Penthouse belong to the ranks of British bands that are not afraid of going the opposite way of Brit-pop.My Idle Hands is even noisier and bluesier .But Unt sounds like a bad Jon Spencer imitation.60 Ft Dolls is the name of a Welsh band that plays hard-rocking melodies with a style borrowed from Jam . Guitarist Richard Parfitt leads the trio of garage-punk rave-ups that showed up on singles and are collected on The Big 3 : Happy Shopper, N.1 Pure Alcohol and Pig Valentine.Joya Magica is even worse.Richard Parfitt s first solo, Highlights In Slow Motion , however, reveals yet another old-fashioned pop-soul singer.7 Solution were formed in Austin by guitarist and vocalist Reese Beeman, a Texas transplant originally from Mississippi, to perform improvised jams in a style reminiscent of both Can s avantgarde experiments and Pink Floyd s early psychedelic suites.The line-up solidified with the arrival of guitarist James Adkisson and the sound veered towards a form of space-rock without the edge: a texture of dreamy solos and instrumental trance but enlivened by a melodic, song-oriented approach that may at times recall REM and Radiohead. That quality is what makes All About Satellites And Spaceships outstanding in that year s musical cene: 7 Solution adds more dynamics to the drone-driven ambient psychedelia of the shoegazers.The single Lullaby introduces the three-guitar attack of Beeman, Adkisson and new member Julian Capps, but Gabriel s Waltz , a concept album centered around the musical form of the waltz, mostly disappoints with a self-indulgent take on Stereolab and Tortoise . Between melodic hard-rock , Neil Young balladry and instrumental jam , the band carves itself a unique place in the history of Texas psychedelic rock.764-Hero is the project of Seattle songwriter Juan Atkins . On the single High School Poetry and on the album Salt Skins And Sugar Floats the band is but a duo of Atkins and drummer Polly Johnson .The duo sounds like a professional combo on the EP We re Solids .The line-up is augmented with bassist James Bertram on Get Here And Stay . Atkins is now playing full-blown rock and roll, often with a vengeange , although the calm Calendar Pages is still more representative of his persona. Lush and operatic arrangements and complex harmonic acrobatics unveil the trio s ambitions, which obviously extend beyond the naif ditties of this collection. 764 Hero s third album, Weekends of Sound , could be their best. A bunch of sprightly, catchy ditties , a tender ballad and a serious tour de force are the highlights equally entertaining and compelling.Atkins other project is Magic Magicians, whose Girls offers lo-fi roots-rock. With bass player James Bertram replaced by newcomer Robin P, 764 Hero s Nobody Knows This Is Everywhere offers a slightly more aggressive sound and sligthly catchier tunes . The six-minute Confetti Confessional and The Long Arm of the Law are less obvious than the average of alt-pop, and Answers and Skylines boast solemnly haunting textures, but the feeling is that some bands should make EPs, not LPs. The John And Spencer Booze Explosion is a collaboration between Murder City Devils vocalist Spencer Moody and 764-Hero s Juan Atkins, who take on a bizarre selection of covers.Luke Slater is a London dj who became a celebrity in the techno underground. His early recordings were collected on X-Tront and 92-94 . Planetary Assault Systems had the most prolific career: Archives , Electric Funk Machine , The Drone Sector , Atomic Funkster . Under his own name, Slater released a modest milestone of latter-day techno, Freak Funk , an eclectic potpourri of hip hop , propulsive funk and ambient textures. Compared with that feast of postmodern hybrids, Wireless is disappointing, but nonetheless it contains overdoses of adrenaline. The two volumes of All Exhale are quintessential Slater art, especially the spectacular Futureshock. Alright On Top is a tired work from a tired artist who is beginning to follow the trends rather than set them.9-Iron are the creature of singer songwriter Will Baum, a Los Angeles kid and a former Love Child, who sings about his generation s woes with a penchant for self-reflection that recalls Jonathan Richman.Baum matured with the concept album Make-out King , that pays tribute to the tradition with charm and passion. More serious fare like This Town Again leans towards the blue-collar rock of Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp, but still with youthful exuberance.90 Day Men were originally a post-rock band from St Louis that released records such as the single If You Can Bake a Cake You Can Build a Bomb , the EP 1975-1977-1998 , and the single She s a Salt Shaker Activate the Borders. Relocating to Chicago in 1999, they added keyboardist Andy Lansangan and recorded their first full-length, It Critical Band . The piano now dominated their music, which carved a niche between Sonic Youth s noise-rock, Jesus Lizard s convoluted hardcore, Gastr Del Sol s loose soundscapes and the new wave of the late 1970s. Brian Case sounds like a less possessed David Yow , and the instrumental passages sustain his performance with a subtle range of polyphony. To Everybody and the EP Too Late Or Too Dead showed improved technical skills, and place the keyboards even more openly to the forefront of the music.Panda Park is sometimes too slick and predictable, as if the band was trying to reach for a broader audience or was more consciously trying to imitate past bands, but moments such as Even Time Ghosts are enough to redeem the entire work.90 Day Men s Afro-American bassist Robert Lowe is also active as Lichens. The vocals sound even more supernatural in Shore Line Scoring, underpinned by a denser drone of instrumental noise, as if swept by a dark and unrelenting wind. The 20-minute You Are Excrement If You Can Turn Yourself Into Gold is a mixed blessing.:Wumpscut: is the project of Germany s Rudy Ratzinger, soon to become a staple of electro and gothic industrial dance. Music For A Slaughtering Tribe is an appropriate title for the violent sounds of pieces like Koslow. The album as well as the previous cassettes Defcon and Small Chamber Musicians will be compiled on the double-CD Bloodchild . The five-song EP Dried Blood contains Black Death, their manifesto and their masterpiece, an evil hybrid of Sisters Of Mercy, Leaether Strip and Ministry. The five-track EP Gomorra contains the terrifying visions of Turn Off Pain and Ultramensch. Bunkertor 7 is not only brutal, it is also amazingly sophisticated, thanks to complex, layered arrangements that run the gamut from Tangerine Dream to Led Zeppelin.Mesner Tracks collects rarities and remixes. Embryodead is another soundtrack to pain. Totmacher is the highlight of Boeses Junges Fleisch that also includes the shocking Ich Will Dich and Flucht.The crises that lasts since 1995 erupts off Wreath Of Barbs , another uninspired collection of dance tracks.4 Non Blondes were formed in San Francisco in 1989 by Linda Perry, already celebrated in the Bay City s blues clubs for her Janis Joplin-style roar, for her doleful acoustic guitar and her open homosexuality. In 1990 the band had a local hit with Mr President, but it was the album Bigger Better Faster More that climbed the charts. The material is eclectic and not always original, often recalling an amateurish Jefferson Starship, nervous when incorporating funk or rockabilly .Her first solo album, In Flight , was a slick production aiming at the charts .4 Hero is the duo of Dego MacFarlane and Marc Mac, two debuted on London s hip-hop scene in the mid 1980s, but left their mark when they started pioneering new forms of drum n bass since 1990. Mr Kirk s Nightmare and Journey From The Light were the gloomy classics that signaled a change of mood within the rave scene, although initially 4 Hero was mainly known for harmless dancefloor hits such as Risin Sun, Combat Dance and The Scorcher.In Rough Territory collects and remixes some of the early singles and adds a few more tracks. Mac Mark also launched the Manix project with singles like Oblivion and Hardcore Junglism, while MacFarlane launched the Tek 9 alter ego with sophisticated singles like A London Sumtin and Just A Dream. With Parallel Universe , the duo abandoned the genre they had helped pioneer and embraced a form of armchair jungle that offered a groundbreaking marriage of fusion-jazz and ambient music, bordering on Weather Report and Sun Ra rather than on their friend Goldie.Another sci-fi concept album, this time credited to Jacob s Optical Stairway , perfected the idea, by investing heavily in synthesized strings and adding the vocals of a disco diva .In the meantime, Mark Mac debuted the straightahead hardcore techno of Nu Era. After the singles Stars and Breaking in Space, the album Beyond Gravity showcased the existential grooves of Mono Concentrate and Mirror Imagesd. MacFarlane, on the other hand, turned his Tek 9 side-project into a laboratory of innovations: It s Not What You Think It Is further refines his approach to jazz fusion , but ultimately lands him into acid-jazz and trip-hop territories, whereas Simply , featuring a number of vocalists, returns him to sample-free, vocal hip hop, soul melodies and bass-heavy funky rhythms. The new 4 Hero EP, Earth Pioneers , and single, Hero Lullaby, introduced live instrumentation.The two-disc album Two Pages furthers the investigations of Parallel Universe and Jacob s Optical Stairway. Mellow, kitschy orchestral arrangements highlight Star Chasers, a natural progression from Universal Love and Loveless, halfway between Curtis Mayfield and disco