this has been one of my favorite albums for a while, i should have posted it sooner :S
lush atmospheric soundscapes and amazing beats... it reminds me of an instrumental clark mixed with ambient brian eno. quite alien, but so comforting that you can't help being relaxed by it.
a beautiful mix of speedcore, breakcore, harsh noise, and pure, refined shit. the name fits well. the lyrics and musical style changes throughout the album immensely, and by the end of the album he is just screaming like he is in immense pain while sampling dirty rap, with heavy distortion on everything. i love it.
Audio Sample (again, NSFW, as it displays the cover art.)
thought this would make for a nice early-halloween post... seriously, don't listen to this album if you aren't ready to sell your soul to satan in exchange for listening to one of the craziest avant-death-metal groups that ever existed. enjoy >:D
alva noto is back for another glitchy, heavily processed data trip with his weirdo spoken-word-french-artist-guy. an obvious followup to the amazing unitxt, this album gets a bit further into noise territory than the previous one.
man, it's a bit more than half a month since i last updated! i realize that i am pretty freaking awful at this "daily" thing, hehe. maybe i should rename it noise weekly? idunno, it's becoming harder and harder to find albums that i haven't already posted :s
hopefully you enjoy this one, its glitchy idm with some ambient/acoustic/house elements... i guess you could call it downtempo? who knows, but it's nice, hehe
this album is an great introduction to the madness that is john zorn. it begins with some nice blues/jazz influenced tunes, slowly incorporating insanity into the music, to the point where you can actually almost bear the most extreme of naked city's music. note that this album is still extremely tough to grasp, as john zorn is not exactly a great intro to noise music; he is known to give even the most seasoned harsh avant-garde veteran a severe migraine... but still, this album is a classic, and if you can get past the blaring saxophone and painful free jazz improvisations, you will see the awesomeness that john zorn is. that said, beware the album "torture garden". not even joking. it will hurt your brain if you haven't heard at least this album first :o
some great glitch, in a vain similar to richard devine, mixing sound design with noise with harsh glitch music. very cinematic in sound, and high in production quality. many of the albums by this artist are free on his site, this album being one of the few exceptions. visit his site at www.accesstoarasaka.com, it is quite a neat site, too ^_^
if you loved the previous album, you will most likely love this one as well :D
its made up of three dreamy, hawaiian stylized, slightly noisy soundscapes with pretty drones and atmospheres, very peaceful, a bit less alien sounding than the previous album.
if aliens wrote music, this is probably kind of what it would sound like... recently i've been getting into drone music, which is basically music that is not as much focused on melody or rhythm as it is on texture and dynamics, and i must say, this is a freaking good drone album, with tons of freaky alien soundscapes, so if you are into drone, you should definitely get this album. i like it so much, that i actually recommend buying it (i did, and ok, maybe thats just cause it was just released and wasn't on any big torrent sites yet, but whatever, it's still worth it). this album is a masterpiece :D
haven't posted math rock for a while, so i thought this classic math rock album was in order. its instrumental, and not as intense as some other math rock i've posted, but it is rather different than the tapping + superfast drums combo that is somewhat popular among the math rock genre.
happy fourth of july, americans who read this! everyone else, WHY DO YOU HATE FREEDOM!?!? D:
jokes aside, this album has a very unique minimalist style that takes influence from many genres. sadly, this does not seem to be a concept album (though it would make a great one!), but the album flows nicely, and it never gets boring. great album, a+++, would pirate again.
here is some classic (and classy) aphex-esque idm (the artist was/is friends with richard (d) james, from what i have heard). all song on this album are great, and many (with a few drum-machine exceptions) show a great amount of effort splicing and juggling and destroying old funk loops. this album is a wonderful example of what some early english idm was like, and why it was so great :)
a bit odd for this post, as this is not a singular album, but a collection of albums, an anthology, of noise and electronic music. a must have for any lover of noise and experimental electronic music, this anthology (of 6 different parts, the first is the only one i feature here because, well, its the first) is a very complete set of works, detailing a very complete history of the evolution of experiments in electronic music and noise. many artists, from sonic youth, to john cage, to evolution control committee, all make an appearance in this collection. this collection is a great introduction to the vast world of the eclectic electronic (heh).
benn jordan, otherwise known as "the flashbulb", is a great electronic musician, known for his insane programmed beats that don't (usually) utilize any drum loops at all. However, while he is usually categorized under the genre of "drill n' bass", he released this album not too long ago in honor of brilliant astronomer Carl Sagan, and, in this album, in which he chooses not to use his well known pseudonym, he also chooses to step away from his frantic style of music for which he is generally known. in this album, beautiful ambient soundscapes, appropriately space-y leads, and minimal drum patterns create a majority of the great atmosphere throughout this album (with several major exceptions in style and instrumentation, but you will have to listen to understand completely).
