s short and the dollar’s weak so we haven’t trekked to most of the globe’s zones for firsthand audio-anthropology, and yet thanks to Firefox/Safari/whatever we are fairly well informed about the crucial psych emissions of Brisbane hypno-squad Blank Realm (thanks, online experience).

So here we are. The Returner is BR’s most recent rusted grain silo mood piece cluster and though it might be their cleanest (fidelity-wise) crop of tracks to date, it also might be their trickiest one to pin down. Range-roving from overloaded bliss-noise collectivism to haunted barn bleak-folk death rattles, this C51 stakes out an endless outback of next-generation Musics Your Mind Will Love head-melt alternatives.

Ryoji Ikeda - Test Pattern

From Boomkat:

A sequel of sorts to his Dataplex album, Ryoji Ikeda's 'Test Pattern' is based around a cross-platform conversion system that takes any format of data (whether auditory, textual or pictorial) as a source to be transformed into barcode patterns. This product is then re-constituted as audio data, ready to be sculpted into composed structures by Ikeda.

Consequently, the sound artist is able to standardise all media and all types of information, reconfiguring everything within the parameters of that familiar language of his: high frequency tones and digital noise. Where Carsten Nicolai might also be seen to occupy this sort of sonic terrain, it becomes clear that Ikeda isn't nearly so preoccupied with the regularities of rhythm and other such more evidently musical tools. Instead, Test Pattern feels like a stream of data in flux, often manifesting itself in a quite alarmingly complex fashion.

Sure enough there are times when this music sounds like some irregular morse code message played out at extreme velocities, though in truth that doesn't begin to do justice to the blistering, awesome extremities of Test Pattern, an album that shifts between stuttering, phased micro-pulsations and blasts of pure digital noise. It sounds less like the product of manmade composition and more in keeping with the chaos of lost connections and telecommunications interference.

Having spent some time with 'Test Pattern' you start to understand that title: Ikeda seems to be challenging you to keep up with his music, to be able to take in such severe sound matter without the safety nets of harmony and rhythm. Arduous as it can often seem (particularly with some of those strobing high frequencies), any serious follower of experimental electronic music won't want to miss out on the experience, particularly when the bass tones come into play and the fractured tones, momentarily, start to build into robust, fucked up rhythms. Awesome stuff.