Six North member Takumi Seino's side project Priority is a beautiful and enchanting mixture of electronics and fusion... The guitar playing reminds a lot of Pat Metheny or Allan Holdsworth (mostly clean or slightly treated, but also lightly or heavily distorted, obviously with lots of pedalling, fade ins and fade outs, like in fusion's best tradition!) coupled with a beautifully deep fretless bass and an intense and pretty much cymbals-only drumming create a relaxing environment. Samples and layers of soft synthetic sounds help the electronic side create an ethereal and heavenly blend with melodic, meditative and melancholic jazzy vibes, awesome atmospheres and a terrific dreamlike overall experience... A unique album, so intense, so beautiful and so powerful. One of my favorite electronic/fusion records!

Debut album by this Japanese combo whose offering consists of a beautiful blend of soft electronica, experimental avantgarde music, jazzy fusion and zeuhl music... Robert Fripp, Weather Report, Lyle Mays, Jeff Back's latest, John Zorn, the Legendary Pink Dots, Klimperei and a lot of other musicians could be their references. It's hard to categorize and even to describe this because there are so many influences involved. If you know the label you might have a pretty good idea, if you don't you have to try to image the above and a lot more, all interacting together as it really goes from almost plain jazz Mays-like piano ballads ("Inner Crystal", "Circular Pinx"), to more experimental quasi slow no-wave (the title track), to progressive rock mixed with free-jazz, fusion and small bits of funk ("Silence, Darkness") and beautiful acoustic ballads ("Where No One Has Gone") with Enya-style female choirs. This album has female pop/jazz vocals (in Japanese) in some tracks.

"Live at Molde International Jazz Festival" is the recording of the event which took place in Molde, Norway the 19th of July 2001 and the three tracks of the lenght of more of ten minutes each are a massive amalgam of electronica and noise, with some drum inserts on the first track and some guitar excerpt on the third. Merzbow needs no introduction because it's twenty years that Masami Akita attacks audience's ears with different form of noise. Instead Jazzkammer exists since 1998 but it's two members Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre have been active in the Norwegian club / noise scene from different years. The forty minutes of this CD are of no easy listening because massive amount of disturbing noises has been used. I can't tell you if I enjoyed these recordings because usually I use headphones to review CDs. The only thing I can say at the moment is: OUCH!

This is the second release in Sub Rosa’s Invisible Architecture series and it sees two masters of the "digital bleeps" manipulation cooperate. Christian Fennesz and Mika Vanio (one half of Pansonic) worked together in this new release recorded live in Brussels at the Kaaitheaterstudio the 29th of November 1999. The slowly evolving drones of ?34 minutes 20 seconds’ are kinda chatartic and the duo build a deconstructed suite which has got two kind of treated noises: one part digital bleeps and contorted tiny instant metallic noises and the other one is made of kinda ambient sounds ... Here and there they also used buried melodies which make the suite a little more interesting. Mika Vainio’s solo piece ?32 minutes 19 seconds’ is more subtle and fades in slowly with little volcanic like explosions along with hypnotic frequencies. The piece has got less sound interruptions (while the other one was a continuous stop and go of changing noises) and it grows slowly until it explodes into chaotic pads which suddenly dive into monotonous frequencies. An interesting work which request a certain concentration into the listening: you are warned!

Here comes some weird uncontrolled freaky shit! If you think you're prepared, think again! After four years of silence (which is a word I'll never use again when speaking of Controlled Bleeding), Paul Lemos and Joe Papa are back with this new album that opens a new chapter in their evolution. Everything they had so far can probably be found in these fifteen tracks, in some odd way, buried by tons of other noises or clear and out there. Schizophrenia and obscurity alternate, so you won't have enough time to get into the dark moods of songs like "Poisoner pt3" before you're assaulted by the disorienting swing of the free-jazz "Schist" and then the total no-wave freakout improvisation of "Felch Space Scan" (with Ruins drummer Yoshida Tatsuya) and then brought back into the delayed watery honiric dub time of the title track. A highlighted use of electric bass, musique-concrete, experimental, classical, dark, avantgarde rock, free-jazz, no-wave are all mixed together to defy your expectations and remind you of Primus (the male nonsense vocal improvisations in "Felch Space Scan" and the electric bass in some songs remind of Les Claypool), John Zorn, Jacopo Andreini, Post Prandials, Maisie, Klimperei, Parts, Bz Bz Ueu and all these other bands from the no-wave scene. Also present is a Brian Eno cover of "Here Come the Warm Jets" and three bonus tracks after some silence (oooops, I said the s-word again!).