divas, perhaps reminiscent of the styles that turned Roni Size and LTJ Bukem into millionaires. Third Stream features African percussion and dancing violins, but the main theme is beaten by the piano as a mechanical pattern, and is rounded up by a fantastic clarinet solo. Spirits In Transit returns to the classical arrangement of Planetaria, but with a festive, fanfare-like attitude .The second, all-instrumental and more experimental disc challenges the arduous structures of Spring Heel Jack and Squarepusher with the eight-minute percussive pastiche We Who Are Not For Others. The other tracks sound a little amateurish and it may not be a coincidence that the best is Pegasus 51, another melodic offering. As avantgarde composers, the duo is definitely not up to the task, but, at least in their intentions, this is the Ummagumma of drum n bass. Two Pages Reinterpretation is the remix album. Mark Mac and Dego McFarlane cannot repeat the magic of Two Pages on Creative Patterns . Their elegant, sensual and baroque drum bass fails to capture the same metaphysical essence of pieces like Golden Age Of Life. The disc is equally divided between noir, expressionistic atmospheres set to warm and slippery techno beats and ballads delivered by an assortment of mainly female vocalists . The instrumental tracks are club-friendly and the ballads are radio-friendly, the latter being the most interesting from the viewpoint of the arrangements.Marc Mac formed the Visioneers, a project with Brad Somatik and 4 Hero s drummer Luke Parkhouse, with the mission to concoct some kind of fusion of hip-hop and jazz, not exactly the most original of concepts.Given the legions of Limp Bizkit, Incubus, etc that roam the lands of funk-metal-rap fusion, one would hardly expect the need for yet another Los Angeles-based purveyors of this most exploited of stereotypes.J. Despite all odds, Lost Angel manages to pack enough punch to elevate the brutal rapping and riffing of Cities on Fire, Flow Heat, Blind My Eyes, All Lies above the average. The band can be more melodic than their rivals and that skill is emphasized when the songs turn into studies in harmonic contrast, as No Light does. Boston s 360, fronted by tough female vocalist Audrey Clarke, often compared to Chrissie Hynde, played granitic rock and roll with an emphasis on the emotional and virtuoso guitar of Eric Russell.Strawberry Stone is a disappointing collection of regular power-pop ditties with a touch of Flaming Lips eccentricities .311 is a band from Omaha that spent years playing a hybrid of funk and rock too far from Los Angeles and San Francisco to be heard.Their effervescent cacophony of heavy metal, reggae, rap, funk was revealed to the world by 311 Music and Grassroots . Do you right, Feels So Good, Visit and My Stoney Baby were the hits in 1993; Homebrew, Lucky and 8:16am followed in 1994. Relocated to Los Angeles, the band started mellowing down.Freeze Time and Come Original are the standouts from Sound System . From Chaos , Evolver and Don t Tread On Me were less and less interesting.The long-distance duo of Joseph Dierker and Tim Donovan that goes by the moniker of 310 debuted with Aug 56 and Snorkelhouse . The former is an album of cold ambience that harks back to the chill-out rooms and to Brian Eno s Apollo studies.The Dirty Rope is an eclectic and erudite melange of post-rock, trip-hop and post-techno . With Nothing To See Here , 310 embraced new-age music. This album contains a parade of short, soothing vignettes realized manipulating natural sounds , human sounds and musique concrete . After All Biosphere Matmos 2Pac is the second alias of Tupac Shakur , the former member of Digital Underground who adopted the gangsta-rap aesthetic for 2Pacalypse Now and Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.His most powerful album was Me Against the World , produced by Sam Bostic, released while he was in jail for a sexual assault. Both gloomy and explosive, it covered a vast spectrum of styles, from homicidal to sensitive, while remaining true to the gangster persona. Much of the anger and fear gone, 2Pac adopted a more domestic stance on the uneven All Eyez on Me , the first double album of hip-hop music, produced by Dr Dre, Mike Mosley and many others . He also released Makaveli s The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory and Tupac Shakur s The Rose That Grew From Concrete , besides 2Pac s R U Still Down?He was shot dead in 1996.Finnish trio 22-Pistepirkko has made an art of crafting blues ambience. Their albums include: Piano, Rumpu Kukka , Kings of Hong Kong , Bare Bone Nest , Big Lupu , Rumble City , Eleven . Tracks: Taxi 74, Onion Soup, Coma Moon, Sad Lake City, Boardroom Walk, Hey Man, Let The Romeo Weep, Beatiful Morning, Frustration, Shadow. 13 Engines was a Toronto quartet that played an intelligent and elegant brand of power-pop. John Critchley, singer and guitarist, was often compared to Tragically Hip and Neil Young, but his more mature work bears a much stronger resemblance to Robyn Hitchcock s. The former ran the gamut from rock and roll to sentimental balladry , and the latter also spawned the modest hit Beached. After a mediocre A Blur To Me Now , that included singles Big Surprise and King Of Saturday Night, their fourth album, Perpetual Motion Machine , suddenly found the magic balance between popular and high art. More and Smoke And Ashes divulged their pop style, while Bred in the Bone and What If We Dont Get What We Want showcased the delicate infrastructure of that style.While Beneath My Hand and Vermillion are catchy and refined, Conquistador is ultimately the album of a band that has not found its personality yet and the 13 Engines dissolved shortly thereafter. John Critchley s solo career took off with Crooked Mile .13 Engines was a Toronto quartet that played an intelligent and elegant brand of power-pop. John Critchley, singer and guitarist, was often compared to Tragically Hip and Neil Young, but his more mature work bears a much stronger resemblance to Robyn Hitchcock s. The former ran the gamut from rock and roll to sentimental balladry , and the latter also spawned the modest hit Beached. After a mediocre A Blur To Me Now , that included singles Big Surprise and King Of Saturday Night, their fourth album, Perpetual Motion Machine , suddenly found the magic balance between popular and high art. More and Smoke And Ashes divulged their pop style, while Bred in the Bone and What If We Dont Get What We Want showcased the delicate infrastructure of that style.While Beneath My Hand and Vermillion are catchy and refined, Conquistador is ultimately the album of a band that has not found its personality yet and the 13 Engines dissolved shortly thereafter. John Critchley s solo career took off with Crooked Mile .The album 12 Rounds revealed the fantastic voice of Claudia Sarne, a female version of Nick Cave s macabre and existential howl, with PJ Harvey overtones. Her morbid ballads Pleasant Smell and My Big Hero are set to the music of Massive Attack s trip-hop by seasoned producer Atticus Ross. 10 CC were a British band formed during the heydays of progressive-rock and hard-rock by four veteran songwriters and multi-instrumentalists: Graham Gouldman , Lol Creme, Eric Stewart and Kevin Godley. They debuted with the demented bubblegum hits There Ain t No Umbopo and Neanderthal Man , from the album Songs credited to the Hot Legs. They then changed name to 10CC for Donna , the retro ballad that established them at top of the charts and that coined their kind of parodistic kitsch. After offering more of the same with Sheet Music , in particular the Wall Street Shuffle, and experimenting with even crazier arrangements, the foursome embraced the high-tech studio a la Sparks and turned The Original Soundtrack into a stylistic tour de force, albeit still rooted in their weird sense of humour and in their poppy melodies. I m Not In Love even became a hit, while the extended collages of Une Nuite A Paris and Life Is A Minestrone straddle the line between Frank Zappa s operettas and the Beatles Abbey Road. Cartoonish wit and four-part vocal harmonies made them quite unique in their age, occasionally worthy successors of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. How Dare You , which includes the self-parodistic Art For Art s Sake and I m Mandy Fly Me, Godley and Creme launched a separate career with the triple-album rock opera Consequences , that used a new technique to produce symphonic, choral and natural sounds, and pretentiously bizarre albums such as L , Freeze Frame , containing An Englishman In New York, Ismism , Birds Of Prey and Goodbye Blue Sky ; while 10cc continued with Deceptive Bends , Bloody Tourists , with Dreadlock Holiday, Look Here , 10 Out of 10 , Windows In The Jungle , totally ignored despite Food For Thought. The foursome reformed the original 10cc for the terrible Meanwhile . Then the two couples continued their separate adventures, 10cc releasing Mirror Mirror and Godley Creme concentrating on their successful career as directors of videos. Images is an anthology of Godley and Creme.Upstate New York s 10,000 Maniacs played atmospheric, intimate and intellectual folk-rock enhanced with vocalist Natalie Merchant s plaintive sanguine colloquial tone. After venting their existential angst on Secrets of the I Ching , they opted for Fairport Convention s more conventional folk-rock on The Wishing Chair . The fragile and pensive In My Tribe was the first album to fully display Merchant s persona , although it led to the ecstatic easy-listening of Blind Man s Zoo . Our Time In Eden , their commercial breakthrough, balanced the profound and the ethereal elements of their art and set the stage for Merchant s solo career. 