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Other Music Digital Affiliate Program We are very excited to be launching our new Affiliate Program. You can earn money by sending your web traffic to Other Music Digital for downloads. Click here for more details.
Other Music Takes Austin!!
Because of all of these events (and yes, there'll be some partying too), we'll only be sending out our Other Music Digital Update this week but we will be back next week with our regular mail order Update. There are, however, a lot of new CD and LP arrivals at our store, including albums from Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Wavves, the Strange Boys, an Abner Jay LP on Mississippi, and the first release on Chimera, a label and art collective run by Sean Lennon, Yuka Honda and Charlotte Kemp Muhl. All of these releases, and more, can be found on our mail order site. Last but not least, Other Music is now on Twitter, and yes, we'll be "tweeting" from Austin. You can follow us by going to: http://twitter.com/othermusic
Free song download of "Riddarholmen" from Finland's Shogun Kunitoki, taken off their new album, Vinonaamakasio. Click now and while your song downloads you can read the full album review below. Our pick of the week! This Week's Featured Downloads
Finnish prog supremos Shogun Kunitoki exploded onto the scene back in '06 with Tasankokaiku and quickly established themselves as one of my favorite acts on the fabulous Fonal label. Of course it's Finnish so by default should slot well into the varied Fonal catalogue, but something this electronic, and this full-on? Shogun Kunitoki were a long way from the pastoral, atonal post-folk of Islaja and friends, but no less successful in their respective genre, the genre being progressive rock. Stripping the sound back to all that was needed -- synthesizers and percussion -- they produced an album which was less an exploration of the retro than a celebration of harmony, melody and analog sounds. It would be childish to compare their music to Goblin or any of the well-known instrumental electro-prog set any more as their sound has developed to sound simply like Shogun Kunitoki. Arpeggios and gloriously emotive descending bass lines shift and shuffle beneath the kind of melodies that remind you why life's worth living. It's like La Dusseldorf and Jean Michelle Jarre had mischievous Finnish offspring with a love for the lo-fidelity naughtiness of James Ferraro et al. Either way the results are terrifyingly jaunty -- at once as uplifting as early Mogwai or early Sigur Ros, but without the now putrid stench of post-rock in the air. By the time the album's carefully constructed early moments bind together for the joyous seven-minute "Holvikirkko," you should be left with no doubt that Shogun Kunitoki are one of the best things to happen to Finnish music since, well, Paavoharju. The track sounds as if Ulrich Schnauss and M83 ditched the computer controlled precision and decided to dub their records to tape instead, and in that the results are so much more lovely. When the sun sets on the album's final notes with the gorgeously haunting "Nebulus," you should have only one thing on your mind -- to press play once more. A clear highlight of 2009 so far -- life affirmingly good. -John Twells
Koen Holtkamp, of Mountains, enthused to me awhile back about the married Japanese couple who comprise Tenniscoats, saying something along the lines that they were one of the most interesting groups making music today. I greatly admire Koen's ability as a listener, so such a statement from him carries a lot of weight for me, and he has definitely been proven right about Tenniscoats, as far as I'm concerned. They've been active since around 2000, and only seem to be getting better as they go along, with their song-oriented release for Hapna back in 2007 being a particularly strong point in their catalog, and one of my favorite albums from that year. Their latest release is for Aussie imprint Room 40, and it finds the couple operating in a slightly more experimental, but certainly no less engaging vein. Temporacha was recorded in collaboration with Lawrence English -- who had a very fine release of environmentally based soundscapes last year on Touch -- after he flew to Japan with his field recording gear. The three traveled to points outdoors both urban and rural to craft an incredibly beguiling collection of music that seems to literally hum in unison with the geography upon which it was recorded. Every piece was recorded in situ, and rarely have I heard such a successful collaboration with nature realized. This is an incredibly thoughtful music operating at the intersections of folk, electronic, and avant-garde, always inventively played, and as corny as it is to say it, filled with a palpable sense of wonder. This music is too modest to garner all of the accolades it truly deserves, but I'm already convinced its one of the best records of the year. -Michael Klausman
As you know, OM's had long, intense love affair with African music and all of its infinite incarnations. We aren't the only ones;' popular bands like Vampire Weekend and Animal Collective have fused certain strands of Afro-pop and blues composition into their particular brand of indie rock. Extra Golden has been taking it a step further over the course of three albums. Borne out of a one-off collaboration between Golden's Ian Eagleson and Alex Minoff (also of Weird War) and Kenyan benga musicians Otieno Jagwasi and Onyango Wuod Omari, the globe-spanning band creates distinctively African music, with a post-rock punch. If you ever wanted to know what a Meat Puppets, Skynyrd and N'Dour collabo would sound like, this might be it. But it hasn't been easy to keep this band alive. Since its inception in 2005, Extra Golden has had to deal with the death of a co-founder, and political strife and upheaval in half the group's native Kenya. Still, the musicianship is amazing and the whole thing is a joy to listen to, especially considering the hardships many of the band members had to go through just to make this album. Tracks like "Anyango" and "Gimakiny Akia" boast some impressive blues slide guitar fretting over a bouncy highlife groove, punctuated by excellent drumming from Omari. All but one of the tunes are sung in their native tongue, and the lyrics address political unrest ("Security"), the African AIDS epidemic ("Ukimwi") and loyalty ("Thank You Very Quickly"). But as stated before, there's a joy and positivity that pervades throughout the six sprawling tunes that make up this record. Recommended! -Duane Harriott
