Portraits

http://m.pitchfork.com/news/45177-grouper-and-tiny-vipers-announce-collaborative-album-as-mirrorring/

The album, Foreign Body, will be out March 19 via Kranky.

C. Weingarten's new twitter feed

WILLAMETTE/Always In Postscript/8: Eluvium-style chamber drone caught in perpetually Lynchian state of romantic, dream-fog rapture.—CW

CATE LE BON: CYRK/7: Nico as chin-up Welsh oddball; Stereolab as folkadelic ramble; melodies as unspooled string to mark the way home.—KH

TRAILER TRASH TRACYS/Ester/7: UK pop therapists serve up a debut of shoeglazed, moony-eyed mood rocks that are all bliss, no bloat.—DB

SO IS THE TONGUE/A Child Of Divorce/7: Kayo Dot metal expressionist seeks Mike Patton's avant-pop heartbeat.—CW

DANIEL MENCHE/Guts/7: Veteran Portland noiser molests pianos like rusty bolts on tumble-dry. The death of Tim Hecker’s “Ravedeath.”—CW

Elisa Ambrogio and Ben Chasny are 200 Years, debut album on Drag City should be ready in half that time

By Harold Shueberg on 11-15-2010

Well, Ben, you’re at it again. As if all your many solo efforts (Six Organs of Admittance), side-solo efforts (Benja Minh), bands (Comets on Fire, Badgerlore), and side projects (Rangda, August Born, and such) weren’t enough to keep those pickin’ fingers agile, you’ve gone and added another branch to the monolithic Tree of Chasny, this time carrying the name 200 Years. This new project is a collab between Chasny and Magik Markers’ Elisa Ambrogio that developed over an 11-month stretch where they holed up in a former toolshed in Seattle and wrote tunes, the results of which will comprise their forthcoming debut album. The two are probably hitting up Key Club Studios right now to start the documentation of those many months of hibernation-style guitar craft. Luck would have it that Drag City, the home of both their main projects, has already staked claim on whatever form this session takes and is planning on releasing the recordings in LP form sometime next year. Also planned is a follow-up, “more abstract” release on Ba Da Bing! as part of the label’s subscription series. Given the known musical wanderings of both musicians, I could take a swing at what this’ll come out sounding like, but I’d rather wait to hear it myself.

• Six Organs of Admittance: http://www.sixorgans.com
• Magik Markers: http://arbitrarysigns.blogspot.com
• Drag City: http://www.dragcity.com
• Ba Da Bing!: http://www.badabingrecords.com

http://www.tinymixtapes.com/news/elisa-ambrogio-and-ben-chasny-are-200-years-debut-album-drag-city-should-be-ready-half-time

Graves "Summr Bummr" LP (St. Ives) Jazz-chord folk songs

Dignan Porch "Deluded" 12" (Captured Tracks) New EP. Effects-heavy shoegaze/dream pop.

Battles "Gloss Drop" (Warp)
It is true that Gloss Drop is a bewitching, entrancing album that
defies both categorization and easy analysis. Just as Mirrored was a massive leap on from the early EPs that first got them noticed, this is truly another seismic shift, propelling them once more into
uncharted territory. It is a sheer sense of fun, unpredictability and
inventiveness that sets Battles apart from every other contemporary group. Stanier sums this up succinctly: "I don't think challenging, new music has to be super serious all the time. That's really boring to me and pushing boundaries should not be boring."

Exciting movements from the Ghost Box camp, their first two releases now reissued again on CD and, for the first time, on limited edition vinyl.

Chosen as one of Fact magazine's top 100 albums of the decade, Belbury Poly's "The Willows" set Ghost Box's hauntological agenda in fine style back in 2004. Its frothy electronics, churning synth sounds and enchantingly off-key melodies were purely evocative of the whole BBC Radiophonic workshop and the likes of Raymond Scott, but there's also an over-riding, knowingly spooky element that distinguishes this age from that, and it's that ambiguity between optimistic futurism and an underlying darkness of reality that helps make this album such a downright modern classic.

Along with Belbury Poly's more playful incidentals and song structures, Julian House set the context for Ghost Box somewhere far stranger with The Focus Group's 'Sketches and Spells". Like his later cult-classic album with Broadcast ('Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age'), House plunges us into an unexplained and inexplicable world of reversed oboes, bubbling sitars, abstract jazz motifs, alarming incidentals and chariactured themes, boinging from one to the next with mystical connections and misty haze of synths. There are precedents, of course, but there's something charmingly poppy and unhinged at play across these recordings that give them a quality all their own.

For fans of Boards Of Canada, Demdike Stare, Broadcast or Moon Wiring Club - these are a must.

Akron/Family
S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT
The album was recorded in an abandoned train station in Detroit with the blackest white dude we all know, Chris Koltay (Liars, Women, Deerhunter, No Age). Akron/Family spent the end of 2009 and half of 2010 exploring the future of sound through Bent Acid Punk Diamond fuzz and Underground Japanese noise cassettes, lower case micro tone poems and emotional Cagean field recordings, rebuilding electronic drums from the 70's and playing them with sticks they carved themselves.