I would like to be able to say that Muslimgauze is back with his latest fatigue (he would sure have some lucid insights about what is going on in the world if he still was alive...), but at least we can enjoy some more of his previously unreleased music that is seeing the light through Staalplaat, where obviously there are plenty of tapes (I am assuming it's tapes these things are stored on because there's plenty of hiss) that are still in the dark ready to be dusted off. "Iranair Inflight Magazine" continues the tradition of semi-distorted and saturated percussions with the addition of some sparse electronics. With this formula it almost sounds more like an idm/electro record than a world music record. The tracks are long, similar to each other, and go by with little changes. You can hear very distant things but you pretty much have to wait for the third song and its middle eastern flute-like breath instrument to find something else besides the percussive track. Half way through the record you start hearing some stereo field experimentation with un-distorted percussive tracks on the left, a distant sitar and some electronic bass on the right, the whole thing glued together by movements across the stereo field and dub-like delays. Later on, around track six, the atmosphere gets a little quieter and samples of middle-eastern language spoken female vocals are introduced. Each of the tracks is named after a page in the Iranair Inflight Magazine and the CD is limited and hand-numbered to 700 copies.

Merging glitch electronics and drones with field recordings, 87 Central go the distance with these seven tracks recorded with a no-input mixer, computer models of feedback systems, field recordings and samples of dan armstrong playing guitar... If that sounds weird to you, don't be surprised, nothing is out of the ordinary for the people at Staalplaat and for people like 87 Central. The nice thing about "Formation" is that it's never overwhelming and aids relaxation and meditation as opposed to interrupt or obstruct it. The strong visionary contents it carries along is filtered through the key of interpreation of every single listener, who will then locate the soft noises and the layers of subtle distortion, electronic feedbacks and other grainy detailed textures of sounds from within the sound space to draw the picture he most likes in his mind.

"O Superman Remix CD" is a remix CD (duuh!) featuring nine experimental artists busy re-working the Laurie Anderson sky-rocketing hit and pop anthem "O Superman (For Massenet)" (the original was paraphrasing Jules Massenet's song "O Souverain"). Anderson's version was first released on One Ten records and later re-released and distributed on her debut LP "Big Science" by Warner Bros (we all know how that went, when these fucking majors are after profits and don't respect the artists...). It was an outsider track, something alien to what the rest of the music industry was putting out. Her vocoded voice and all the electronics were painting a picture of an ill society becoming greedy and loosing touch with the importance of human relationships (she sings "this is the hand, the hand that takes", which incidentally is also one of the sentences printed on the beautiful hand crafted cardboard box case that Staalplaat specifically created for this release). Now nine names did go over all of that and came up with their own versions, some where the electronic aspect is emphasized, some where noises are added, some somewhat close to the original, others totally re-worked into newly crafter creations of digital sonics, glitch electronica and drones (Frans De Waard's new project Freiband, Origin of Sound), noise (Dutch Danny De Graan, Italian Massimo), beautiful IDM arrangements that would fit into the Warp catalogue (Com.a, Radbound Mens, Team Doyobi), synthetic Kraftwerkian sounds (Electric Company), experimental concrete weirdnesses (Staalplaat founder's project Staalplaat SoundSystem), vocal samples and so on... Few stones are left unturned when it comes to sonic experimentation. Definitely an interesting re-interpretation of a classic of avantgarde pop-electronica of the early eighties.

I've always been fond of bands achieving decent results when mixing metal with electronica, and in this case I even stumbled on something slightly different than what the average electro-metal scene offers. Of course I am not saying that these Adelaide-based guys are better than, say, Die Krupps, but they definitely have a very original approach to what they do, which could characterize them on the long run and make them remarkably unique. "Follow the White Line" takes the raging guitars that you will find in bands like the above-mentioned German masters or the equally interesting and innovative Flugschaedel and mix it in with dancefloor-friendly beats, synthetic sounds, electronic sequences and vocals that are somewhere between those of a rock singer and an ebm one. If you always liked Stabbing Westward, Sloppy Wrenchbody, Headcrasch, Swamp Terrorist, Marylin Manson or even Nine Inch Nails but you always wanted to shake that ass of yours to their beats the way you do during a rave or in a club, maybe you should turn to Circle Clan when looking for those emotions.

This cd by Argentinian quartet Kutna Hora begins with militaristic pecussions, but later they seem to opt for the lighter, wave-ish side of dark folk. The press sheet quotes In My Rosary and Novalis as references, and I'd definitely add some Cure too in the vocal department (see "Hell is a place on earth"). They also take on the Irish traditional "Crazy man Michael", yeah, the one that Sol Invictus covered aeons ago. Competent musicianship, good production, and decent songs, but nothing that even remotely thrills me. I don't know, this style of dark folk just does not for me. It is the classical "acoustic ballads played by goths"-vibe, which often sadly couples the "acoustic ballads played by metalheads with runes"-vibe in the not so exciting noir folk scene of today.