Hum a Silent Prayer

There's a new short review of the split by the marvelously talented ladies Grouper (Liz Harris) and Inca Ore (Eva Saelens)*, two of the premier talents in today's fuzzy ambient, proto-hauntological musicsphere, over at PopMatters. Having dabbled in lo-fi tape recording for years and years before the slow dawn of computer music myself, there's something even more affecting and certainly more intimate about this music for me than, say a certain Radiophonic/public television referencing subset of the genre. Ore's damaged and worn voice on her half of the CD feels like a cross between the amateur "nobody's ever gonna hear us" adventurism of the Lucas and Friends Discover a World of Sounds disc and the confessional fictitious diaries the young Jonathan Caouette aired in his exquisite documentary Tarnation.

Coincidentally, I came across a compilation of clips on Youtube that resembled pieces one might have found on the Lucas disc while searching for clips for Weird Tapes (the clips were also called Weird Tapes). Certainly, there's much to be said about this type of slightly pernicious voyeurism into our younger, hidden moments, but what interested me was that it reminded me that I have a couple boxes worth of the same stuff in my basement. For years, I was under the assumption that this stuff had no value to any one besides myself, but perhaps it might be interesting to throw these into the cultural deitrus and see what happens.


*Ore's Birthday of Bless You would have surely made into the best of 2008 categoryh had I heard it sooner.

Slipped Discs 2008

Two little blurbs about two little overlooked albums in '08, Grouper- Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill and Friendly Fires- S/t.

Read 'em and the rest of the list here.

Slow Motion Suicide

Perhaps like most of you, I wasn't aware that Daft Punk had released a film two years back. It has just been released on DVD via Vice Records. It's not at all what you might expect, especially had you seen their anime Inter5tella 5555, for reasons detailed in my review here. Quite interesting stuff though, for those willing to brave the desert terrain.



More reviewing here for Grouper's new album, which is a really rare find. Didn't know what I was expecting when this arrived in the post, but I was definitely blown away when it came through the speakers. The unintentional sibling to Belong's fantastic Colorloss Record, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill might just be the perfect pairing for a year-end superlative blowout.

On the non-authored-by-me front, there continues to be a great dearth of textual analysis emerging from the Dubstep scene. Notably in recent weeks, K-Punk's article on 2562 and the convergence of the scene with minimalism. The Quietus also has a nice review of the Bug's new album (a long awaited follow-up that more than lives up to its anticipation, which i will also be weighing in on in a few weeks) which explores the double meaning of the word "Dread", particularly how it pertains to the new school of dub (though it doesn't really talk about the album itself too much).