1 Mile North is the New York-based project of guitarist Jon Hills and keyboardist Mark Bajuk. The hypnotic repetition of New Clock and Evil Architecture tried to exploit an old minimalist trick, while the more emotional scores of Escorting Deep Waters and Have a Good One What were reminiscent of new-age music and cosmic music. Minor Shadows is more of the same, just at a higher degree of complexity. The best part of the 9-minute In 1983 He Loved To Fly comes when the piano takes the lead, two minutes from the end. Most tracks, though, indulge in slow, languid, gentle and predictable atmospheres which fall somewhere between Harold Budd and new-age music.The Gibson Bros in Ohio, led by guitarist Don Howland and vocalist Jeff Evans, were natural heirs of the Cramps and Pussy Galore. The blues and rockabilly bacchanals of Big Pine Boogie , which is mainly covers, and Dedicated Fool , Evans moved to Memphis and formed 68 Comeback, another blues outfit, while Howland formed the Bassholes, whose Captain Beefheart-ian blues orgies topped the Gibson Bros at least on When My Blue Moon Turns Red Again . Out Hud were formed in 1996 in Sacramento with Nic Offer , Tyler Pope , Justin Vandervolgen , Molly Schnict and Phyllis . Nic Offer and Tyler Pope were formerly in Yahmos, a Sacramento punk band formed around 1990. They released the EPs Right On and Off Your Parents , while their album Undefeated will be published only several years later.Out Hud debuted with a trio of EPs: Out Hud , Natural Selection , First Single of the New Millennium and the single Le Elephant Stomp . The all-instrumental album Street Dad contains six dance tracks that hark back to the dance-oriented new-wave bands of the early 1980s, such as Contortions and Golden Palominos. Story of the Whole Thing is a monster revisionist piece of the reggae and funk tradition, enhanced with gothic overtones, a tinning guitar pattern, classical-sounding cello lines and frantic hip-hop explosions. Dad There s a Little Phrase Called Too Much Information, propelled by the steady beat and whirling electronics of European disco-music of the 1970s, and derailed by recurring and slightly discordant guitar patterns, soars in a funk fanfare worthy of the glorious Love Of Life Orchestra. Hair Dude, You re Stepping On My Mystique and My Two Nads are more convetional dance tracks that simply reiterate previous elements, but still a lot of creative fun. The conceptual centerpiece of the album is the 12-minute The L Train is a Swell Train and I Don t Want to Hear You Indies Complain, a syncopated and tribal techno ballet that mixes oneiric guitar tones, industrial-grade panzer rhythms and a symphony of quirky background sounds. Out Hud moved to New York in 2001. , a septet, formed in 1996 in Sacramento, whose debut EP was a split with Out Hud , followed by a single and the album !!! , containing the nine-minute funk-ska-punk dance There s No Fucking Rules Dude and the electronic fireworks of Feel Good Hit Of The Fall. The 20-minute EP Me And Giuliani Down By the School Yard collects two lengthy new-wave-ish dance jams, and the nine-minute title-track is another glorious disco-punk nightmare that resurrects the likes of ESG and Liquid Liquid.The second album by !!! , Louden Up Now , hypnotic and orgiastic dance music deranged groove-driven instrumental workouts that sound like parodies but actually constitute the new avantgarde ., Theme from Space Island, Pardon My Freedom and Dear Can are endless chain-reaction mutations of Me And Giuliani Down By the School Yard, each adding new eccentric twists to the base concept.Out Hud s Let Us Never Speak Of It Again is another cauldron of quotes from the 1970s. The elements that stand out are the extremes: either when the music harks straight back to the beginnings of synthetic funk music, or when the experiment is truly theirs, Out Hud s . The pounding percussion and exotic vocals of It s For You is distinctively 1990s, not nostalgic at all, and the treatment of the melodic progressions and the string arrangements is plainly futuristic. The cubist, hiccupping ballett of One Life to Leave and the noisy, trancey interludes of Old Nude overcome the superficial resemblance with disco-music. The tribal orgy of the instrumental The Song So Good They named it Thrice best summarizes their aesthetic principles by laying down a rhythmic base and then devastating it with a hailstorm of cosmic bleeps, mutating synthesizers and whirling, exotic symphonic melodies: Frank Zappa meets Giorgio Moroder and the Talking Heads. The horror score of 2005 A Face Odyssey is, de facto, a free-form sonata, fading and returning like a ghostly presence, until it explodes in a massive fanfare. The 11-minute Dear Mr Bush There are Over 100 Words for Shit and Only 1 for Music is a thumping feverish techno locomotive that shifts gear a few times and destabilizes the hypnosis with mournful cello phrases. From mutation to mutation, the melody becomes more relevant, and, by the end, the piece has turned into some kind of triumphal Yanni-like anthem. The overall feeling is one of psychoanalysis of the post-industrial digital world, not of nostalgic reminiscence of the pre-digital era. !!! s EP Take Ecstacy With Me is devoted to covers, notably the namesake Magnetic Fields song.Adam F has rapidly achieved cult status among fans of jungle, thanks to the dancefloor success of his singles Circles and Metropolis . The album Colours has revealed a refined musician, who can alternate his jungle fever with bursts of jazz-funk and touches of mellow soul .Add N To are a trio of British musicians who mainly play analog keyboards, augmented by the occasional vocoder or drum machine.Add N To are in splendid form on On the Wires of Our Nerves . The music is made of artsy beats and noises and evokes a dark, claustrophobic, teutonic fantasy of mechanical monsters gone mad. Such punk retro-futurism owes a debt to a variety of rock and pseudo-rock ensembles: Mother Mallards, Tangerine Dream, Suicide, Cabaret Voltaire, Kraftwerk, Devo and, more recently, Atari Teenage Riot. The album opens with a videogame-inspired We Are Add N To X that sounds like a tribute to Devo. Murmur One is the quintessential industrial suite, all metallic bangs, pounding machines, robotic ballets and radio interferences, early Cabaret Voltaire and Human League. Grey Body takes off from there and lands in even more experimental territory, with rhythms that belong to the videogame generation rather than to Sheffield working class milieu. Orgy Of Bubastus references Brian Eno s dadaistic vignettes and Giorgio Moroder s eurodisco locomotives. Melody appears in Sound of Accelerating Concrete: a guitar and a synth weave their melodic themes onto each other before being swept away by tribal, polyrhythmic electronic percussions .Some tracks are recognizable as more or less conventional rock songs , albeit still diluted in a sea of sound effects. The guitar riff of hard-rock surfaces in Black Regent, that sounds like Jimi Hendrix fronting the Allman Brothers and broadcast over a dirty channel. Sir Ape Their battery of analogue keyboards plays different roles at the same time: the guitar solo of heavy metal, the forceful drumming of punk-rock, the shouting of rhythm and blues.This isn t electronica, just like Led Zeppelin s was not blues. They discovered a new, rougher and deeper, dimension of electronica, just like Led Zeppelin discovered a new, rougher and deeper, dimension of blues.So it comes as no surprise that the follow-up album was titled Avant Hard . The title is a misnomer, though: somewhat smoother and easier, Avant Hard put aside the previous album s uncompromising sonic onslaught for a more mature symphony of tones and textures. Revenge Of The Black Regent is an exalted symphonic poem, somewhere between classical music, military music, Morricone soundtracks and Procol Harum. Oh Yeah Oh No boasts a female whisper with the quiet bliss of Stereolab s lullabies, a jazzy trumpet and intense drumming. The latter two are experiments in the experiment as they further broaden the band s horizons and show new nuances of the method. The 10-minute suite Machine Is Bored With Loved picks up from here and is a manifesto of sort: an atmospheric whistle is swallowed in a sonic black hole. Elsewhere, the band resurrects the rock format in grand style. What makes it uniquely Add N To is the maelstrom of synthesizers that rages, layer after layer, over the forceful drumming. A synthesis of sort, Metal Fingers In My Body approaches the perverted intensity of Pierre Henry s Rock Electronique and establishes a new peak for the band s rock output. Less erudite and programmatic than Wires, the album presents a more human version of Add N To . With Add Insult To Injury , Add N To gave their most schizophrenic album yet . The singalong Monster Bobby, the alien Kingdom Of Shades, the decadent Plug Me In, the devoluted anthem Adding N To and Brothel Charge show more of a rock and roll edge, while the progressive-rock suite The Regent Is Dead is just about the contrary, fifteen minues of convoluted, pathetic, melodramatic magma. The thesis of Loud Like Nature is that confusion is a sign of wisdom. Luckily, the band s growth does not limit itself to the horizontal axis, but also occurs on the vertical axis: songs such as Electric Village, PP MAchine and Take Me To Your Leader are surgical strikes that exhibit manic cohesion and absolute determination. But their post-industrial decandent futuristic