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The Haxan Cloak Excavation
Label: Tri Angle

What are we to make of music that dwells on death? Our culture does its best to push the inevitable out of our minds and for most artists, apart from rare exceptions like Coil, odds are that evoking death is a cheap way of importing gravitas, reflecting a cultural neurosis while keeping it at arms' length. Listeners don't need any external data to figure out what The Haxan Cloak (a.k.a. Bobby Krilic) is meditating on via his second album, Excavation. From the noose-like loop of rope on the cover to the sharp in-breath of reversed drum hits, which stalk restlessly over the album's misty wastes, Excavation imagines the afterlife as a kind of spiritual meat grinder. Appearing courtesy of Tri Angle, a label that's gotten plenty of aesthetic mileage out of the spectral, The Haxan Cloak's full-bore emptiness feels refreshingly inescapable. As Ben Frost's By the Throat is to fans of composers like Jóhan Jóhannsson, Excavation is to witch house; it's unsparing but still palatable, metal-influenced in a thoughtful way, and almost suffocatingly cinematic. Read more » 

  • Filed under: review
  • 04/15/2013

Roman Flügel "Even More" b/w "More&More&More"
Label: Clone Jack for Daze

If there isn't already an excellent sports analogy for Roman Flügel, one needs to be invented. The Frankfurt producer/DJ has been consistently unflashy and solid over a lengthy—especially by dance-music standards—career, and this is why he's become a sort of unstuffy institution. It's as if Flügel has built a modest home on the ridge where dancefloor prowess meets the art of crafting layered, schooled tracks; furthermore, he's been too immersed in his work for much hype to stick to his strangely low-profile figure. Given these characteristics, Clone's Jack for Daze imprint seems to be an ideal outlet for Flügel to flex his style-hopping muscles, and with "Even More" b/w "More&More&More," he's put together two stupidly effective and raw—yet giddily detailed—jack tracks. Read more » 

  • Filed under: review
  • 04/15/2013

Kahn Kahn
Label: Black Box

Like many of his comrades in Bristol's Young Echo collective, Joe McGann's work as Kahn has skipped across genres at will. In addition to garage- and dubstep-based efforts for bass-music mainstays Punch Drunk and Deep Medi, McGann has lately put his name to an exciting series of releases with his friend Neek (a.k.a. Sam Barrett), which essentially fed grime and bashment dissociative steroids. This self-titled EP ramps up those releases' marginal vocal presence—every track here features a different vocalist—and the backdrop is considerably eerier. Read more » 

  • Filed under: review
  • 04/12/2013

Christian Piers Clocked Decay EP
Label: SourceUnknwn

The third 12" to come from A1 Bassline's SourceUnknwn imprint again finds the label head himself delivering the product. This time around, the UK artist appears as Christian Piers—a moniker we assume is something resembling his given name—offering three technoid house workouts led by a standout title track. Read more » 

  • Filed under: review
  • 04/12/2013

The Knife Shaking the Habitual

Pick
Label: Mute/Brille/Rabid

In all honesty, XLR8R doesn't really need to weigh in on whether or not the new LP by Swedish duo The Knife is any good. It's been seven years since the spellbinding Silent Shout ushered in a new era of moody synth-pop, four years after singer Karin Dreijer Andersson once again captivated The Knife's fans with her bewitching Fever Ray project, and even Deep Cuts' decade-old hit "Heartbeats" continues to charm just about anyone who hears it. Basically, records like Shaking the Habitual arrive more or less entrenched in hype, expectations, and adoration. (XLR8R even went so far as to explore the highs and lows of the collective preconceptions before we'd heard more than a tenth of its music.) So, if we don't need to explain why The Knife's 98-minute behemoth of a fourth album is one of the best releases of 2013, we'll instead talk about why it should be considered one of the most important albums in recent memory. Read more » 

  • Filed under: review
  • 04/11/2013

Lorca If I Told You EP
Label: 2020 Midnight Visions

At times, it can be hard to describe the music that rising Brighton-based producer Lorca makes without it sounding—on paper at least—a little generic. Indeed, the vast majority of elements that go into most of Lorca's tunes are fairly commonplace amongst his UK peers; he works with fractured, late-night garage rhythms, muted synth lines, and reverb-drenched snatches of R&B, none of which are exactly rare amongst the current wave of British electronic artists. Yet on the three-track If I Told You EP, his most substantial release to date, he proves that he has subtle compositional skills that can outstrip many of his peers, and a talent for understatement that sets him apart from herd. Read more » 

  • Filed under: review
  • 04/11/2013

Various Artists Acid: Mysterons Invade the Jackin' Zone—Chicago Acid & Experimental House 1986-93
Label: Soul Jazz

It's been almost 30 years since the advent of acid house in Chicago. In the time since then, the unmistakable sound of the TB-303 bass synthesizer has enjoyed successive waves of reinvention and popularity, becoming one of dance music's defining characteristics in the process. Along the way, the 303 itself has become fetishized to an insane degree, fetching high prices on the secondhand market and more recently even inspiring boutique-made exact copies in the DIY underground. It's from within this acid-crazed context that Soul Jazz finds itself as it releases Acid: Mysterons Invade the Jackin' Zone—Chicago Acid & Experimental House 1986-93, the follow up to last year's Invasion of the Mysteron Killer Sound digital dancehall compilation, and a spiritual companion to its 2005 acid comp, Can You Jack? Chicago Acid And Experimental House 1985-95. Read more » 

  • Filed under: review
  • 04/10/2013

Perc Work Softer Revisited
Label: Prosthetic Pressings

Where did sci-fi techno go? These days, it seems that the most listened-to contemporary techno spends its time hanging around abandoned factories rather than dreaming about interstellar travel. Perhaps economic austerity calls for some version of realism, but it's just as likely that computers have made notions of the future seem kind of quaint and attainable. Perc (a.k.a. Ali Wells) has been doing the industrial-techno thing since The X-Files went off the air, which is about three stylistic lifetimes in electronic-music terms. Last year's A New Brutality EP helped define techno's rehardened tone, sporting a grim tower-block image on its label alongside a track titled "Cash 4 Gold," but this remix collection from Chicago's Prosthetic Pressings label actually looks back to the b-side of a 12" from 2008. It's unclear at first why this particular cut is the focus, especially since Perc is not unprolific, but whatever the case, the absence of a clear referent frees remixers Orphx and Desonanz to strike a balance between underlining and annihilating the source material. Read more » 

  • Filed under: review
  • 04/10/2013

Ana Helder Beating PC EP
Label: Cómeme

In our review of last year's One Night in Cómeme, Vol. 1 (the inaugural release of the pan-Latin Cómeme label's compilation series), we described the Matias Aguayo-helmed imprint's stable of artists as a group that's "dead serious about being playful." With her second effort for the label, burgeoning Argentinian producer Ana Helder again fits right in with the label's characteristic approach, satisfying an appetite for off-the-wall sonics and eccentric production choices while never losing sight of a dancefloor where fun is given priority over power. Read more » 

  • Filed under: review
  • 04/09/2013
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