Itto is the collaboration between Ian Holloway and Neil Rowling respectively from Psychic Space Invasion and Directive 4. A long drone that shifts in pitches is just a prelude for the unexpected core of the work where field recordings of various sources intertwine with a dismal guitar plucking. Maybe the only point against this one is that when you start to get comfortable with the difference it suddenly ends leaving you longing for more. Sound On An Empty Road is surely at its best when it's at its gloomiest. A good display of creative verve, worth checking out for both the Die Stadt & co. fanatics and the lovers of the darker side of the Kranky label out there.

This Zairo guy behind Where is probably into scary music and into the aesthetics of the dark ambient/industrial scene judging both from the cover and from the music, but also considered he's put some Atrax Morgue's quote in the booklet. This guy obviously is not a newcomer since I've seen he's already put out something on cdr format. Dark ambient to the bone but with a couple of odd elements like the "werewolf/inhuman" laments that dyes the first track in black on black. Misanthropic and horrorific as you can easily imagine, Zairo seems to be obsessed by rats more than GBH in their famous song. Talking about rats, it could be the perfect soundtrack for that scene of Herzog's Nosferatu where the ship brings the rats and the subsequent cholera in town. In the second track you have those warlike "beats" that speaking about the genre are quite a standard but it's not another pale imitator of Death in June or Blutharsh. In the last two tracks of the records the soft ambiental white noise is pushed so far that there’s an hypnotical side effects and that's probably the part of the cd I’ve enjoyed the most. I'm not such a fan of dark ambient where the keyboard sound is still intelligible but Where is ok due to the production and to the cure with which he's developed all of the tracks without using goth elements.

After several full-length, some 7"es and many tours, Rollerball are back in town with a new self-titled cd on Wallace. Let's cut it short by saying I've just this and another record titled "Behind the barber" but I must admit I love them, honestly I think they're one of the most underrated bands of the last decade. This digi-pack features another extravagant and delicious cocktail of heterogeneous influences with which this band from Portland creates little gems. Acid folk, poppy-psychedelia, free sketches drew with an incredible intensity and "phatos" is what makes the difference in most of their songs. The singing is top notch as always, above all those of Mae Starr (the vocalist in most of the tracks). Funny, depressed, dreamy, melancholic and if it was an "all you can eat" I'd comment "the banquet is damn tasty and rich". The production is rough here and there, but really good (I can't say if a more refined mix and post-production would have improved the release or not) but it's hard to find the Achilles’ heal of this collection of songs. Freaky extravaganza with a "pop-stimmung" and for what it worths, I've played it in the car and my girlfriend was not even complaining as she usually do. Some may think to a more organized and "songwritten" answer to Jackie O' Motherfucker or Alexander Tucker but this music is less country-folk and deals more with varied influence than with the root of American tradition. Recommended.

The British Ambient/Avantgarde artist Marvin Ayres has released another experimental CD and the title gives you already an idea on what he has worked this time. For this release he has placed two grand pianos in different locations with different rooms, hall and reverberation effects. One piano got immaculately tuned in a big orchestral studio, the other was out of tune in an empty room. He has done several experiments with the key sounds, speed, kind and conditions and has recorded only the harmonics of the chords. The recordings of both pianos got merged and reassembled. Marvin could so "win" several resonant overtones and subtle quartertones – a real psycho acoustic experiment which he couldn’t ever expected has happened. So the here presented sound collages are hardly to understand as real compositions, this is a real acoustic experiment after a lot of work and effort. Nobody – including Marvin – could ever expect how this experiment would have been sounded before – so here is the result of Marvin’s very own world of static noise collages. A real companion to his "Scape" CD.

The newest Cruise Control (now Cruise [Ctrl]) is a CDs titled GARMONBOZIA!. On this one John Cult and DJ Gore are giving to the audience a taste of what’s next on their first full length release (which will see Jean-Luc Demeyer from Front 242 on vocals on one track and C-Drik remixing "Eat my fear", track that you can find on their previous MCD "No Hay Banda") with three new tracks of their granitic mixture of industrial noise, techno and drones. The first track "Black lodge" seems to be a techno remix of a Godflesh track where the remixer took off the guitar parts replacing them with guitar drones. The following "Smoke and nude I" is more minimal with its hisses and dark ambient noises while the closing "Crow’s nest" introduce again some rhythm and also a bit of melody creating a sort of electro industrial loop. The tracks sounds great on the short distance and I’m curious to see how the duo will deal the whole album length.