It's particularly sweet when loyal customers make great albums. Though based in Chicago these days, the two principal members of Speck Mountain met in New York, and I remember when they were both fresh faced youngsters (actually, they're still fresh faced youngsters) picking the sales staff's brain for great releases. To my mind, both Karl Briedeck and Marie-Claire Balabanian were the ideal kind of customers in that they didn't just want to know what the flavor of the month was, they both really wanted you to dig deep into your knowledge and share those dusty corners with them. I really think a sense of that interest comes across on their new album Some Sweet Relief, which is their second thus far, and a gigantic improvement on their debut, which wasn't by any means bad, just maybe not fully formed yet. They're still going to have a hard time not getting compared to Mazzy Star in every review, but a more developed sense of purpose neutralizes that criticism, if it even is one -- saying something sounds like Mazzy Star is a pretty easy way to sell albums actually. The songs are all slow and hazy, with a bit of the cosmic gospel inflection you hear in Spiritualized, or perhaps what a grittier take on Beach House might sound like. Marie-Claire has become a much more confident singer, her vowels all drawly and taking their time, surrounded by Karl's raga-esque guitars. This is music that is not in a hurry to get anywhere, just perfectly content to lay down some atmospheric vibes and while the hours away. Great stuff, and I can't wait to hear what they do next. -Michael Klausman
I sometimes wonder if all indie rock frontmen are frustrated solo artists; certainly it seems like it with the number of pained solo projects that erupt from the scene, but rarely do they capture the magic of a collaborative project. This latest effort from Joey Barro, however, is a little crack of sunshine in a slow spring, and actually differs slightly by not even attempting to sound like a band. Many might know Barro from his work with LA outfit the Antiques, but here he goes it solo with only a studio full of instruments and what sounds like a love of electronic music to keep him going. Sure, the folk-rock influences we heard in the Antiques are still lavished lovingly all over Season to Season, but Barro has molded and sculpted these songs into something altogether less traditional. Fittingly, the album opens with a pulsing synthesizer line which slowly grows into "Shallow Winter's Moon," a song which could easily have been simply another crack at the singer-songwriter mode. Elsewhere Barro hints at Van Morrison and Bob Dylan but through a frosted glass of modern production not unlike DNTEL's Jimmy Tamborello. Barro is no Postal Service, these aren't going to set the electro teens alight, but there is a feeling that the confident, light electronic elements heard on strong tracks like "Makebelieve Tree" make this album far more involving than it might have been had it been approached with less able hands. Of course, there are plenty of more traditional moments too, and Barro is just as assured when he isn't relying on synthetic tricks and blips, but for me he's most successful when he bends the traditions to suit his modern outlook. Lovely stuff. -John Twells
Pain has its reasons
A couple years back, MIT Press published an extraordinary and highly entertaining collection of poems by one of the most fascinating French artists of the 20th century, Francis Picabia. Entitled I Am a Beautiful Monster, it garnered a review in the Nation by critic Barry Schwabsky, whose first paragraph paraphrasing the book's translator Marc Lowenthals' introduction to the artists' character I can't resist not paraphrasing here: Overgrown infant, true reactionary, scandalmongering nihilist, egoist, facile, treacherous, self-promoter, neurasthenic, drug-addict, unoriginal, plagiarist. None of that is necessarily germane to the album at hand, I just happened to find it to be pretty funny. What is interesting is that you can add composer to this enormously complex artist's manifold talents and traits. "La Nourrice Americaine" (The American Nurse) was written in 1920 during Picabia's Dada phase, and was premiered that May in Paris for the Festival Dada at the respectable concert hall Salle Gaveau, alongside other Dadaist musical works, as well as a magic act by Philippe Soupault, and a "motionless dance" by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. The instructions to Picabia's piece are quite simple, three notes played to infinity, and what this release provides us is a twenty-minute "fast" version, and a twenty-minute "slow" version. It's clearly indebted to his friend Erik Satie's mid-1890's score for Vexations, which is for a brief chordal passage to be played very slowly for 840 repetitions. No doubt Picabia couldn't resist trumping Satie by making his piece "to infinity." Interestingly, Picabia's piece also pre-figures and outdoes John Cage's 1985 composition "As Slow As Possible," a current performance of which began in Germany in 2003, and is expected to be completed at some point in 2642, barring any unforeseen catastrophes. The "fast" performance has a certain mind-numbingly hypnotic appeal, but the "slow" version is really quite beautiful in its simplicity, and bears favorable comparison to the long-form and skeletal works of Morton Feldman. I highly doubt the Picabia quote above was in reference to this piece, but it couldn't be more apropos to the music at hand. Also included is a French language interview with Picabia from the 1940s. -Michael Klausman
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