There's always been a hokey streak to The Orb that doubles as a kind of wry self-awareness in the right conditions, even at the most phantasmagorical extremes. Or has there? A little mystery of the sort is desirable, even necessary, but The Dream has a ...
Hercules And Love Affair, a disco act featuring the quivering voice of art-rock star Antony, hearkens back to a mode of disco in which quivering vocals by someone as weird or weirder than Antony would hardly count as novel. The model is the kind of ...
Ever since he started creeping out of the fantastical urban dystopia of Detroit, Carl Craig has been one of the figures most closely associated with the sound of classic Detroit techno. He came up in the late '80s, shortly after the genre's original ...
Toby Barlow is the author of Sharp Teeth, a novel in verse that has to rank among the more notable epic poems of the year. But even calling it an epic poem is misrepresenting it; in terms of tone, the book cooks and jives through a stylish story about ...
If the notion of a German enterprise tasked with alchemizing sound into something like vapor doesn't excite you, it should. That was effectively the premise behind Gas, one of many projects marshaled by Wolfgang Voigt before he started the epochal ...
The two guys in Matmos have adopted lots of different personae, but they've never been especially free-spirited—at least not on conceptual albums devoted to the sounds of surgery, songs from the Civil War, and "audio biographies" of luminaries like ...
Since the start of their rise to the top of the art-rock underground, the beatific chums in Animal Collective have warbled, wheezed, whinged, and wowed—all in alternating currents that make each album and EP sound like a relic from an age they've ...
Hard Candy is a serviceable and sometimes very good pop album that also happens to be a confusing and even dismal Madonna album. Some of that answers to simple math: Amid forceful guest spots by Justin Timberlake and Kanye West and self-identifying ...
As a director, screenwriter, and workaday creator of music videos and performance projects, Harmony Korine has developed an aesthetic as unique and bracing as any that have stemmed from the heyday of American independent film in the 1990s. He made his ...
The storied Japanese noise-rock outfit Boredoms isn't a band in the conventional sense. It's a revolving-membership collective that initiates and plays music, and it's generally spoken of in reverential whispers more often reserved for matters of ...
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