Stuff (I'm just testing this)
ONE OF THE MOST ORIGINAL MUSICIANS EVER
ARTIST`````BRUCE HAACK
ALBUM`````THE ELECTRIC LUCIFER
GENRE`````EARLY ELECTRONIC, OBSCURO, EDUCATIONAL
YEAR```````1970
WHY:
Since I mentioned him earlier... Bruce Haack is one of my favourite musicians and the one I respect the most. He used his homemade electronic instruments in ways nobody did before him and just a few artists after him. I consider him to be the greatest musician in the field of electronic music ever. Simply, he was so "far out there" that the music industry almost completely ignored him (and still does), even now - when his popularity is growing (over the internet) and his fanbase was never this big.
Here I present you 2 of my favourite Bruce Haack albums - his most serious album "The Electric Lucifer" and the best compilation of his early works - "Hush Little Robot".
BIOGRAPHY:
Bruce Haack, born on May 4, 1931, was one of the most musically and lyrically inventive children's songwriters of the '60s and '70s. Despite -- or perhaps because of -- his intended audience, his music was unusually expressive, combining homemade analog synths; classical, country, pop, and rock elements; and surreal, idealistic lyrics. Haack's innovations and desire to teach still sound fresh, making his music a favorite with fans of analog synths and esoteric recordings. Followers like Luke Vibert and Add N to X championed his unique musical vision, which embraced concepts like "powerlove" and turned household appliances into synthesizers and modulators.
THE ELECTRIC LUCIFER REVIEW:
After hearing late-'60s rock & roll from his friend Chris Kachulis, Bruce Haack added acid rock to his already diverse sonic palette. The result was 1970s Electric Lucifer, a psychedelic, anti-war song cycle about the battle between heaven and hell. The underlying concept of this concept album is "Powerlove," a divine force that not only unites humanity but forgives Lucifer his transgressions as well. But though this album extols the healing powers of peace and love, Electric Lucifer uses often menacing music and lyrics to get its point across. "War" depicts the battle royale between good and evil with a martial beat and salvos from dueling synthesizers; a child's voice murmurs "I don't want to play anymore, " and a funereal synth melody replaces the electronic battle march. Haack's marriage of rock rhythms and his unique electronics creates a sound unlike either his previous work or the era's psychedelic rock, but songs like "Incantation" and "Word Game," with their percolating beats, buzzing synths and vocoders, are much trippier than most acid rock. The strangely forlorn "Song of the Death Machine" sounds a bit like a short-circuiting HAL singing "My Darling Clementine," while "Word Game" features cool, dark electro-rock and brain-teasing lyrics like "Ray of sun/Reason/Knowledge/No legends." Kachulis sings on both of these tracks, and his deadpan vocals complement the weirdness going on around him nicely.
His involvement with Electric Lucifer also includes aiding the album's release on Columbia Records; though it was Haack's only major-label release, Electric Lucifer remains musically innovative and subversive.
You can check him out here:http://www.brucehaack.com/pix.asp
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(In Polish: Matki Wandalki = Vandalizing Mothers)
ARTIST`````FELIX KUBIN
ALBUM`````MATKI WANDALKI
GENRE`````ELECTRONIC, EXPERIMENTAL
YEAR```````2004
WHY:
After Bruce Haack, Felix Kubin is one of the strangest artists in the realm of electronic music. German madness and general disregard for enjoyable sound are his trademarks.
BIOGRAPHY:
Felix Kubin, one half of the Hamburg based futuristic noise band KLANGKRIEG, lives and works against the rest of the world. His activities comprise Sci-Fi Pop/Noise/animation films/radio plays/experimental broadcasting. As the messenger of exploding lungs he started his label "Gagarin Records" in 1998 and rules the "syndicate of counter-noise" since 9.9.1999. His experiences both in electroacoustic music and strange electronic pop (that he followed already in the early 80ies with his notorious band "Die Egozentrischen Zwei" — released as "the Tetchy Teenage Tapes of Felix Kubin" on SKIPP and A-Musik) induced him to launch a vinyl record label for all kinds of Dada-electronics on the edge of pop and experimental music.