punk cabaret is best represented by the alien weirdness of Invasion Of The Polaroid People, Party Bag, Up the Punks, and Large Number. And it even finds room for a couple of poppy, silly novelties such as Sheez Mine and Total All Out Water. Spray on Sound is Ann Shenton s debut solo album. Large Number is Ann Shenton s solo project, that debuted with Spray On Sound .The Adolescents, with Rikk Agnew on guitar , Tony Montana Cadena on vocals and Steve Soto on bass, released one of the most mature punk albums of 1981, whose sticks of dynamite exploded one after the other without a moment of pause illuminating a poetic universe representative of the teenager medium of Los Angeles . Touching on anthems to supersonic rhythm like I Hate Children, the nonsense-refrains of the Ramones like Wrecking Crew and the epic slogans of the Clash like No Way, the disc presents a phenomenal ability to forge powerpop songs, thanks overall to the riffs and fiery solos of Agnew. Far from indulging in the tragic tone of so much punk rock of that period, the Adolescents disc excels rather in the comic register: sarcastic vignettes like L.A. The masterpiece is Kids Of The Black Hole, a classic rock cut with boogie progressions that ll remind you of Zeppelin played and sung with the futuristic melancholy of Ultravox. Like so many of these one-album wonders of 1981, the Adolescents also came unglued immediately following their first album. But only in 1986 did he succeed in reforming the Adolescents and releasing an album of new material, Brats In Batallions , inferior to the first and to Agnew s solo album. Much better was the successive offering Balboa Fun Zone , with Alone Against The World and It s Tattoo Time, as far as it is still a disengaged work without the powerful presence of their debut. They passed more years of silence before Agnew succeeeded in finding another recording contract. This time it was under the heading of Yard Sale and the first album, Emotional Vomit , emphasized simply hard rock, preserving the verve and the melodism of their good times.Soto had meanwhile formed Joyride, perhaps the formation that brought together the true heredity of the Adolescents and their principal competitors, Big Drill Car, in the 90s: the 45 rpm She s A Rebel and the two melodic gems All I Ever Wanted Was You and As I Fall from the album Another Month Of Mondays were nothing to envy over the power pop of ten years earlier.Irish singer-songwriter Adrian Crowley debuted with A Strange Kind , possibly the first collection by a male British singer-songwriter to bring back the glory days of the 1970s. Capricorn weds the simple tone of a and the psychological tension of a John Martyn, while a small ensemble turns the atmosphere into a quiet nightmare.For such an accomplished album, it is odd that the mood be best summed up by an instrumental track, Trilogy, whose foggy ambience and distant tolls seemed to be washed ashore from another planet. When You Are Here You Are Family is a more conventional album, in the vein of Will Oldham . Very few word painters have a palette as broad as Crowley s. A Northern Country employs the neoclassical pace of One Hundred Words For Snow before tip-toeing into Dark Anvil Skies, weaves the warmer and denser Morning Frost before evoking Leonard Cohen s tender melodies in A Northern Country, suspends himself in the hypnotic lullaby Photographing Lightning Strikes before weeping into the anemic blues of Great Salt Lake, delves into the dilated trance of Brake Lines and reemerges in the sullen piano notes of Happiness Came To My Door.English virtuoso folk guitarist Adrian Legg became famous for his supersonic fingerpicking but is actually more important for his fusion of folk, country, bluegrass, blues and new age elements. After three albums released only in England, Technopicker , Fretmelt , Lost For Words , Legg became a sensation with Guitars And Other Cathedrals , which remains a classic of modern guitar, thanks to the frenetic Thump The Clouds, Reckless Love, Guitars And Other Cathedrals. On the other hand, the best moments on Guitar for Mortals may be on the contemplative, elegiac tunes Waltzing with Jesus and The Netsman And The Laird. Wine Women And Waltz Mrs Crowe s Blue Waltz contains the Green Ballet and High Strung Tall Tales the High Strung Suite.Waiting for a Dancer is a less exciting set, whose standout being the somber, atmospheric L Amour Manque, Carolina Sunday Waltz, Bayou Belles.Postcard From London is a two-CDROM set of music and videos.Adult is Detroit s duo of Jack Vulpine and android vocalist Nicola Kuperus, one of the original purveyors of electroclash before the term was invented. Their theatrical fusion of disco-music, punk-rock and glitch electronica permeates the EPs Dispassionate Furniture , Modern Romantics , credited to Plasma Co, and Entertainment , including Human Wreck.The album Resuscitation collects their best singles and remixes. Anxiety Always is a more visceral and violent work, that highlights their punk personas. Suck The Air High Heels On Tile Floors and the EP D.U.M.E.Insanity makes further inroads into Adult s sound on Gimmie Trouble , thanks mainly to the maturation of Nicola Kuperus vocal style and a new member, guitarist Sam Consiglio. Strange Mistakes, Turn Into Fever, In My Nerves, Seal Me In, Helen Bach are schizophrenic workouts that redefine their mission in music, while Bad Idea, Lovely Love and Still Waiting, the tracks that more closely resemble their electroclash roots, sound naively redundant at this point.With the help of Spirea X vocalist Judith Boyle, Beattie later formed Adventures In Stereo and opted for a simpler, direct form of pop that returns to Primal Scream s origins. Airline and When We Go Back, the singles preceding, and later included, on Adventures In Stereo , as well as opener Underground Sound, are tiny gems in a style that rips off the Beach Boys and Phil Spector productions for girl-groups.Greater confidence and down-to-earth humility lends Alternative Stereo Sounds a Stereolab feeling. Silence Falls, Dream Surf Baby, and the trailing singles Down In The Traffic and A Brand New Day, are more immaculate photocopies of the Sixties, albeit in a slightly offbeat style. Monomania indulges in more of the same, except that vocal harmony has reached new peaks of baroque and the duo has embraced the genre of the slow ballad .Formed in 1997 in Glasgow by Ganger s singer-guitarist Craig B, Aereogramme debuted with two singles, Translations and Hatred, and two EPs, Glam Cripple and White Paw. Their first full-length album, A Story In White , offered an ambitious mixture of prog-rock, death-metal, post-rock, industrial music and emo-core. The band s specialty is the quiet loud routine of The Question Is Complete , Zionist Timing and Post-Tour Pre-Judgement, although the most gripping sounds come out of the bombastic and chaotic Shouting For Joey, and the most touching moments display a surprising dose of emotion. The album is an exercise in style, not simply copying styles but trying to coin a new one via a process of metamorphosis. Sleep And Release is an equally complex album that relies on even looser song structures. If sometimes the results sound confused and pretentious the majestic, symphonic glam-pop of Black Past, the chamber industrial post-rock of Process of Elimination and the graceful elegy of Gratitude, drenched in classical strings and solemn drums, unleash avalanches of feelings sounds that, if not for content, are impressive as sheer form. The mood swings, the gentle melodies and the menacing eruptions, the narrative subtleties of Older, No Really and Wood hark back to prog-rock melodrama, but with a neurotic angelic twist that gives new meaning to King Crimson s 21st century schizoid man . It all comes together on the tenth track, six minutes of martial crescendo that negate Aereogramme s skills at dynamics but also prove their irrational take on rationality. The mini-album Seclusion is a vastly inferior work, despite the surreal mini-concerto of Alternative Score. Seclusion is an eclectic and confusing collection, generally harsher and denser, but highlighted by an emo-core anthem, Inkwell, and by a ten-minute psychodrama, The Unravelling, that had little in common with the rest .Slint s guitarist Dave Pajo contributed to dispel the notion that instrumental music had to be atmospheric with Aerial M , which delivered languid sub-sub-ambient slo-core in which elements of lounge jazz, Ennio Morricone s soundtracks and Rachel s semi-classical scores were carefully defused. His minimalist and transcendental technique, equally inspired by Pat Metheny , Robert Fripp and John Fahey , reached an existential zenith on Papa M s Live From A Shark Cage , a phantasmagoria of cubist de-composition, the instrumental equivalent of Tim Buckley s music. New York City-based hip-hop artist Aesop Rock debuted with Music for the Earthworms and Appleseed . He then released one of the most intense albums in the history of hip hop, Float .Labor Days was not as revolutionary, and not as consistent, but still boasted two gems such as Daylight and Labor. It helped publicize producer Anthony Blockhead Simon, who had already collaborated with Aesop Rock but blossomed as a beat sculptor with this album. Bazooka Tooth is another feast of classy, creative numbers .The seven-song EP Fast Cars, Danger, Fire And Knives is a mediocre collection of trivial political rants. Anthony Blockhead Simon has released the solo Music by Cavelight .In Ohio, Greg Dulli s Afghan Whigs, who had begun as punks with Big Top Halloween and pseudo-grunge rockers with