Buke and Gase are an upstate NY-based duo who make unconventional music with unconventional instruments. Together they come up with some of the most original and interesting music I've heard in a while, both on the record and on stage, and as is always the case in these rare circumstances, describing their sound is really challenging. If you can, imagine some sort of experimental post-industrial avantgarde indie rock... Odd meters, doubled melody lines, angular beats, intricate harmonizations and skilled used of distortion, pitch shifters, harmonizers and delays elevate the whole Buke & Gase experience to the level of something you've never heard of and that will keep you glued to them. Incredibly they achieve all of this with just the two of them and I've seen them doing it live. They are a power house and they don't even have a drummer or use any loops or pre-recorded material. Arone Dyer (woman) sings and plays a heavily effected Buke (baritone ukulele) and Aron Sanchez (man) plays the even more heavily processed Gase (guitarbase - a self built guitar looking instrument that has some bass strings and some guitar strings) as well as a modified kick drum with some tambourine jingles on the front of it.
Do yourself a favor and check them out yourself because describing them doesn't really do them much justice! They kick ass and you won't really know that until you hear what they do.

Deth Rok is the moniker used by NY-native Texas-based electronic artist Aaron Havill, a young electronic music producer, composer and engineer who has been working for Ministry's Al Jourgensen. Al's label is in fact the one who gave Aaron a chance and released his new CD "Us & Them" on his 13th Planet records. You shouldn't however except a Ministry clone or even an industrial-metal band. "US & Them" has no guitars or even distortions at all (except for maybe one track)... The music is more on the quieter side, although it has an underlaying sinister vein that pervades all the songs. Slow down-tempo electronica with a hoarse softly-spoken vocal parts whose themes fringe upon apocalyptic, political and cynical. The vocals actually are a pretty focal point here. Where most bands in the electronic genre might choose to hide their lyrics behind walls of saturation and screams, Havill makes the conscious choice of tackling uncomfortable topics and making sure what he thinks and says is actually intelligible and unadulterated. The sarcastic nature of the topics is futher exacerbated by samples of preachers talking about the end of the world, TV/radio commercials about medicine with really bad side effects and things like that. The slow pace and the articulation of his voice helps drive home the points he is making. Sure a lot of it is metaphoric and not necessarily matter-of-factual, but obviously the lyrics are important or the artist would not have chosen to include them in the digipack packaging.
If you are in the mood for some dark and sombre death-electronica give Deth Rok a spin, unless you are Eddie Kramer, you probably won't be disappointed!

Brooklyn-based electronic musician/composer/improviser Sarth Calhoun a.k.a. Sarth has spent the last few months working on what at first sight looks like just any other iPhone/iPad app but actually has a lot more to it than that: it's a book, it's a story, it's an illustration, it's an album, it's a graphical album (hence the name "The Gralbum Collective")... and it might even, potentially, be a new way of distributing music all together!

The book is an easy 10-15 minute read of one-liners distributed across 8 short chaptes. It tells the tale of two children who find a device that generates transmissions which create mass hallucinations that the government wants to suppress. The story flows easily and is well augmented by the visuals. I have to say I am not sure I liked the ending though, which felt a bit inconclusive and open-ended (unless of course Sarth is setting it up for a sequel).

Graphic novels and comics are not my strong suit so I won't be commenting much on the visuals but I can tell you that there are several styles interacting to tell this story, almost as if it they came from different pens. You start with the Pixar-style cartoon type images with soft colors and round edges (think Toy Story) and you get to the more stylized, straight-lined and vectorial asian-inspired comics that in the app get filled with colors in stages and get various other photoshop-filter treatments. Reality then shifts once again and takes the shape of black and white pictures that have been treated to look like drawings. Then the black and white gets slowly colored in and eventually, by the Epilogue, you have pixellated, vectorized and almost art deco new modernist minimalistic paintings. The cool thing about all of this is that you can interact with these images by tapping, zooming, swiping and thus re-ordering the 80+ page animated novel with your touch.

Musically speaking, "The Book of Sarth" is an interesting album of experimental electronic music which draws from a number of inspirations... At times it sounds like Clock DVA, at times like Brian Eno, at times it reminded me of some '80s avantgarde electronica and kraut. The album is instrumental for the most part, but there are several tunes where vocals are pretty front and center... Sarth has a beautiful voice, especially when he does spoken word stuff in the lower register, and my only criticism is that having spoken word parts on top of music that is playing while you are reading a book that is also a graphic novel can be a bit distracting... Inevitably, when the words of the songs came in, my mind started listening to those and forgetting the words my eyes were reading... Unless Sarth is trying to create some kind of state of confusion on purpose, or unless the words in the music are supposed to somehow interact with the words on the screen (which, if they were, wasn't clear to me), I would have opted for some entirely instrumental music to go with this kind of release.

Design wise the app doesn't feel as polished as it could be (at least not when it comes to controls, buttons, scrolling etc)... As much as I am a fan of small text, I have to say I felt the text is a bit hard to read, especially when the unfortunate choice of colors makes it even harder (think light green font on light yellow background... seriously!?!?!). A black Sans-serif font instead of a colored Serif font would have way easier on the eyes, or even increasing the font size a little bit would help on the iPhone version (it almost feels like the app was programmed on/for iPad and then just downsized for the iPhone).
In my opinion, navigating the app is not very intuitive and could be re-designed a bit better, with function in mind. The good thing is that you can navigate the images and the story separately from the music. The bad thing is that if you want to listen to the music again after having read the book (which I found myself wanting to do) there is no way to do that with the app running in the background (if you quit the app or switch to another app, or even if you lock your screen, the music stops). Also the stop/play/skip/rewind button on my headphones (which by the way is highly recommend you wear to enjoy "The Book of Sarth") as well as on the Apple earbuds doesn't work with this app, which is a pity. Allegedly it's possible to download/extract the tracks from the app into iTunes so that you can listen to them while doing something else, however it is not sufficiently clear how that is supposed to be done and that too should be made more obvious/functional. Other than that the app works pretty well and except for one crash while swiping quickly to skip ahead it's been stable for me.