ALBUM REVIEW BY Fritz Ostermayer:Old School? New School? In reality, both are just a question of orchestral and sound preference. The freespirit, in this case, decides for No School: for only from the fragments of No (ie. No Wave in reference to No New York) new forms can originate. And, at best, No would also imply idiosyncratic wanking and autodidactic self-empowerment.
As 11-year-old pre-teen, this Gyro Gearloose of pataphysical sound Felix Kubin not only sought for self-satisfaction with his legendary child-band „Die Egozentrischen 2“ but also instigated the first folk synthesizer against its own instruction manual (of course in accordance with the „zeitgeist“ at that time). The result was an elevated monstrosity from a merciless rage-experiment with frightening precociousness. All at the peak of the Neue Deutsche Welle... Thank god that today, more than two decades later, there is no stopping this former „wunderkind“! Admittedly, the mischievous demolition of pop structures, which was once attributed to a juvenile Berserkerdom, has since then evolved into a more conscious Dada-Hooliganism. Or - to put it simple with the metaphor of the album title - it turned into the „Mothers of Destruction“ (in Polish: Matki Wandalki = Vandalizing Mothers).
The fact that the anaemic ghost of deconstruction doesn’t spoil the 13 tracks on this CD must have to do with Felix’ abstruse humor. Like his love of sounds, the hum of Kubin’s cosmos is powerfully distinct. It reminds (not only) me of tschechoslovakian animation films and – even further back – of the electro-acoustic sound experiments of the fifties avant-garde long before their development into pop,
Matki Wandalki unites several pairs of aesthetic contradictions. Abstract Darmstadt goes Pop. The result is „witty“ musique concrete and something that I can only interpret as „program-music“ without a narrative „program“.
That by such cheerful science he would also come out with a real hit for the possibleWeb-Nerds-Casting-Show (Hit Me Provider) is no surprise for me. On the conrtrary, it’s more than ever pleasing. With it Felix should finally be making the well deserved dough...As for me, I just can’t leave him out of Pop...No School? Better this: Own School! Class Kubin!You can check him out here:http://www.felixkubin.com/http://www.myspace.com/httpwwwmyspacecomkubin
See this great video for "Hotel Supernova":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7M4RIeePO48
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ESSENTIAL.
ARTIST`````BRIAN ENO
ALBUM`````BEFORE & AFTER SCIENCE
GENRE`````EXPERIMENTAL, ROCK, PROG
YEAR```````1977
WHY:
I keep listening this album every spring for the past 4 years so here it is. I generaly dont like him much but this is one of my favourite albums and probably one of Eno's most important moments.
ALBUM REVIEW:
Before and After Science is really a study of "studio composition" whereby recordings are created by deconstruction and elimination: tracks are recorded and assembled in layers, then selectively subtracted one after another, resulting in a composition and sound quite unlike that at the beginning of the process. Despite the album's pop format, the sound is unique and strays far from the mainstream. Eno also experiments with his lyrics, choosing a sound-over-sense approach. When mixed with the music, these lyrics create a new sense or meaning, or the feeling of meaning, a concept inspired by abstract sound poet Kurt Schwitters (epitomized on the track "Kurt's Rejoinder," on which you actually hear samples from Schwitters' "Ursonate").
The music on Before and After Science at times resembles Another Green World ("No One Receiving") and Here Come the Warm Jets ("King's Lead Hat") and ranks alongside both as the most essential Eno material.
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AFTER 3 YEARS OF SILENCE THEY STILL HAVE IT. AND AGAIN IT SOUNDS GREAT.
ARTIST`````AUTECHRE
ALBUM`````QUARISTICE
GENRE`````EXPERIMENTAL, GLITCH
YEAR```````2008
WHY:
My favourite album since Tri Repetae. If you are new to Autechre you will need some time to get used to their abstract sound.
