BotN #15 || Oval - 94 Diskont

Okay, so first post in my amazing "Best of the 90's"-series thingy (BotN = Best of the Nineties). It's taken a while to get going, I know; mostly because I've forgot, but frankly also because I am very lazy. As you might have noticed in the title, this is the album No. 15 out of 15 (meaning the least awesome of the 15).

Now that the boring informative stuff is out of the way, let us get to the actual music:

A groundbreaking album by a not-so-silly man with a silly name (but that's just my opinion), Markus Popp released this album with his group Oval in 1995 and in the process practically created a new sub-genre of electronic music in the process.

So called glitch music has since then grown pretty popular and terms such as IDM and glitch are thrown around whenever some dude on Warp releases a new single.

Most stuff that gets called glitch is in actuality not what I would call glitch. This, however, is undisputably delicious glitchy ambient.

The album is centered around the 24 minute masterpiece Do While, which was composed from short clips and sonic fragments from scratched and mutilated CDs, sampled and rhythmically organized into a single flowing, (surprisingly) organic and melodic drone. It's so watery and constantly mutating, hypnotizing and with subtle percussion it still manages to retain the true spirit of ambient as Eno meant it to be; background music.

Sure, the other songs are great too. But none are as mesmerizingly beautiful as Do While.

94 Diskont is one of those albums that has become so hugely influential, but was largely ignored at the time of its release, like Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (practically single-handedly created noise music).

This might not be the best nineties album, but it sure is one of them.

7/10

DO NOT DOWNLOAD IF YOU HAVE SHIT ATTENTION SPAN

Password: OFmK7Z9

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Alva Noto - Xerrox Vol.1

What up peeps? (This is how cool people talk, right?) It's been a laawwwng time since I posted anything worthwhile now. So here it is; on the 1st of July, a new beginning (sorta).

The blog has been on a bit of an (is it 'an' or 'a'?) hiatus for a while now, mainly because I've been really, really busy doing nothing.

Okay! So, Alva Noto is this German (or something; look it up yourselves, jeez) dude who's real name is Carsten Nicolai, which actually sounds a whole lot cooler than Alva Noto in my opinion.

I found out about him by browsing through the artists last.fm deemed similar to Pan Sonic (Fun Fact: The spectrogram in the background is from an excerpt of their song Maa, off of A. Really great album, maybe I'll post it some time).

Considering how Pan Sonic's music sounds, I expected this to be minimalistic, experimental and atonal electronic music as well, but boy was I in for a treat! Sure, Alva Noto is pretty minimalistic and experimental too, but he sure as hell doesn't make atonal music. Xerrox Vol.1 features (to my great surprise) some of the most beatifully melodic ambient I've ever heard. It kind of sounds like Oval's legendary 94 Diskont meets 90's Autechre.

Either it was Oval and Autechre who was very avant-garde, or Alva Noto's music is just heavily influenced by 90's experimental electronic music (Xerrox Vol.1 was released in 2007).

What's important though is the music, and it is a-fuckin'-mazing. If glitchy, minimalistic ambient is your thing, that is.

TRANSFER ALBUM TO YOUR COMPUTER *BEEP-BOOP-BEEP*

ATTN: I seem to have accidentally written "Xerrrox Vol.1" to the ID3 tags instead of "Xerrox Vol.1", so it's mistagged. Just noticed it yesterday, not a big deal but you may want to fix that yourselves (especially if you scrobble to last.fm).

Shining - Blackjazz

Hey there. Weird (but awesome) album for ya today. Shining is this band from Norway and they've been pretty much been playing experimental jazz with electronic elements and other stuff their entire career.
But on this album they just went nuts. It's sounds like some sort of crazy mix of Meshuggah, Dillinger Escape Plan, industrial, jazz and metal. Seriously crazy shit. And really good too. This is just about as avant-garde and experimental metal gets.
It's gotten quite a lot of hype recently, and it deserves it (most of it, anyways).
Not much more to say, just check it out for yourselves, as it's pretty hard to describe this musical madness/genius with only words.

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Aves - Demo

Hi. This is a rather unusual release. Aves' 2009 Demo is a very nice mixture of post-punk/shoegaze, black metal and a bit of post-rock. These guys are part of the so called blackwave movement that has risen in the latest couple of years.
And it's instrumental. You may have already heard it, and you may have not, but this is still a great demo.
I specifically love how they manage to blend these quite different styles seamlessly and still making it sound great.
It's instrumental, which is good because it lets you focus entirely on the instrumentation, which is quite awesome.
It's been quite humorously referred to as "twee black metal", due to the fact that Aves incorporates black metal elements into their upbeat, twinkly and melodic post-punk.
The black metal influences are most notable in couple of songs, for example the beginning of the second song.
Also, there's this badass 70's hard rock/heavy metal-ish guitar solo being played while the drums are doing insane black metal-style blastbeats. Does it get more awesome than that?

