Spencer Doran

In 2010 a then 21-year-old James Blake released a series of three EPs in the fringes of the dubstep/wonky scene, dicing modern R&B samples, piano and his own voice into tiny rhythmic shards and sprinkling them around UK bass music’s decaying exoskeleton. With each EP his approach grew more abstract and by the last, Klavierwerk, […]

Shangaan Electro — V/A – Honest Jon’s Life-affirming electronic dance music from South Africa with a 180 bpm synth-marimba blur that unknowingly refracts current trends in international club music (namely, Chicago juke and UK funky house) back into the global dancefloor ether…amazing YouTube videos to boot. Florine — Julianna Barwick — Florid Kickstart-funded a cappella EP […]

Lumen Tähden — Kuupuu (Time Lag) First proper full-length release from Finland’s Jonna Karanka, mixing muffled sing-song folk, bubbling electronics and jumbled avant-improv in a lo-fi haze. Beautiful and haunting. Flaming Tunes — Gareth Williams and Mary Currie (Life and Living) A reissue (!) of a small-run cassette from the mid-’80s. Williams was the "non-musician" […]

Treny. Michal Jacaszek (Miasmah). First real masterwork from Polish post-classical composer Michal Jacaszek. Jacaszek’s work is clearly nestled in the digital-conscious world of 21st century modern composition (think Max Richter, Ryan Teague, Jóhann Jóhannsson, etc.) but is strange enough to avoid the overtly cinematic/soundtrack feel of much of his peers’ work (Teague, for instance, is […]

In recent years, New York band Gang Gang Dance has become a creative force in experimental rock, with a sound created by intersection of a wide pastiche of influences. The conceptual bent of their new album seems to be something like a 2008 version of an album like Talking Heads Remain in Light, mixing electronic, […]

Kraftwerk is a tough band to cover in a documentary because the scope of their influence on modern music is so wide that it’s nearly impossible to grasp, and their discography is so multidimensional that something is bound to be left out. A comprehensive and interesting history on the band seems like a difficult task, […]

Elodie Lauten Unseen Worlds In the current world of modern composition, no movement has been more influential than minimalism. With the canon of bona fide first-generation minimalism set almost in stone with the big four (La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass), not much is left undiscovered. However, much less examined is […]

Album by Gas Kompakt The sound of Gas is tough to push into an established subgenre corner. Too stagnant to be “techno,” yet too mobile to be “ambient,” Gas elegantly moved beyond both genres with a certain otherness that seems to be neither. Closely linked to the already well-defined German minimal techno sound, artist/musician/thinker Wolfgang […]

Album by Steve Reich. Nonesuch. Steve Reich’s work stands today as one of the pillars of modern music. Along with his contemporaries Philip Glass and Terry Riley, his exploration of the potential emotional weight of the cyclical repetition of music phrases in the 1960s and ’70s was not only one of the last great movements […]

CD by Times New Viking. Matador. The lo-fi rebellion has come and gone, but its echoes ring in underground rock to this day, liberating bands from the creativity-limiting atmosphere of studio recording and allowing them to hone their expression at home. Years of being a necessity for underground rock bands have made low fidelity a […]