though this is definitely not the general style the flashbulb is known for (though, neither was his latest album, "Love as a Dark Hallway", which can be categorized as jazz, more than electronic music), it is very nice to hear jordan experimenting with other styles and genres, and his professional and complex sound remains consistent throughout these experiments.
glitch/noise music made by scratching a cd, in the same way a dj would scratch a record. cuts, pops, and retriggers, along with the noisy sound of the data being transfered, create a very interesting electronic atmosphere, as long as you are not easily annoyed by repetition.
pioneers in sampling, layering, and having a complete disregard for all musical copyrights ever made, the tape-beatles were the first musicians (other than negativland, and perhaps john cage) to create music categorized in a genre known as soundcollage, or plunderphonics, if you'd rather call it that. they used analog tape recorders to steal from pretty much everything, often messing with it, and blending it with other samples, nearly beyond the point of recognition. they also experimented with other forms of media, notably a very interesting audio-visual technique that involved 3 or more projectors overlapping each other's images (seen below), creating visual collages almost as strange as their audio ones!
a conceptual piece by Ryoji Ikeda, an experimental/glitch electronic musician who has had some very interesting ideas throughout his career (this being no exception!). this piece is an exercise in very limiting minimalism, focusing entirely on rhythm and dynamics, and totally ignoring timbre (texture) and pitch, by using the purest sound that can be synthesized, the sine wave, at 440Hz, or A (above middle C). an interesting listen, but probably not something you'd listen to more than once unless you are VERY into conceptual art and very extreme minimalism.
p.s. use stereo headphones for this piece! the interplay between the left and right sides makes up one of the main features of this album, and without it, the piece becomes even more repetitive :P
ok, i understand many of my readers have a strong aversion to anything by venetian snares (for some weird reason), which is why i haven't posted anything by him here yet, but i must say that this is quite different from snares' usual amen break slicing madness. harshly chopped samples from reggae music intersect with warm analog sounding synths and strange chanting to create a very unique sound that one would definitely not expect from aaron funk. a very enjoyable ep, whether or not you like funk's previous works.
a great introduction to noise, using a traditional rock setup (despite some very un-traditional guitar tunings!). pioneers in punk rock that are a bit underrated.
some intense braindance from france (that rhymed!)
not as entirely loop focused as some other artists, doc colibri tends to use more drum machines and glitchy device sounds, along with samples from french media, to make his music. his tracks ("danse avec les nains" in particular) even involve him giving his own freakish take on the genre of dubstep. very much worth the download, which you can get/stream legally for free from over here!
concept album by the residents with some really great (and really bizarre) lyrics. this originally had some sort of computer program to go along with the album with freaky avant-garde graphics flying all over the place, but i find that the album is great even without it. "everything was okay before mtv" :)
(very!) glitchy hip-hop music, occasionally featuring a very interesting style of highly processed and sliced rapping, where words are almost indistinguishable because of the individual grains being thrown around all over the place. listen to the track below to see what i mean :)
japanese harsh-noise/sound-collage/free-improvisation band. there hasn't been any harsh noisy music on here for a while (if ever), so i think its about time that i introduce some non-melodic music to you all :)
dont blow your speakers out... a rule of thumb when listening to noise music, whether your medium be studio monitors, 200 dollar headphones, or a cheap pair of ipod buds, is that you should start with the volume on 0 and slowly move up until it is at a comfortable level, being sure to leave headroom in case there is anyone change in dynamics (when the music suddenly changes volume, which happens quite a bit in noise music)
heed my advice, i have messed up many speakers in my time i have spent listening (and making!) to this sort of music, i know better ;)
ps the youtube video below is one of the least noisy tracks on the album, don't get this album and expect to be treated to an (easily) understandable melody/beat throughout!
"hey cuttlefish (my musicname), i thought you said you weren't gonna make another hipster post..."
"yes, but, you see, animal collective is not hipster, it is awesome music that hipsters just happen to sometimes like too, so, uh, FUCK YOUUUUUUUUU"
feels is an album which might sound funny to you (at least, more funny than the usual animal collective freak folk would sound weird to you), and this is because all the instruments are very slightly untuned from the traditional twelve tones we are used to hearing. it sounds better than i am describing it just trust me.
eno has been posted here once before, but that was when he was still doing glam rock and such... this is one of the most classic ambient albums ever made, and it is pretty much impossible not to relax to it :p
it was created to be played in airports, where eno described the atmosphere as "tense and non-inspiring", so it is supposed to be calming and unobtrusive, which i think he certainly accomplished!
