The four latest updates come from an impressively august roster led by post-industrial pioneer, Asmus Tietchens, and Lord of lowercase, Steve Roden, with luminaries Stephan Mathieu (+ Caro Mikalef), and France Jobin in strong support. Over the last decade Line has become synonymous with leading edge inquiry at the interface between digital minimalism and microsound. [...]
Articles By: Alan Lockett
ALAN LOCKETT :: Slings the Wooze Mix
20 exponents of blurred and blissed ambience, washed out synthwave and reverb-drenched electronica selected and strategically slung into a document of daze, a hymn to haze. Slinging the Wooze is Igloo Contributing Editor, Alan Lockett, aka albient for mix-meddle and audio-fiddle. The theme, vaguely programmatically, is of blinking re-emergence from Winter’s stunned chill, bleary peering [...]
AUN :: Phantom Ghost (Denovali)
Phantom Ghost has about it a compelling elusive quality, as if evaporating when its solidity feels graspable; it seems to float, as if levitating, just above ground, attended by plumes of fog enveloping proceedings, mirroring the spectral figure and blur of the cover. AUN, project of Montreal experimental scenester, Martin Dumais, has evolved since 2007 over [...]
Yann Novak :: Presence (Hibernate)
Presence operates in the inbetween between unresolved and resolution, flirting with the chill charms of the unpitched then back, finding refuge in more comfily pitched material. Low-end looms cede to sudden subsides, then other kinds of radiation, drawing back from the edge of abrasion, softening in focus to warm fuzzy then ceding again to cold [...]
BROKEN20 :: 3View
These three releases (10-20′s Magnet Marsh, Isodyne’s Dreams Torn From The Sky and Nanorhythm’s Beyond the Green Wall) show Broken20′s faculties very much intact in their drawing together of fragments across the electronic spectrum from washed out wonk-tronica to headf**k techno. (February—2012) Broken20 is a nearly new label run by Marcia Blaine School for Girls [...]
Stormloop :: Snowbound* (Glacial Movements)
There are no great shifts to the glacial isolationist ambient paradigm here, but a consummate execution of a programmatic template. A little more than this, in fact, since Spence manages, with the quiet storm of his loop, to imbue Snowbound* with a metaphysical sense of something beyond within the chronostasis of his scenes. Snowbound* compiles [...]
Spheruleus :: Voyage (Hibernate)
What makes this Voyage, indeed our (listening) voyage, resonate is not the literal of the littoral, of dock to deck to descent, but the figurative force; its ripples and waves, pitches and tosses, the lulls and lurches of life and its times paralleled. The sea has exercised the Muse of composers over the years, from [...]
Bvdub :: I Remember (Translations of Mørketid) (Glacial Movements)
The sound apparently sweeping the new ambient nation is so anodyne; and that, unlike the likes of Lull or Aquadorsa, or indeed Netherworld, it chimes so thinly within the GM programme of glacial and isolationist ambient; that the glacial I Remember deals in is so commodified, the isolation at such a remove, from a safe [...]
Pausal :: Autumnal (Students of Decay)
Autumnal is a diptych of floating tableaux of wistful bucolica and gently heart-string tugging micro-symphonics created from a mélange of treated guitar and processed vinyl, with organic assistance on strings from Svitlana Samoylenko, Alex’s partner in side project Olan Mill, and electronic enhancement in the form of computer-mediated post-production tweaks. It’s become a trope of [...]
Marcel Dettmann :: Conducted (Music Man)
Dettmann conducts his brute orchestra of kick-pulse, synth-stab and bass-throb with predictable pazazz, choreographing anthemic and abstruse, antiques and curios, deriving gains from playing tradition off against sub-genre-cidal rule-breaking. Marcel Dettmann’s star continues its ascension with a second commercial mix, notwithstanding the hiatus since 2008’s scene-defining Berghain 02 - “near flawless” according to Techno arbiter [...]
Chihei Hatakeyama :: Mirror (Room40)
Chihei achieves a felicitous juxtaposition of analogue sound sources, digital processing and musicianly sensibility, imbuing Mirror, for all its floaty-drifty hyper-ethereality, with a certain satisfying loamy quality – a sonorous life less ordinary, both below and above. [Release page] On Mirror, Chihei Hatakeyama draws on the earliest recorded period of Japan’s history in a form [...]
Scott Solter :: One River (Hidden Shoal)
A lulling affair of quiet majesty, at once glacial and warm, with a hymnal swell-relent dynamic, One River relaxes without being anodyne, retaining attention through certain incidences — a strange twist in pitch or key, a barely perceptible tinting or tainting of timbre here and there. [Release page] One River is a reissue on Australia’s [...]
Pascal Savy :: Liminal (FeedbackLoop)
Liminal is an epithet normally associated with the avant end of electronic experimentalism, like the lowercase abstractions of Steve Roden or the near-silent studies of Bernard Günter. But this is a different Liminal, one that skirts the perimeters of melody and harmony, albeit without immersion. [Release page] Make like Blake, take the doors of perception, [...]
