Loscil – Sea Island

With its cinematic soundscapes, distant dub-techno references an subtly constructed ambient soundscapes, “Sea Island” is an album that defies genre tagging.
Maybe it’s because Loscil is defining his own ‘genre’ more strongly with every release.

Stephan Mathieu – Sacred Ground

The music of “Sacred Ground” is created for a documentary film (by Tim Grünewald and Ludwig Schmidtpeter) about the Wounded Knee and Mount Rushmore memorial sites in South Dakota:
“Two memorials in the heart of America. Two hours’ drive but worlds apart. Mount Rushmore is an icon of the United States, attracting millions of visitors each year. The Wounded Knee Massacre Site receives just a handful of visitors each day.”

It is also inspired by (and dedicated to) Florian Fricke, who created soundtracks with Popol Vuh for many Werner Herzog movies.

Kenneth Kirschner: Imperfect Forms

“With electronic music, it’s hard NOT to create huge amounts of sound… and to me it’s often about taking things away” – Kenneth Kirschner

An overview of an impressive multimedia project on the Tokafi website, showcasing the versatile music of Kenneth Kirschner, a 20-track, 4 hour remix album and much (much!) more.

Enough material to fill your coming Christmas holidays!!

Anna Thorvaldsdottir – Aerial

Right from the opening track it’s obvious that “Aerial” is something else, almost beyond comparision!
It took me some time to grow accustomed to this album. It requires some dedicated listening, on the right moment.
But ultimately, the raw beauty of the distictive textural palette grabbed me, and didn’t let go.
Only to leave me wondering why I had not heard of Anna Thorvaldsdottir before.

Bad Sector – Kosmodrom

Bad Sector’s “Kosmodrom” was originally released in 2005 but sold out within a few months. It is dedicated to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (Russian pioneer of astronautic theory), and shows this dedication by including original Soviet sound devices (like the Aelita synthesizer and the electro-optical ANS), mixed with space mission dialogues and fragments from transmissions of the mysterious spy channel (‘numbers’) radio stations.

Dedicated to all Soviet/Russian cosmonauts – and also recommended to all wannabe astronauts that enjoy drifting away into outer space (while not leaving home)!

Various Artists – Touched Two

Charity compilations come in all forms & sizes, but “Touched Two” is one of truly megalomaniac proportions. I really don’t know where to begin here. This “review” is the very first I ever write without having listened to the album at least a few times. How can anyone éver review a 255 track compilation that presents over 22 hours of music?

John Luther Adams – Become Ocean

“Become Ocean” was inspired by the oceans of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, and the references to the endless oceanic movement are clear from the very beginning. Like there are different ways to look at the ocean’s movement, there are also are different ways to listen to this piece: you can just ‘follow the larger structure’, but you can also focus on the multitude of details underneath it..

“It may be the loveliest apocalypse in musical history” – Alex Ross, The New Yorker