Up In It , an abrasive blend of Replacements and Dinosaur Jr, rediscovered soul music and the rhythm n blues ballad on Congregation , a calmer and catchier collection.The first conscious artist of rap s aural collage was Afrika Bambaata, aka Kahyan Aasim, the Leonardo of the beatbox , the producer of Soul Sonic Force s Zulu Nation Throwdown , the rap auteur of Planet Rock , Looking For The Perfect Beat , Renegades Of Funk , World Destruction , whose album Beware summarized five years of experiments in mixing samples, epileptic beats, disco grooves and Kraftwerk s electronic pop, and defined the genre called electro . Afterhours are an Italian band that helped shape the national scene of the 1990s. They debuted as a rather traditional rock n roll outfit with the the effervescent mini-album All The Good Children Go to Hell , the mediocre album During Christine s Sleep , the transitional mini-album Cocaine Head , and the even less exciting album Pop Kills Your Soul . They redeemed themselves with the elegant noise-rock of Germi , and went on to coin a unique compromise between Tuxedomoon s new wave and Black Flag s hardcore, particularly with the tour de force of Hai Paura del Buio? They lost a bit of verve with Non E Per Sempre , and Quello Che Non C e closed the circle by returning to a more accessible format, and Ballate Per Piccole Iene reignited the punk bonfire of their first album. A Short Apnea blurred the borders between post-rock, free-jazz and electronic avantgarde in the three jams of their second album, Illu Ogod Ellat Rhagedia .Florida s Against Me, led by vocalist and guitarist Tom Gabel, specialize in punk-folk of the Billy Bragg tradition, via alt-country, the Dropkick Murphys and southern blues-rock. Following the EP Crime as Forgiven , that contained the powerful I Still Love You Julie and Walking is Still Honest, the album Reinventing Axl Rose announced a screaming bard, whose philosophy of life was expressed by the desperate Pints Of Guinness, the anthemic Those Anarcho Punks are Mysterious , the catchy Reinventing Axl Rose, and We Laugh at Danger. Following the horns-tinged single The Disco Before the Breakdown , the 26-minute album As the Eternal Cowboy showed a more mature outfit, recalling the Clash as it shifted from T.S.R. to the political sermon Mutiny On The Electronic Bay, from the driving Slurring The Rhythms, to the reggae Turn Those Clapping Hands Into Angry Balled Fists, even imploding into the acoustic ballad Sink Florida Sink. Searching for a Former Clarity was musically even more professional, with longer songs and progressive arrangements. The political rant From Her Lips To God s Ears harked back to their roots, but the dance-punk number Unprotected Sex With Multiple Partners and the reggae-infected Justin slowed down the proceedings while deepening the context.Air is a duo of French musicians, Nicolas Godin, with a degree in architecture, and Jean Benoit Dunckel, with a degree in classical music. They started playing alternative rock in the 1980s in Paris, but reached maturity composing music that harks back to the heyday of Europop and Eurodisco, albeit transfigured by retro-futuristic arrangements. Their musical itinerary was marked by a batch of delightful singles: Modulor Mix , Casanova 70 Les Professionels , J ai Dormi Sous l Eau, Le Soleil Est Pres De Moi , that have been collected on an EP, later expanded to a mini-album, titled Premiers Symptomes . You can hear the soothing melody behind the plastic mix of digital beats and electronic reverbs of Modulor Mix, but only when the horns moan it louder it becomes the center of the song, and only for a few songs.The nocturnal lounge music of Les Professionels, wrapped in tides of gentle melodies, and the dreamy music box of J ai Dormi Sous l Eau, whose repetitive patterns border on minimalism and raga, push the melody to the forefront. Le Soleil Est Pres De Moi continues the slide towards a more conventional song. Air s music belongs to the easy listening side of the spectrum: jazzy and laid-back, sensual and melodic.Moon Safari is a vastly more professional and ambitious proposition than the early funny singles. Korg keyboards, Moog synthesizers, Fender Rhodes electric piano, and vocoders bestow a zany campiness to the kitscy pop of Air s electronic dance music. The tracks exude Pink Floyd s psychedelic majesty, jazz s subdued ambience, random quotations from the history of soul, funk and disco music, and more than a passing mention of Burt Bacharach s and Ennio Morricone s scores. The suave and uplifting jazz-rock theme of La Femme d Argent, played and counterpointed on a plethora of timbres by the electronic keyboards, whirls like one of Terry Riley s minimalistic dervishes before mutating into a driving movement for piano and orchestra. Their knack for post-modern revisions of commercial music is in full display. Sexy Boy is culled from France s easy listening of the 1960s but augmented with bizarre sounds and a robotic tone. A similar treatment awaits the bubblegum motiv of Kelly Watch The Stars , the catchy novelty Remember , the joyful parody of orchestral movie soundtracks Ce Matin La. Gli Air sono un duo di musicisti francesi, Nicolas Godin, laureato in architettura, e Jean Benoit Dunckel, laureato in musica classica. I due hanno incominciato dedicandosi al rock alternativo nella Parigi degli anni 80, ma hanno raggiunto la maturita componendo una musica che riporta all epoca del massimo splendore di Europop ed Eurodisco, quantunque transfigurata da arrangiamenti retro-futuristici. Il loro percorso musicale e caratterizzato da una sequenza di singoli deliziosi: Modulor Mix , Casanova 70, Les Professionels , J ai Dormi Sous l Eau, che sono stati raccolti su un EP, piu tardi ampliato a mini-album, intitolato Premiers Symptomes . Dato che tutti gli strumenti sono suonati dal vivo e che non e impiegato alcun tipo di campionamento, il suono risulta fresco e per niente artificiale. Moon Safari è un progetto molto più professionale e ambizioso rispetto ai primi divertenti singoli. Il suono vecchio stile delle tastiere analogiche è preponderante, secondo la scuola di Moog-revival che sta prendendo piede negli Stati Uniti. Le tastiere Korg, il Moog, il piano elettrico Fender Rhodes ed i vocoders conferiscono una claunesca effeminatezza al pop kitsch della dance music elettronica degli Air. I brani trasudano la maestosità psichedelica dei Pink Floyd, le atmosfere sommesse del jazz, menzioni casuali dalla storia del soul, del funk e della disco music, e più di una fuggevole citazione delle partiture di Burt Bacharach e di Ennio Morricone. Il tema soave e cadenzato di La Femme d Argent, suonato e contrappuntato su una moltitudine di timbri dalle tastiere elettroniche, si avvita come uno dei dervish minimalisti di Terry Riley prima di mutare in un movimento incalzante per piano e orchestra. La loro passione per le revisioni postmoderne della musica commerciale e all apice. Un trattamento simile attende il motivo bubblegum di Kelly Watch The Stars , la novelty orecchiabile di Remember , la gioiosa parodia delle colonne sonore orchestrali Ce Matin La.The film soundtrack Virgin Suicides is not up to the masterpiece. A dozen Pink Floyd-ish instrumental tracks and one vocal piece, Playground Love, merely scratch the surface of their postmodern technique of layering kitschy and retro sounds. Helped by Moog and Mellotron, Air forge an evocative and nostalgic score in which the story matters more than the merit of each song. 10.000 Hz Legend , Air s second album , is a more sophisticated and colder portion of catchy and soft 1960s-infected arias. The dreamy, Pink Floyd-ian Radio 1, the Beatles-esque How Does It Make You Feel, the glam-rock melodrama of People In The City rank among their most consummable moments. The French revisionists have lost something in arrangements, despite a pastoral flute or a psychedelic guitar or a Macintosh computer voice occasionally surfing the soundscape. It may not be a coincidence that Air asked distinguished guests to help out pen The Vagabond and Sex Born Poison . Everybody Hertz is the customary, tedious album of remixes. City Reading is the musical soundtrack to a reading by Italian writer Allessandro Baricco.Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin returned to a relatively warmer ambience on Talkie Walkie . If their specialy remains the classy but pointless easy-listening of Run and Alone In Kyoto , or the elegant bubblegum music of Cherry Blossom Girl or the joyful instrumental novelty Alpha Beta Gaga, i.e. the numbers that highlight their inventive fusion of Brian Wilson and Brian Eno, a deeper sense of existential spleen radiates from the slightly neurotic Alpha Beta Gaga and the oddly funereal Venus, songs that cast a dark shadow on their paradise lounge, or from the postmodernist revisions of the space boogie Surfin on a Rocket and the space country Biological. Occasionally, Air s art evokes the dark-humorous vision of a paradise set inside a videogame, a vision that is worth a philosophical essay. Aislers Set is a San Francisco-based combo that plays retro-pop, often bordering on imitation of Tin Pan Alley and girl-groups. Terrible Things Happen was a lame example of Brit-pop translated into American, but The Last Match offered a batch of inspired, effervescent ditties worth of Sixties girl-groups . The single Action, Attraction, Reaction simply upped the ante and third album How I Learned To Write Backwards indulged in a denser, layered Phil Spector-ian production than ever, both on the upbeat side and on the downbeat side .Aki Peltonen is a Finnish accordionist who fused folk, classical, jazz and post-rock elements on Radio Banana . Just like the bluesy and romantic second track , the 14-minute fourth piece, ostensibly a waltz, is a long series of melodic variations over a touching nocturnal leitmotiv.Los Angeles-based composer Akira Rabelais builds a bridge between classical romanticism and digital composition.Spellewauerynsherde and EN OF 031 manipulated found samples to produce eerie, almost gothic, atmospheres.New York s folk psychedelic quartet Akron Family debuted with Akron Family , an album of soundscape-oriented instrumental background for warbling surreal elegies and litanies of metaphysical loss. Their touching Before and Again, Part of Corey, Afford, I ll Be on the Water showed how the post-rock aesthetic could be applied to Sufjan Stevens-like folk-rock melody. The eight-minute Italy is an exercise in rubber-band aerodynamics, a lengthy slumber slowly accruing tension that is eventually released in a fit of grandeur. The split album Akron Family Angels Of Light continued the experiment of Angels Of Light s Sing Other People: Michael Gira backed by Akron Family.Mitchell s raw and basic southern-soul productions also propelled the erotic hymns of Al Green: Green s own Tired Of Being Alone and Mitchell s Let s Stay Together , Look What You Done To Me , I m Still In Love With You , as well as Green s own Take Me To The River .Even if he was not particularly successful on his own, Al Kooper was one of the most influential artists of the 1960s and one of the most accomplished keyboardists of all times.Al Kooper, a New York native, came to rock music via pop group Royal Teens, who had a minor hit with Shorts Shorts . After writing Gary Lewis hit This Diamond Ring , Kooper was called to play organ on Bob Dylan s Like A Rolling Stone and remained throughout Blonde On Blonde, continuously perfecting that atmospheric, dreamy, melodic style. Kooper formed Blues Projections and Blood Sweat Tears, both influential in their respective fields .Scottish folksinger Al Stewart began his career as an introverted minstrel of love songs on Bedsitter Images , particularly gifted in Swiss Cottage Manoeuvers and Clifton In The Rain. Love Chronicles , backed by the Fairport Convention, delivered the 18-minute autobiographic epic Love Chronicles that stands as his masterpiece. Zero She Flies was perhaps a stronger set of songs, thanks to the electrical Electric Los Angeles Sunset, the soulful Small Fruit Song and the historical narrative Manuscript. Orange completed his romantic phase and transitioned to the historical phase of Past Present And Future , a concept devoted to historical themes and Modern Times , that includes the title-track. Stewart s newly-found mass appeal peaked with Year Of The Cat, the chart hit from the album Janus , produced by Alan Parsons.24 Carrots returned to his passion for history coupling it with thick, almost symphonic arrangements. Famous Last Words and Between The Wars were collections of persoal and historical odes arranged for small chamber ensembles. To Whom It May Concern is an anthology of the period between 1966 and 1970.Alabama Thunderpussy is a band from Richmond that plays stoner-rock full of colossal riffs and screamed vocals, but at a faster tempo. One of the inspirations of Rise Again seems to be Motorhead, and that sets the band apart from the pack of stoner wolves . After the EP River City Revival , containing Dryspell, the album Constellation offered a more sophisticated version of their style and betrayed another key influence, Lynyrd Skynyrd .Staring At The Divine alternates between old and new, between Pantera-like sludge-fest Shapeshifter and rockers like Ol Unfaithful , between the dejavu riffs of Whore Adore and Esteem Fiend and the full-throttle charge of Motor-Ready .S.D.D.Vocalist Johnny Throckmorton, guitarists Asechiah Bogden and Erik Larson, drummer Bryan Cox and bassist Sam Krivanec constitute a formidable line-up that can take up much tougher challenges than the ordinary stoner sludge stereotypes.Alan Parsons worked as a sound engineer on the Beatles Abbey Road and the Pink Floyd s Dark Side Of the Moon, two of the most lushly arranged albums of all times. In 1976 he and keyboardist Eric Woolfson formed the Alan Parsons Project and released Tales of Mystery and Imagination , a concept album based on Edgar Allan Poe s stories.After the gothic theme of its debut album, the Project proceeded to deal with sci-fi on I Robot , whose instrumentals are among the most intriguing of Parsons career. Pyramid , dedicated to ancient Egypt, which still features some I Robot-style instrumentals , and Eve , which includes the instrumentals Lucifer and Secret Garden, were lame imitations of the early albums. The progress towards soft-rock and MOR balladry began with The Turn of a Friendly Card , their most electronic album yet, that contains the hits Games People Play and Time, and peaked with the awfully commercial Eye In The Sky , whose Eye In The Sky became Parsons best seller.Parsons decided to restore a bit of artistic prestige to his career with Stereotomy , whose lengthy ballads and futuristic instrumentals are probably Parsons most elaborate compositions, and Gaudi , which sounds more like a philosophical treaty than a pop album . Freudiana , Try Anything Once , The Time Machine are the later albums. A flood of anthologies covers Parsons career: The Best of The Alan Parsons Project , The Best of The Alan Parsons Project - vol. 2 , The Instrumental Works , Anthology , The Ultimate Collection , The Best of The Alan Parsons Project , The Definitive Collection , Gold Collection , Encore Collection , etc.Before turning to commercial pop music, Italian singer-songwriter Alan Sorrenti crafted the free-form psychedelic concept Aria , with the 20-minute title-track, in the vein of Tim Buckley, perhaps the most accomplished and innovative album of the Italian cantautori . He tried to repeat that miracle on Come un Vecchio Incensiere, that includes the 23-minute title-track, but, despite the veteran session-men who helped out, he could never quite muster the same magic. Lowercase is a guitar-drums duo from San Francisco that plays a weird hybrid of lo-fi pop, post-rock and slo-core, a veritable summa of 1990s alternative rock dialects. They debuted with three singles that established a credible record of heavy albeit minimal noise-rock: Sometimes I Feel Like A Vampire , Brass Tacks , and Cadence . The album All Destructive Urges expanded their sound towards more dramatic forms of expression. Occasionally, the duo enters a catchy melody, but As Your Mouth is pop that ends in terrified screaming, and Earth Minus One is pop depressed by suicidal agony. Their normal mood is one of extreme passion and emotion, like in the discordant, unstable Palace Vaccine, like the incendiary atmosphere of Ringbleeder, like the frantic bacchanal of Sometimes I Feel Like A Vampire. The nine-minute psychodrama Because I Can owes to Slint s convoluted harmonies as well as to Built To Spill s free-form counterpoint: the music ebbs and flows, punctuated by a depressed slow-motion raga-like guitar line and disrupted by sudden bursts of grief. As in the best tradition of progressive hardcore, the vocals, the riffs and the beats are artsy as well as demented.A bass player guests on Kill The Lights , but only She Takes Me and Stairways, the two most aggressive songs, benefit from the addition. She Takes Me is like a Rolling Stones song that focuses only on the terrifying groove and reduces the melody to a Nirvana-esque lament howl. Stairways is a two-minute instrumental that builds up a dissonant maelstrom, a sort of the Sonic Youth meet the King Crimson . The rest is a descent into a personal hell. The eight-minute Slightly Dazed is virtually a documentary of a man losing his mind, the guitar repeating an ominous pattern over a funereal beat until it becomes a death toll . Neurasthenia is even less musical, and, by making the most of the least, paints a harrowing picture of claustrophobia and desperation. The lengthy instrumental overture of the nine-minute Rare Anger returns to the Pink Floyd-ian suspense, with an additional dose of guitar noise and dejected melodies, and this time the screaming reaches an apocalyptic intensity. On the other hand, the heaviness of the 12-minute nightmare You re A King owes a lot to the Melvins.The single Imbedded on Ice heralds a more austere phase, that dawns with the hypnotic, droning tracks of The Going Away Present .After Lowercase dissolved, Imaad Wasif formed Alaska with another drummer, Russ Pollard of Sebadoh. Emotions is not all that different from Lowercase, but showcases the most intimate side of the singer, a sort of Jonathan Richman for the new century. Imaad Wasif s first solo album, Imaad Wasif , a calvary of gloomy slocore.The genre had already existed for at least ten years before it became a sensation , and it has at least three inventors . Meade Lux Lewis, who was a cab driver for a same Chicago taxi company recorded Honky Tonk Train Blues in 1927, but the song was released only two years later . Clarence Pinetop Smith lived only 25 years, but, the year before dying, moved to the same apartment with Ammons and Lewis and recorded the archetype: Pinetop s Boogie Woogie , the first recorded song that referred to the boogie woogie . It was announced by Albert Ammons Boogie Woogie Stomp , a cover of Pinetop s Boogie Woogie recorded with his Rhythm Kings, and by Pete Johnson, who teamed up with Kansas City s vocalist Big Joe Turner, the ultimate shouter , for Roll Em Pete , and then exploded