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Idiot Pilot - Strange We Should Meet Here

Hey there. So I've got a new album for ya, this time by a band called Idiot Pilot.
I don't really feel like typing out a long description, so I'll just write something short.
It's really hard to classify them as one genre, but I guess you could say that they are similar to The Sound Of Animals Fighting, basically really experimental rock, sort of neoproggy with a little post-hardcore here and there, and a little electronic influences.
Except that these guys are more post-hardcore and shoegaze mixed with electroclash/new rave.
This may sound like absolute shit, but it's actually very skillfully done, and has just the right amount of guitar, alternating between screaming/singing vocals and synths/electronic kick drums.
It's interesting for sure, so check it out - I, for one, really enjoyed this album.

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Jesu - Silver

Hello again! I'm back after the holidays and I hope that you've had a merry Christmas.
Silver is an awesome EP by Jesu, a band that former Godflesh frontman Justin Broadrick formed after they split up.
Jesu is only one of Broadrick's many projects, but definetely one of his best. They have always played a very eclectic brand of music, being rock at the core, but experimenting with many different genres such as shoegaze, industrial, drone doom and ambient, among others. Kind of like a british Boris, I guess.
Silver, however, is a shoegaze release. And a heavy one at that. Imagine Black Sabbath meeting My Bloody Valentine, and you pretty much have the overall sound on this EP.
Broadrick does a good vocal performance, as well as playing all the other instruments except for bass and drums.
All the songs have a very nice structure, consisting of many layers of sounds with guitars high in the mix and vocals low in the mix. Like proper, traditional shoegaze should be.
But Jesu are not afraid to think outside of the box and incorporate ambient synths, industrial beats and doom riffs to make the music their very own.
A must listen for any fan of shoegaze or bands like Boris.

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Boris - Smile

Aww right. Last album for today is Boris' latest full-length (released last year). If you haven't heard of the pure awesome that is Boris yet, now is a good time to do so. Briefly, Boris is a japanese trio who play pretty much everything from stoner rock to doom metal to experimental drone. I've posted a collab album of theirs earlier (here), where they worked with drone doom gods Sunn O))).
Smile is more of a traditional (and by traditional I mean not batshit crazy) stoner/psychedelic rock album (although, the some songs are pretty droney), but every once in a while they release some heavy-as-fuck drone/doom or some experimental stuff. Either way, it seems that everything they touch turns to fucking gold. Including this and the Sunn O)) collab. This may not be their best, but it's still brilliant.
Oh, and make sure you have an extra pair of underwear ready for the solo in the end of the first song.

IF YOU DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS YOU'RE AN IDIOT

TwinSisterMoon - The Hollow Mountain

Hello there. I've got a new album for you with some incredibly original (and awesome) music. I was originally planning on posting this ridiculously amazing screamo album today, but as I realized that it seems as if this blog is gradually becoming more and more emo/screamo oriented, I wanted to keep the variety with some different music. Now, I haven't listened to any of TwinSisterMoon's previous releases (I'm actually not sure if they've released anything before this either). But if this defines their overall sound, the band/artist has a promising future. Also, I don't even know if this is a band or just a single artist (there is basically infomation about TwinSisterMoon to be found, as I see it). But it is incredible. The album was released this year and is so far a strong contender for being one of my favorites this year. It's basically some sort of drony, psychedelic ambient-like french folk and it is just hauntingly beautiful. As I listened to it I was both frightened and amazed by the cover. For some reason it feels like a perfect visual representation of what the album sounds like. It's all very dreamy and the vocals are very vague. I kind drifted off in my own imagination while listening to it so much that I forgot to really listen to it and analyze the music like I usually do. But I'm pretty sure it some accordion in the background, giving it a very "french" sound, so to speak. So yeah, I really, really, really think you should listen to this album. It's very unique, beautiful and simply amazing.

YOU BETTER LISTEN TO THIS (DOWNLOAD).

On a different note, I think I might be posting the awesome screamo album I mentioned earlier on Tuesday. So check my blog in two days if you want some reeeeally awesome skramz.

Black Moth Super Rainbow - Start A People

I'm back with another awesome (obviously) album for you. This one is called "Start A People" and it is in my opinion probably BMSR's best album. It's all very psychedelic and electronic mixed with some indie pop, plus subtle vocoder-vocals (you know those things that make sound like a robot?) in the background in just about every song. It sounds very experimental and it probably is; happy, trippy electronic pop with a chilled out hip-hop beat. I guess you could call it "psychedelic trip-hop"? Either way, this a great album filled with trippy awesomeness and you should probably (read: definitely) check this out.

DWONLAOD.

Amps For Christ - Circuits

Time some for hipster garbage! No but seriously, this is album is awesome. And very weird. The most fitting description would be experimental folk I guess. They shift genre back and forth the whole album, but it's still folk at it's core. Oh and did I mention it sounds really experimental? Yeah, I guess I did. Not much more to say. Strange, yet awesome and very enjoyable. Check it the fuck out.

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