ALBUM REVIEW:
"Unified" and "cohesive" would not be two of the first couple hundred words used to describe Quaristice, the first Autechre album since 2005's Untilted. The only aspect that prevents Quaristice from seeming open-ended, as a bunch of tracks splayed arbitrarily across a disc, is that it begins and ends with ambient (as in entirely beat-less) pieces; an arc might gradually become apparent, but that would only be the result of increased familiarity with the sequence of tracks. It's disparate, to say the very least, but that is not at the listener's expense. Just by glancing at the length of the track list, it's apparent the album is not standard-operating Autechre; at 73 minutes in length, most of the 20 tracks are more like vignettes, yet the ideas arrive fully formed, never appearing to be dashed off or loosely sketched.
The variety of ideas is nearly imposing, the best of which include the deadened chiming and clanging of "Simmm," the stealth jitter of "Tankakern," the Drexciya-worthy pitch-black neo-electro of "Rale," and the handful of stunning and duly swarthy ambient tracks -- especially the closing 12 minutes shared by the chilling "Notwo" and "Outh9x" tandem. A couple moments, unsurprisingly, border on the inscrutable, with "Fol3" sounding like a collage of car collisions and slammed doors smeared and backmasked for nearly four minutes, and "bnc Cstl" more like a hyper-speed gag of sound effects, its high hats and snares tucked deeply into the mix. While it can take some time to get a handle on its generous stream of components, Quaristice is far from just another Autechre album. Not since LP5 has being impressed been so obviously secondary to enjoyment.
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"At the top of the mountain, there is a special sensation at the centre of your body, and you can feel the earth moving underneath your feet. In the deepest part of the ocean, there is a cool and special place that is good for thinking. It happens to all of us at the same time. A feeling of the All-Thing."
ARTIST````KELLEY POLAR
ALBUM````I NEED YOU TO HOLD ON WHILE THE SKY IS FALLING
GENRE````LEFT-FIELD, HOUSE, ELECTRO
YEAR``````2008REVIEW FROM PITCHFORK:
The highlights come easy and often. The aforementioned album opener "A Feeling of the All-Thing" turns that churning spoken-word passage into the skeleton for a celebratory sliver of symphonic electro; "Roseband" opens on a set of string trills before blossoming into a brisk, stuttery bit of disco; the throbbing "A Dream in Three Parts" rests on a gooey analog synth and Polar's even gooier delivery; and the sumptuous, string-drenched boy-girl duet of "Entropy Reigns (In the Celestial City)" is one of the best of the year so far.
Never mind that all that hokum isn't actually so hokey, that the ideas that form the backbone of the album's intro sequence-- that mind/body divide-- have functioned as dance music critic catnip for the better part of the last 15 years; by working them into a strain of music that walks the tightrope between that divide, Polar's managed a neat rhetorical track. More than anything else, it's really Polar's willingness to extend himself beyond dance music's often frustrating, low-risk, low-reward tendency towards po-faced seriousness that excites. Regardless of how you square with his overly-besotted singing style, his new age proselytizing, his occasionally agonizing earnestness-- and make no mistake, some people will hate this record-- it's hard to debate the artistic impulses that led him to make it. After all, if the sky really were falling, what more could one person do than set out to make a new one?
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A SOLID SHORT RADIO DOCUMENTARY ABOUT ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTAL ELECTRONIC BANDS IN THE HISTORY OF MUSIC
ARTIST````BBC RADIO 4
ALBUM````KRAFTWERK: WE ARE THE ROBOTS
GENRE````RADIO DOCUMENTARY
YEAR``````???DESCRIPTION:
Marc Riley traces the career of Kraftwerk, whose 1970s electronic music owed more to the experimental German classical compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen than to any pop tradition. They were part of a new generation of young West Germans, living in the shadow of the Cold War, who identified with the need to recapture a German cultural identity distinct from that of Britain and America.
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