Dagshenma :: Zaumi (Electroton)
Those that feel they might fancy a fractured stopover far east of, say, Schematic, or maybe Chocolate Industries, be warned, as, like some hyper J-pop wind-up pup, the unrelenting rough and tumble of Zaumi ’s errorist activity may prove ultimately too wearing for all but the most intrepid avant-idm enthusiast. [Listen] Zaumi is Kyoto electronic [...]
Dragon’s Eye :: 3View 2011.10
A trio of recordings from Dragon’s Eye that maintains the reputation of Yann Novak’s minimal electronica and sound art house for covering all points north of experimental. The three on view here span the breadth of DE’s concept and sound – from the organic-electronic hybrids of Mem1 & Stephen Vitiello to the evacuated installation spaces [...]
ALAN LOCKETT :: End Summerless Mix
Conspiring with fellow-travellers in ambient-drone and atmospheric electronica, Alan Lockett, Igloo Contributing Editor (aka albient for mixage and audio-scrawl), compiles a document of days. [September 2011] End Summerless: a mix to accompany impressions of a summer now apparently ending, with a strange sense of somehow never having started; not worth talking about perhaps, but listening’s [...]
Premonition Factory :: The Sense of Time (Longstreet)
Impresses as a contemporary update of classic ambient space cadence that manages to both lull and engage, to be serene, even blissful, without falling prey to the insipid tendencies of some of the recent jumpers on the No-Age and post-Kosmische synth bandwagon. [Release page] Sjaak Overgaauw is not a name that will resonate especially strongly, [...]
Richard Chartier :: Transparency (Performance) (Line)
Chartier’s choeographing of silence with sound increasingly seeks the shortest space possible between the constituents of its fabric. [Release page] Transparency completes a decade of CD releases by once 12k subsidiary, now fully free-standing, Line, serendipitous coincidence aligning its publication with owner Richard Chartier‘s 40th birthday. It documents an hour-long performance using as primary source [...]
Robag Wruhme :: Thora Vukk (Pampa)
By turns up close and personal, remote and withdrawn, there’s something warm and congenial in this ebb-flow, for all its disorienting and confounding tricks. And where Wuzzelbud KK sometimes had the air of a geek-attended IDM-dance set with a bolt-on of self-conscious fripperies, Thora Vukk comes across like a more complete work of an integral [...]
Seth Cluett :: Objects Of Memory (Line)
Cluett’s voice – still, deceptively small, decidedly not calm – makes much of Objects of Memory veiled and obfuscated, oddly at once soothing and unsettling. The listener disappears in a Bermuda Triangle – of classical minimalism a la Lucier and Niblock, of contemporary laptopiary and installation sound-art. [Release page] A focus on perception, concern with [...]
Stephan Mathieu :: Remain (Line)
At the edges small flurries crepitate, then fade away and radiate. Mercurial layers spin out in slow motion from centre point, while new tones upwell and recede supplanted by a new set in cyclical recursion. [Release page] Stephan Mathieu works with sources from the (often antique, here recent) past to reconfigure the acoustic space around [...]
Alan Lockett’s Tops of 2011 :: So Far (So Good)
Igloo Magazine Contributing Editor, Alan Lockett’s verdict on 2011’s half-year of music is sofar, sogood, with his picks appearing on two Top lists here. To accompany this, extracts from his thirty picks were chosen and sorted into two piles, broadly designated ambient/drone and techno/dub/idm, and spun into a brace of mixes. :::….:.:::….:::::::..:::::…..::..::::…::::.:.::::..:::…:::….:::.::::.:.::.:::.:::.:::…:::..::…:: 20eleven sogood :: [...]
ALAN LOCKETT :: 20eleven sofar | sogood (igloomag mix)
Alan, known to some as albient for his mix-tricks (and occasional audio-doodle) compiles 15 of driftiest dream-dealers in ambient/drone for 20eleven so far, while for 20eleven sogood he channels another 15 of the movie’n’grooviest techno/dub/idm players. Igloo Magazine Contributing Editor, Alan Lockett’s verdict on 2011’s half-year of music is sofar, sogood, with his picks appearing [...]
Audiokonstrukte :: City Echoes (Fürni)
An ear-pleasing array of synthetic pads and washes, bleeps and wibbles consort with sprightly beats and kinetic bass motifs, the production finely tooled for clarity and depth. [Release page] German producer Audiokonstrukte offers a finely judged blend of spacious urban electro-dub and downtempo electronica on this his first album City Echoes on Mille Plateaux-related Vertical.fm offshoot, [...]
Tommy Four Seven :: Primate (CLR)
Primate seems neither as conceptually crafty nor sonically savvy. That said, Tommy Four Seven perhaps has his sights set on simpler aims, and undoubtedly deploys his deliberately restricted architecture and modality skilfully to peddle a set whose overall resolutely sullen and joyless mood is never less than enjoyable for all that. [Listen | Purchase] Berlin-based [...]
V/A :: Tasogare: Live in Tokyo (12k)
The serene, almost reverential, music issuing from within these Japanese temples is no doubt site-specific, its context of capture preserving a highly particular atmosphere distinguishing it from studio sound. [Purchase] Tasogare: Live in Tokyo documents performances at two temples in Tokyo by a community of 12k luminaries. Komyoji Temple was the venue for sullen soundsmiths [...]