And here we go again with Muslimgauze. Almost 150 releases in 20 years (this would be no.127). After a series of sold-out limited edition releases (such as the four LP box set called "Tandori Dog", a nine CD box called "Box of Silk and Dogs", the "Iranian Female Olympic Table Tennis Team Theme" CD packed on a table tennis paddle etc) for which there is a subscription plan with discounts available from Staalplaat, this untitled CD (Muslimlim 028) with a red-filtered picture of people around a fire on the cover, presents ten songs with repetitive low-freq dub/d'n'b electronic bass lines, minimal original percussions, some other more electro-percussive patterns, enchanting middle-eastern female vocal lines, occasional instruments that sound like an indian sitar or a flute and this pretty much constant distortion in the background. The entire album has this low-fi thing going. I don't know if that is a choice (you never know what people do or intend to achieve with their records when you deal with experimental music) or if it is just how these records were found/mentained/archived after his death. Besides the permanent thin statics in the background (like if you were listening to a poor quality radio station or to streaming highly compressed mp3 or real audio files...) there are distant things you almost can't hear and especially in the first song there are these extremely annoying interferences (the sound gets very loud all of a sudden for just a second and then goes back into a volume that you thought was normal level, but that is probably a lot attenuated if you consider these peeks that come and go as your normal 0dB level). Also the sounds sometimes peeks and distorts or goes to the left side of your stereo speakers for a bunch of seconds... It's very weird, but considering that the bass line pretty much seems constant it would make sense if they told me that it's been overdubbed or that those spikes are intentional... Anyway, this is it. I guess you can consider this to be the normal Muslimgauze playing with distortion as if it was another musical mean to experiment with, pushing minimal percussion patterns to the edge of saturation, using subtle disturbances as a tool to stress people's listening experience and pushing the limits one step further, or maybe I should say 5dBs up! It's hard to relate to Muslimgauze's discography in terms of "evolution" since we (or at least I) don't really know whether this record is old or new, if you know what I mean... But my last thought definitely goes to the Middle-East, where blood-baths in the name of a dead christian god, western civilization, financial power and world domination are taking place every day for the past decades and nobody cares. Nobody knows what Muslimgauze would have to say about it... And please let's not forget that that was the very thing his music was inspired by and was all about... Let's not think for a moment that Muslimgauze is just music In fact it's so much more than that, so much that lately, with all what is happening, he would probably be inspired for the rest of his life, if he only was still alive... Let's hope the madness stops and ALL people learn what respect is, how to use it and act with a little more intelligence to put an end to this useless and bloody conflict.

This is quite old but I wanna give it a quick review anyway, so bare with me. Ex-Suspiria member Mark Tansley and his pal Apollo, have released their new CD called "Irreverence", a powerful 12-track dancefloor-friendly electro-goth album with pounding industrial-dance hammerings, techno/trance beatz, well-done synth lines and background textures, treated vocals and more in that direction...
If you like to dance your ass of to strong goth/indus peaking on german ebm then give this a try...

This is a re-edition of Klimperei's first ever record, which at the time, or more than 10 years ago, already was just a selection of five hours worth of music. If you are into experimental music, you must already know this prolix french duo (in music and in life) and the fact that they have 28 old songs on one CD will probably be good news to you. Those who ain't familiar with Klimperei should try to imagine a unique experimental voyarism, musique concrete vanguard, baroque, romantic, visionary, old-fashioned (above all in a record with material this old!) and "french"; simple minimalism, short compositions with out-of-tune pianos (or even worse with classical guitars and piano, both are out of tune) and other home made or really weird and unconventional instruments. Forget punk, this is the new do it yourself stream, a monument to home recording as well! Spontaneous as in every mainly improvised record. Klimperei throw everyone off with their stuff. For lovers and people really into this.

Hungarian-born Gabor Csupo is the founder of the Californian quality-experimental/electronica label Tone Casualities and known for his music work on various TV shows. When he left Communist-ruled Hungary to move to the US he decided not to forget his roots and the Eastern European musical projects. In 1994 he started the label to give exposure to the people whose music he's been listening and have been influencing him. He didn't take too much advantage of the fact he owned a record label, in fact he only put one other record of his own out on Tone Casualities. So after many years he's now back with this ambitious double CD, packaged in a beautiful folding digipack with nice graphics. The two CDs are called respectively "Liquid" and "Fire" and present you with 35 left-field electronica pieces of great impact and quality. Although his extremely wide array of credited sources of inspiration spans from jazz/free jazz/fusion/progressive bands (Brand X, King Crimson, Miles Davis etc) to the pioneers of new music (Frank Zappa, Brian Eno, David Sylvian, David Torn, Bill Laswell, Laurie Anderson) to the more modern geniuses of the electronic pop sound (Bjork, Massive Attack, Lamb) without forgetting true electronics-only bands (Skinny Puppy, Leftfield, Autechre, Chemical Bros) you don't really find very much of this. Let's just say those influences are there but they ain't in your face. The list goes on and on and basically most of the folks he mentions are some of my favorite artists, therefore I thought this album was gonna totally kick ass!!! I didn't get what I was expecting musically (I don't really know what I was expecting with a list that big anyway) but I wasn't disappointed at all. It is an original album of sample-heavy inventive music. It's hard to explain. It has that particular "genius-at-work" shadow, kind of thing... It's almost like a concept album but I couldn't find a common denominator to be elected as the theme, expect for maybe his life... His life, his musical experiences, his emotions are probably all inside this, packed and ready to be put on display, so this is Him, this is Csupo, so please allow me to introduce you to Gabor Csupo!

I really dig the description of "mesmerizing trip hop listening experience", used by the label in an attempt to define what is just that what those words say, but yet so much more: Michael Banabila's second CD "VoizNoiz - part II", part of the Urban Sound Scapes series is a mind-altering thing... Rotterdam-based sound-manipulator Banabila has collected a bunch of voices and other sounds and turned it into this swirling electronic voyage that peeks into experimental musique concrete (never getting annoying though), lets you vanish within clouds of soundscapes and patterns of beats and doesn't ever forget the time-frame it is coming out in. Pulsing beats, freezing german-like Kraftwerk robot voices, beautiful patterns of changing rhythmical structures, skillfully arranged into a nice album where sounds and voices have never been used so magically together before, treated as one single thing, one entity. What I also really loved in this album is the use of almost jazz-line-up instruments (i.e. the soooo english and soooo cool song "Dinoh Dinoh", with an uprigth bass sample, funky brass instruments and hammond sounds) and other traditional instruments such as guitars, drums, bass clarinet... You got to check this one out!