The Fall’s ‘Hex Enduction Hour’ Casts Long Shadows 40 Years On
Easily among the Fall’s top two LPs and one of the finest slabs of controlled noise of the post-punk era, Hex Enduction Hour continues to kick up new dust 40 years on.
Bruce Miller
Bruce earned an MFA in fiction from Goddard College. He teaches college-level composition and literature. He has traveled, documenting music from India, Uganda, Ghana, Senegal, Vietnam, and elsewhere. He's published in Magnet, Rootsworld, Signal to Noise, The Old Time Herald, and The Oxford American.
Ricardo Donoso’s ‘Progress Trap’ Finds Disquiet Through Stealth
Ricardo Donoso’s Progress Trap is cold. It sends chills, causes dark, abstract thoughts, and seems perpetually set in a futuristic noir.
‘Good and Green Again’ Finds Jake Xerxes Fussell Effortlessly Cloaking Folk Song Tradition
Jake Xerxes Fussell’s Good and Green Again sounds as if it might have been released any time over the last 50 years without aging a day.
Elena Setién’s ‘Unfamiliar Minds’ Basks in Quietly Foreboding Minimalism
Immersion into Elena Setién’s Unfamiliar Minds is not unlike watching a bowl being coaxed into shape on a potter’s wheel. The slightest touches can send it in another direction.
Mira Calix Makes a Dada Dance Record with ‘Absent Origin’
Mira Calix’s Absent Origin takes the concepts of Dada and re-arrangement from visual artists such as Duchamp for a series of tracks impossible to pin down.
Claire Cronin’s ‘Bloodless’ Is Pure Catharsis
Claire Cronin’s music plays like the ghostly sounds someone lost in the woods in winter, hungry, beyond tired, and bordering on frostbite might make.
Experimental Duo Raja Kirik ‘Rampoken’
Indonesian experimental duo Raja Kirik force a scuffle between seemingly disparate entities, at once alarming, joyous, and defiant on Rampoken.
Experimentalist Phew Pushes Forward by Crawling Deep Inside on ‘New Decade’
Phew’s voice on New Decade is an instrument often disconnected from lyrics. Its job is supplemental to the amorphous tones she invokes from electronics.
Jana Rush’s ‘Painful Enlightenment’ Exists on Footwork’s Outer Edges
Jana Rush’s new album addresses mental health issues and exists gingerly on footwork’s outer edges, suggesting the genre without quite hardening into it.
Maxine Funke Whispers the Commonplace Into the Unexpected on ‘Seance’
To take in Maxine Funke’s music is to slow time down, watch a spider methodically envelop its catch for the day, or marvel at a flower on an okra plant.
Electronic Producer Ziúr Conjures an Unsettling Utopia on ‘Antifate’
As we wobble out of a nightmarish pandemic, Ziúr’s Antifate might be the soundtrack to our awkward efforts to wipe the cobwebs from our wings.
Dâm-Funk Creates a Form of Funk Ambient on ‘Architecture III’
Dâm-Funk creates funk as ambience on Architecture III, the blunter edges chiseled, the song structure replaced by trance-inducing not-quite-dancefloor minimalism.