Ask a Game Producer!

In this installment of “Ask a…” we’re going to talk to a game producer and play my imitation jukebox obscura, where the most dangerous game of all is Ger-man.
I uploaded five tracks and changed the file names, but completely screwed up by not removing the tags. Mr. Producer was a good sport about it.

Biosphere & Higher Intelligence Agency – Birmingham Frequencies

Higher Intelligence Agency kinda sucked. That’s being a bit harsh, as they did help shape the concept of “ambient dub” but on the other hand, it’s also an information-free concept.
Silly terms are what they are – silly – but Colourforms is almost ok for what it is, though I’d recommend Global Communication first (and last, [...]

Arovane – Lillies

Back in the day Autechre clones* were commonplace, like dandruff or dour men in turtleneck sweaters. Like those things, they were just part of being interested in a “thing” or a “scene”; some went off into hip-hoppy directions like Push Button Objects; others did electro-influenced versions of early Ae tracks, like Accelera Deck. And there [...]

Tombs

If I ran a futures desk in up-and-coming brooklyn metal bands I would be heavily pushing Tombs, a local act that’s now signed to Relapse Records. New album drops in February – you can hear the single “Gossamer” on their myspace page – and I’m excited and all if only because when I saw them [...]

It Takes a Tough Korean to Make a Tender MP3 Player

I had a Cowon F2 that I dropped a few too many times. My fault for buying something the size of a matchbook. Though I sometimes had a hard time holding it, it was also the nicest-sounding personal audio device (psst it’s the future!) I’ve ever had the pleasure of using to block out the [...]

Oxbow – Let Me Be A Woman

Is music gendered? We shall go with “yes” on this one. Otherwise that whole “glam” thing would have just been dodgy dudes in makeup rather than dodgy dudes in makeup working against cultural norms.
So we shall take it as a given that there are gender conventions at play in the giant fishbowl of bitches, tricks, [...]

The Angelic Process – Weighing Souls With Sand

A remarkable album and a tragic story.
Husband and wife duo make glossy drone metal where everything is buried in a steel bathtub of reverb. Husband injures his hand in such a way that playing becomes impossible, sometime after Weighing Souls with Sand was recorded, and stops the project.
In April of this year he killed himself.
Since [...]

Fifteen for 2008

Got a top 15 albums of the past year listing up at White Heat, where I’ll be writing reviews of assorted weirdness – look for an expanded review of Fennesz’s Black Sea and (finally) some words about The Threshold Houseboys Choir.