Aside from the fact that the title sounds a bit pompous and pretentious, I think calling it "The Book of Sarth" is almost a bit misleading, since I'd argue that it is more of an album and/or a graphical novel than it is a book. What I think is the most impressive and admirable part of this whole thing is that by delivering his music and his ideas in this way, Sarth has handed us (the general public) and the music industry at large an exciting and potentially lucrative new way of distributing words, music and images. With the music industry in a deep state of crisis, the publishing industry in an even deeper financial black hole and the creative industry always looking for new ways of being creative and deploying and distributing creativity on a large scale, the Gralbum could really be an amazing and entirely new way for artists to make a living. We've seen some isolated instances of artists releasing apps that contain their music or their videos, but the Gralbum, could be a platform for everyone to release albums with liner notes, lyrics, cover art work and so much more!! The Gralbum could be the album of the 22nd century! As a hardcore music fan who is deeply concerned for the future of music and unhappy with the current state of things, that is truly very exciting to me! My hat goes off to Sarth for having come up with this brilliant idea!

At $7.99 it might be seen as expensive when compared to the rest of the apps in the Apple ecosystem, but the price is right when you consider that you spend at least $9.99 for a new album from the iTunes store, which will be just music and no graphic content.

I give it 4 stars because I think the implementation deserves 3 stars, the content deserves 4 stars and the vision behind this entire project deserves 5 stars!

Norwegian band Shining (not to be confused with the Swedish metal band by the same name) is a jazz-metal band with a cult following in Scandinavia. My Norwegian friend, label-mate and Chain D.L.K. contributor Eirik Havnes first told me about them and I had the pleasure to check them out live at SXSW in Austin this year. Their concert was phenomenal and in order to attend I walked out of an admittedly quite amazing show by Bruce Springsteen that I had won tickets to and was happening at the same time across town.
Their latest release is a CD + DVD entitled "Live Black Jazz", which follows their last full length album "Black Jazz". It is a recording of a recent live performance in Oslo which looks and sounds even better than the show I saw in Austin. This multi-camera shoot has great sound and video quality and you can choose to watch it or just listen to it, since it's a double release.
These guys take metal and add in acoustic and electric saxophone, keyboards, distortions, triggered drum sounds and they play intricate tunes with unusual time signatures and fast-paced changes. Did I mention they do so with maniacal precision and absolute mastery of their instruments? When you hear somebody switching around with such fury and precision, it's hard for me not to draw a comparison with John Zorn's Naked City, who pretty much were the first to mix saxophone with metal and to experiment with lighting fast changes, odd tempi and juxtaposition of such distant genres such as metal and jazz. Although it the case of the Shining, the link with jazz is pretty much only to be found in the way they can play and in the instruments, they do keep the link with experimental (and in a way prog) music alive with their use of keyboards, which besides layering sounds, usually plays lead lines or perfectly doubles the lead played by the guitar, the sax or the Akai EWI electronic wind instrument. For the headbangers out there, don't be put off by what I am writing and embrace the future because this band is looking ahead! There's still plenty of rocking out to do with the Shining and the distorted guitars and metal riffs are in extra large abundance.
I'm hooked.

Frank Riggio is an Italian-French artist based near Toulouse, France. He's been making music and releasing records for a long time, but his first official debut release dates back to 2007, shortly after he closed the label he was running (Sagaloops). He then embarked on a more sophisticated musical journey, the effects and results of which we are seeing in "Psychexcess I - Presentism", the first of a three part installment which showcases Riggio's abilities as a composer, sound designer and engineer. The album is masterfully executed and you can tell from the compositional style, the versatility of the sonic palette and the quality of the final mixdown and mastering that Riggio is a talented professional who excels in his field. The low end of this album is just amazing (present, controlled, thought out) and comes through even on smaller speakers and without a subwoofer. You can also tell that he works in sound design and music/sound for film/TV because he uses some of the same techniques and types of sounds that you often hear in that world (a great example of that is the fantastic sounding track "Venusian Philosopher (Future Vision I)", which would make a great Hollywood action-suspense movie trailer sound track).
I really like this album because it finds a great balance between the electronic realm and an organic truthfulness that only real instruments can provide. To describe these textures with classifying words is hard: in a way it has elements of classical composition, but it doesn't have any classical instruments (except for the occasional strings line), obviously it is downtempo electronic music at its core, but it goes way past its purest and simplest form and it also doesn't have a lot of beats or rhythmical patterns that you would expect in that genre. It kind of flows through your life as if it were it's own self-contain sonic universe, taking in elements from a variety of genres and making it own. Sparse elements of glitch, french chanteusisms, dark-ambient soundscapes, sci-fi sounds, There are field recordings, obviously there is a lot of sound manipulation and there is a strong footing in the experimental world too.
Definitely a very mature record that enjoyed listening several times and exploring in depth, both sonically and mentally. Looking forward to part II.