After their 6-track debut release 'Jubilee' through D-Trash Records earlier this year, Manchester-based Electro/Industrial-duo Needle Factory returns with this all new 10-track album. Established by Freddy Morgendorffer and Johna Curtis in late 2011, this duo has caused some attraction through some intense live performances, so that the British Independent label Unrepresented Music couldn't resist to offer them a deal. 'Goetia' is the result of this collaboration and it is without any exaggeration a colorful, musically diverse sounding exploration between genre boundaries. This duo integrates Post-Punk Industrial influences of the old icons of Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire to their up-to-date sound-adaptation by blending between styles like EBM, Witchhouse, and TBM/IDM. The opening track 'Blind' with its distorted, lo-fi synth-arrangement is a good example, how they are capable to unite the rawness of Noise with calm, cold-melodic synthesizer-drops. Fx-manipulation on female vocals has become a stylistically hype at latest with Erica Dunham / Unter Null and Needle Factory are swimming often on this wave, as this track proves too. 'Die For Joy' and their pre-released, freely available teaser track 'Needles, Pins & Razor Blades' are standing for solid, club-oriented food, which will surely impress the dancefloor-junkies. The musically more striking tracks are starting with 'Drug Laws', as this track offers surprisingly a typical old-school EBM-like bassline programming. Their sense for calm melodies returns with a vengeance on 'Kiss The Blade', a ballad-esque, ominous, but beautiful sounding Dark Electro pearl. If it seriously needed any proof that Johna's voice sounds more effective without multiple fx-manipulations, you've found it herewith. Also 'Innocence' sounds really 'innocent' and rather inspired by melodic Electropop styles instead to evoke the noisy ingredients. 'The Falling' deserves a mention too with its crafty and attractive bassline programming. The title track, an eerie Downtempo-influenced tune with raw, experimental-minded drum patterns concludes this refreshing album. Needle Factory for sure haven't invented an own, authentic sound-style, but their attitude and their courage to break with conventions deserves respect. It at least results in a quite good and diverse sounding Electronica-album, which deserves support and attention. Good work, keep it on!

The appreciated sound-artist Wil Bolton, who used to sign his previous releases (mainly on the appreciated Boltfish) with his moniker CHEjU, should have been enraptured by amber jewelleries and peaceable temperament of Krakow citizens I could also witness about people living nearby Baltic Sea when I explored those countries over the so-called route of amber. I'm pretty sure that Wil read many documents about the beliefs concerning the supposed powers of this "stone" - the ones in Baltic jewellery, also known as succinite, is particularly beautiful for their colour gradations -, which is nothing but fossilized tree resin (sometimes containing accidentally "drowned" insects or plant material), but was believed to chase nightmares and headache and bear wisdom and altruism. On the four tracks of "Amber Studies", he seems to excrete sonic amber by means of effected guitars and thin ambient tones in order to absorbe surrounding reality and ordinary life (people talking, noises of carriages on the pavement or grabbed nearby restaurants or bars on the street and so on), supposedly recorded in the streets and places of Krakow Old City Center he mentions to name his tracks - "Rynek Glowny", "Ulica Kanonicza", "Ulica Grodzka" and "Plac Szczepanski" -. An entrancing way for frozening reality whose final result is prominently atmospheric and healing for your head ache. Just like amber supposedly does!

Coming from Nantes, Bertrand Loreau's recording career started in the early 80s when he purchased his first synthesizer: the Polymoog. Thanks to that and to his newest keyboard, the Korg MS20, he started to experiment with sounds and soon after he formed with some friends a group called Krill. Since then Bertrand never stopped creating music and at the beginning of the 90s he got in contact with the label Musea and started to release albums for them. On 1992 Musea released the first Bertrand solo album "Priere". Since then he released for Musea Parallèle and Dreaming labels nine albums where he mixed progressive, new-age, classical and experimental music taking inspiration from Klaus Schulze and Vangelis. The album I'm about to review is titled "Journey Through The Past" and has been printed by Spheric Music, the label run by Lambert Ringlage. This isn't exactly a new album by Bertrand Loreau, it is a selection of tracks recorded on the 1982-1988 period. At that time Bertrand composed many tracks influenced by the Berlin synth scene of the 70s. On these tracks you'll hear echoes of Hoening, Froese as well bits of Schulze, without forgetting the influences of the French school of Jarre and Vangelis. Bertrand picked up nine tracks which span from calm suites with celestial atmospheres (like "Meeting You" or "Welcome In The Show") to long mesmerizing suites made of sidereal sounds and nice melodies (check the two parts of "Le Ciel Est Jaune D'un Liquide Inconnu" and "Dx Seven Age") passing through great upbeat tracks made of several arpeggios (like on "Moog On The Moon" and "L'arpege A Tord"). The album is very long and to get into it at the best I suggest you to listen to the tracks separately different times.

The new regency of cut-up electronica, a scene which bred many successful artists and musicians who almost permanently conquered the hearts of so many listeners that they sometimes buy their pigs in a poke, could be based on a triumvirate in the forthcoming future. After a couple of EPs printed by their label Doumen Records, this Leipzig-based trio made up of experienced musicians Devaaya Sharkattack, Guschling and Simon 12345 received the unofficial imprimatur by notorious magazines (Vice, Groove) without the accomodating intercession of any promotional agency and first acclamations by underground audience on the occasion of their live appearances on stages shared with Mount Kimbie, Cloud Boat, Eskmo or Untold and at FUSION, the largest outdoor festival in Germany. Their crossbreed of traditional acoustic instruments - piano, guitar, drum, trumpet, clarinet - on the one hand and synthesizer, modern editing techniques and sampling on the other hand, which stylistically bears a likeness to Prefuse 73, Gold Panda or similar attempts of blending together a syncretic style with no defined boundaries within the same track and a contemporary sound such as those ones by German (maybe forgotten) bands like Netzer or many Japanese contemporary musicians (it's not so casual Praezisa Rapid 3000 managed to mouthwater Noble, a stylish and remarkable J-pop label), coalesces with a pronounced passion for exotic collagism of samples and genres (they wisely manages to dose and whisk hip hop, ambient, jazz, post rock, IDM, film music, disco, post dubstep), which rather reminds Felix Laband and similar weird musicians. Even if they're undoubtedly humorous, I'm not sure many listeners could understand it: for instance the humour of the track "Thom Liwa" could not be easily understood by those ones who never listened the "spiritual" songwriter and singer Tom Liwa as well as the typical mispelling of notorious names by some electronic musicians (Com Truise, Duran Duran Duran, Donna Summer and so on) as well as the supposed references to an imaginary freak between Geoff Farina's Karate sound and J-pop in the track "Dojo Days" and other funny quotations. But this is just a little flaw, that is not going to impede the possibility to be recognized by broader audience.

This album from Rafal Iwanski is a collection of track, according to the linear notes, related with a question about human brain that is if this is an era which brain is stating to be overloaded. This is an electroacoustic album made with tone generators, filters and synthesizers with, in my opinion, nothing to justify the claim of the linear notes except the absence, not unusual in this genre, of computer, the main actor of current information overload.
"It is you brain?" is a short and static intro to the album, based on a sort of sinewaves loop. "Artificial landscape" is, instead, based on small noises above a quiet menacing drone that slowly evolve. "Contra-stasis" is a slowly moving track where filtered tones create a quiet evocative tension continuing in the next track "minute by minute, second by second" more oriented in the development of small tones above continuous tones. "Total overproduction" is based on single tone slightly evolving, using a beat and a menacing line of synth revealing the influence of old industrial act and is, perhaps, the best track of this release. "Reversed space for no one" is a static soundscape until a beat and some noises gives colors to the track. "Reset digital demon" close this release with a journey into noise as evocative as disconnected to rest of the album.
Musically speaking this is not a bad album as is well played and constructed, however the absence of a fil-rouge gives the impression that the linear notes were written just to justify the release. However, without reading the notes, this is a record worthing a listen.