after John Hammond assembled the piano trio of Albert Hammons, Meade Lux Lewis and Pete Johnson at New York s Carnegie Hall in 1938. Albert Ammons was the most passionate of the trio, for example in the manic Boogie Woogie Stomp with his Rhythm Kings, Mecca Flat Blues , Shout for Joy and Bass Going Crazy .Shirley Collins was a pivotal figure in the English folk revival movement. Collins pure voice lent itself to interpret old English songs in a mesmerizing tone, as proven by her early albums Sweet England and False True Lovers , and countless EPs. Her third full-length album, Folk Roots New Routes , a collaboration with guitarist Davy Graham, marked a bold departure for the folk movement, as Collins embraced jazz. Accompanied by sister Dolly on piano , Shirley Collins returned to traditional material on The Sweet Primeroses , trying to capitalize on the boom of the folk revival. However, her creative peak was reached with The Power Of The True Love Knot , that featured Mike Heron and Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band, and with the concept album Anthems In Eden .After Love Death The Lady , whose songs sound like classical leaders, Collins put together the Albion Country Band by assembling 25 of the most respected folk-rock musicians of the time, and released No Roses .Shirley Collins closed her career with the relatively conventional collections of A Favourite Garland , Adieu To Old England , Amaranth . For As Many As Will was credited to both sisters. The Albion Band still recorded Rise Up Like The Sun and Lark Rise To Candleford and will continue to exist in the 1990s. Fountain Of Snow collects songs recorded for the Topic label. Within Sound is a 4-cd set compilation.Tristeza is a quintet from San Diego which debuted with the single Foreshadow Smoke Through Glass . The slow, gentle, minimalistic instrumentals of Spine And Sensory presented Tristeza s instrumental rock as new-age music s version of post-rock. The longest piece, When We Glow , is the most challenging of these guitar-driven jams that nod at bluegrass, jazz and surf music but never quite pick a genre.The single Macrame is almost bedroom-pop. The guitars weave their intense prayers by playing tiny variations of a simple theme over geometric and old-fashioned rhythms, and over the distant rumbling of the most humble keyboards in rock history. While the melodic tapestries of Building Peaks and Opiate Slopes are quite catchy, in general their art shuns spectacular moves and favors an intimate, domestic, colloquial style. The colorful scales and trance-inducing cycles of Respira, the tender and delicate tinkling of Shifty Drifty, the dreamy and effervescent resonance of I Am a Cheetah, the peaceful adagio of Chiaroscuro are more in the style of John Fahey than in the style of contemporary post-rock. For a few seconds Aurora Borealis sounds like an outtake from Neu s first album, but the hammering soon turns into pointillism. The fundamental unity of the album is also its only drawback, as the technique does not offer a broad range of variants.The remix album Mixed Signals and the EP These Walls were a poor appendix to the album. Album Leaf is Jimmy LaValle s side project. The music on An Orchestrated Rise to Fall is not too different from Tristeza s, it is merely less structured and less hummable . However, One Day I ll Be On Time , the five-song EP Seal Beach and In A Safe Place were mostly undistinguished. Album Leaf came into its own with Into the Blue Again , coloring LaValle s songs with an existential ambience that was reminiscent of Sigur Ros. Folloowing Jimmy LaValle s split with the band, the 7-song EP Espuma was Tristeza s least inspired work yet, a set of experiments that betray a lack of direction. Tristeza s A Colores was one of their most accomplished festivals of the unpredictable. An impressive number of instrumentals hint at catchy melodies only to implement them in the most awkwardly creative way and to rapidly dismantle them according to some masochistic aesthetic. Somehow the departure of Jimmy LaValle has created a new equilibrium within the band, with bassist Luis Hermosillo and drummer James Lehner providing shaky rhythmic foundations for the twisted flow of stylistic gestures by keyboardist Sean Ogilive and guitarists Christopher Sprague and Alison Ables. Tristeza è un quintetto proveniente da San Diego.Le compozioni jazzate lente e aggaziate di Spine And Sensory presentano il rock strumentale dei Tristeza come una versione new age del post-rock.Il singolo Macrame è quasi bedroom-pop. Le chitarre tessono le loro intense preghiere suonando piccole variazioni di un semplice tema su ritmiche geometriche e demodè, e sul distante brontolio delle più umili tastiere nella storia del rock. Le tappezzerie melodiche di Building Peaks e Opiate Slopes sono alquanto orechiabili, ma in generale la loro arte evita mosse spettacolari a favore di uno stile più intimo, domestico e colloquiale. Le scale coloratissime e i cicli ipnotici di Respira, il tintinnio tenero e delicato di Shifty Drifty, la risonanza onirica ed effervescente di I Am a Cheetah, l adagio pacifico di Chiaroscuro rimandano più allo stile di John Fahey che a quello del moderno post-rock. Raramente i Tristeza sono cervellotici, e, qnche quando lo sono , riescono ad evitare i contrappunti aspri e discordanti del progressive-rock.L unità fondamentale dell album è anche il suo unico svantaggio, dato che la tecnica non offre una vasta scelta di varianti.Album Leaf è il progetto parallelo di Jimmy LaValle. La musica su An Orchestrated Rise to Fall non è molto lontana da quella dei Tristeza, è solo meno strutturato e meno canticchiabile : fatta con tastiere, chitarre e rumori ambientali, rimanda ai The Alchemysts are a British power-trio led by guitarist Paul Simmons and formed in 1990.Over and Out leans too much towards hard-rock , although a few numbers are still madness in music . Zero Zen continued that progression towards hard-rock with jams that were acrobatic intermezzos for riff-heavy songs rather than psychedelic trips. Simeon The Alchemysts documents a 1998 collaboration between Alchemysts and Simeon Coxe of the Silver Apples, particularly the 15-minute Morning Comes.Alec Empire was born in 1972 in West Berlin. Empire formed a punk band called Die Kinder, then started listening to classical music and finally began to experiment with guitar and electronics. After German reunification, the stereotypical teenage rebel found relief in the raves of East Berlin s underground scene, far removed from West Germany s commercial rave scene.Atari Teenage Riot was started in 1992 when Carl Crack , Alec Empire and Hanin Elias , decided to revolt against the state of the techno scene and launch a creative bybrid of industrial, metal and electronica, which they defined digital hardcore . Their singles and EPs were as uncompromising and ultra-aggresive as their manifestos: Hetzjagd AufNazis , Not Your Business , which includes the epic riff of Atari Teenage Riot, the childish spasm of Not Your Business , the metal-industrial fit of Into The Death, and Raverbashing, Kids R United , with the nihilistic sermons Kids Are United and Deutschland , the singles Raverbashing and the propulsive, booming techno of Speed , replete with male rap, girlish female counterpoint and male choir, were mostly boycotted by labels, stores, radio stations. For those who had missed the singles, the lyrics on their first album, Delete Yourself , sounded like they were coming straight out of 1977 punk-rock. The album s sound, a very noisy and chaotic mix of guitar samples, distorted breakbeats, 909, manga samples and shouting, and its political overtones , virtually reinvented the mission of dance music in the wake of the triumph of western-style capitalistic values. The pounding, unrelenting, visceral call to arms of Start The Riot and the epileptic orgy of title-track, accompanied by a generous selection of the previous singles, terrorized discos and radio stations around Germany. Empire s solo career, in the meantime, was much more prolific, including: the single Tripmen , the EPs Yobot , SuEcide , with Terror Worldwide, Orgasm Addict and the anthemic SuEcide, the EP SuEcide Pt 2 , the singles Das Duell and Bass Terror , the EPs Limited Edition 1 and Limited Edition 2 , the EP Pulse Code , etc. These early recordings, which will be partially compiled on Limited Editions 1990-94 , show a techno artist still searching for his mission, but Generation Star Wars , the first proper Alec Empire album, displayed an angry young man of techno and hip hop intent on deconstructing the genres through a manic use of distorted breakbeats. The deluge continued with the EPs Berlin Sky , The Wipe Out , with Two Steps Beyond The Terror, Jaguar , with The Past says and Interplanetary Disco Rhythm, and Squeeze The Trigger , with Squeeze The Trigger. The glacial Low On Ice , which included the Kraftwerk-ian single 22:24, was more in the vein of Brian Eno, Aphex Twin and Bill Laswell . Les Etoiles Des Filles Mortes , a fully electronic work and possibly his masterpiece, showed the influence of electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and veered towards gothic ambient music. But Empire changed course again with Hypermodern Jazz 2000.5 , and its slower, relaxed, self-indulging dance music, which employs slightly out-of-time beats to disorient the listener . That was about the same time when Alec Empire put out his album The Destroyer , that recycles material from the EPs The Destroyer , The Destroyer Pt 2 and Death , a milestone in the extreme jungle sound known as drill and bass . Part creative rhythms and part political ego, the album created a personality cult of sort for the angry young man of techno. We All Die and The Peak ripping apart the tender flesh of dance music with the shocking and blind hatred of a terrorist.Then ATR released the EP with Sick To Death , an inferior work but boasting the supersonic title-track, and their second album, The Future of War . Not much had changed, as the disc was still dominated by songs like The Future of War, Heatwave, Fuck All and P.R.E.S.S., i.e. wild, hard-driving punk-rock bacchanals, the rhythm is devastatingly loud and frantic, Elias still screams like Exene Cervenka on speed and the others concoct ferocious choirs. Outside the canon, the heavily distorted Death Star and, above all, the hip-hop hurricane Destroy 2000 Years Of Culture, with heavy-metal riffing and loud drumming, half Public Enemy and half Run DMC, prove that Empire does not rely on only one trick. If the result has less impact than the debut, it is only because the debut also included so many of the early singles. The best of their repertory was then compiled on Burn, Berlin, Burn , which introduced a much wider audience to the band s criminal career. In June of 1997, ATR picked up their fourth member, Nic Endo, a young Japanese-American who specializes in noises.In the meantime, Empire also released We Punk Einheit , credited to the Nintendo Teenage Robots and entirely composed from samples of videogame music. The Geist of Alec Empire is a three-disc set collecting material from the five LPs recorded for Mille Plateaux between 1990 and 1996. Alec Empire and Techno Animal s Kevin Martin have recorded together The Curse of the Golden Vampire , a nightmarish experiment in free-jazz electronica. The No Attitude returns Empire to his middleground, the slower, atmospheric variations on Atari s music.Alec Empire s Miss Black America does not display the violence of Atari Teenage Riot or The Destroyer.On her first solo, In Flames , singer Hanin Elias sets the angry young woman s lyrics of Girl Serial Killer and In Flames to a futuristic soundscape, sounding like a Bjork who joined a guerrilla movement. Rage is a single recorded by Atari Teenage Riot with Tom Morello on guitar. Alec Empire s Intelligence And Sacrifice is a double album that is divided in a first half of dense, intense, angry, desperate, violent techno-hardcore music, reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails , and a second half of experimental soundscapes . Redefine the Enemy collects rarities. Hanin Elias first solo album, No Games No Fun , is old-fashioned disco-punk bordering on synth-pop. Live CBGB s NYC 1998 documents a performance with Merzbow. Alec Empire s Futurist harks back to the age of aggro and industrial metal with little imagination.As an adult, Alejandro Escovedo, who had played punk-rock with the Nuns, country-rock with Rank And File , and roots-rock with the True Believers became one of the most solemn voices of his generation.The repertory of the Tall Dwarfs, almost entirely recorded at vocalist Chris Knox s house, excels at skewed, drum-less melodies. The EPs, Three Songs and Louis Likes His Daily Dip , the mini-album Canned Music and the EP Slugbucket Hairybreath Monster specialize in kaleidoscopic collages of ideas that rarely coalesce into a regular song but often waste enough cleverness worth an entire career. Throw A Sickie , their first album, was still a madhouse of improbable pop music, but subsequent albums adopted a more traditional format. Throughout the ages of hard-rock, progressive-rock, punk-rock and the new wave, Alex Chilton has been the prophet of power-pop, of unadulterated melody, of four-part vocal harmonies, of jingle-jangle guitars, of hard-rock riffs, and of crystal-clear production.Born in Tennessee, Alex Chilton was the guitarist and vocalist for the Box Tops, a Memphis-based band. Their elegant variant of blue-eyed soul yielded the hit The Letter , written by Wayne Carson Thompson, when Chilton was only 17 years old. After a few more hits in that vein , and a last album, Dimensions , featuring Chilton s first compositions, the Box Tops disbanded, and in 1970 Chilton joined Chris Bell s Big Star, another Memphis band, that played ebullient, straightforward pop music. 1 Record is very much the product of Bell s passion for the catchy refrains and engulfing choruses of Mersey-beat, although the band used jingle-jangling guitars a la Byrds .After Bell left the group, Chilton became the undisputed leader. Chilton s style is different from Bell s: Chilton s pop relies on a philosophy of life, on a vision, on psychological depth, whereas Bell was all sound for the sake of sound. Third , recorded in 1974 but released only four years later, and reissued with additional material as Sister Lovers , was harder and bleaker . The material he had recorded was collected on I Am The Cosmos , and shows a far superior songwriter than Chilton. Big Star broke up in 1975 and Chilton, relocated to New York, began a solo career with the EP Singer Not The Song , the single Bangkok and the album Bach s Bottom , a 1975 session that includes part of the EP. The problem is that there was a reason if he had been forgotten: he was not the most original or prolific of composers. Chilton is a late-night entertainer in the tradition of saloons and road-houses, not a singer-songwriter in the tradition of the Greenwich Village.In fact, the following decade produced very little.Lost Decade is a bad anthology. A Man Called Destruction has an unusual good dose of original.1970 collects the recordings that Chilton prepared for his first solo album, before he joined Big Star.Loose Shoes And Tight Pussy , reissued as Set , is another dreadful set of covers. Story is an anthology. Big Star returned with their first studio album in 27 years, In Space . The new line-up randomly sample the pop landscape of the early 1970s with Dony, Turn My Back on the Sun and Hung Up With Summer.The English blues of the 50s was a strange brew of instrumental jazz and Chicago style rhythm and blues.In 1954, two musicians from Barber s orchestra, Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, opened up a club in Soho - The Barrelhouse - that for a while served as the home base for the musicians of that community. In 1957, following the failure of their project, they went back to Barber s orchestra, that in the mean time was roaming Britain in the company of American bluesmen imported as the need arose. In 1961 the same duo formed an electric band, Blues Incorporated, with a young drummer - Charlie Watts.The importance of Blues Incorporated was enormous. The band of Korner and Davies was the vehicle by which the blues could express itself, mature, develop a more sophisticated audience, find distribution channels, and spread its message. Within the ranks of the band were gathered just about all the fine musicians of the time: terrific bandleaders such as John Baldry and Graham Bond, future jazz-rock giants such as John Surman and John McLaughlin, future stars of the Merseybeat such as Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Keith Richard, Eric Burdon, Paul Jones, future leaders of progressive-rock such as Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and Dick Heckstall-Smith.That great tree yielded many branches. Graham Bond, for instance, a jazz sax player who had switched to the organ for Korner , in 1963 formed the Organization with Bruce, Baker and sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith . The Organization was the first ensemble to fuse jazz and rhythm and blues, and to open the path for English jazz-rock, as shown in Solid Bond , recorded in 1963 with McLaughlin at the guitar, The Sound Of The Organization , the first album with the mellotron, and There s A Bond Between Us , which includes Walkin In The Park.In 1962 Davies became the leader the All Stars, who showcased the instrumental Country Line Special, a debut for Nicky Hopkins at the keyboard and Jeff Beck at the guitar. After the death of Davies , the lead shifted to John Baldry who took on Elton John, Rod Stewart, and Brian Auger.Korner went on to form several progressive-rock bands in the 70s.Mali s blues guitarist Ali Farka Toure debuted at 37 with Farka and became a star when he was almost 50 with Ali Farka Toure , a collection of originals, including the lengthy Amandrai, and African Blues . He carved a niche in the territory of Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder with The River , that adds saxophone and fiddle and scavenges the ancient repertory of Mali , The Source , which abandoned the solo format for a real band and guest stars, Talking Timbuktu , a collaboration with Cooder, the traditional Radio Mali , and Niafunke .Red And Green collects two rare recordings.Toure died in 2006.Alice Cooper became the first star of horror-shock rock, relying on the most truculent and ridiculous show of the era. But Cooper had been a disciple of Frank Zappa s satirical operettas, mainly on Pretties For You , and later became, first and foremost, a terrific craftman of teenage anthems in the tradition of Chuck Berry. Epically defiant, Under My Wheels and School s Out represent the authentic, subversive spirit of rock n roll, while albums such as Love It To Death continued to recycle and borrow themes from the vaudeville, Broadway showtunes, horror movies, and the Grand Guignol. Alio Die assembles electronic pieces that are inspired by the slow, soothing ambient melodies of Brian Eno s Music for Airports and by early Harold Budd: Sit Tibi Terra Levis , the angelic Under an Holy Ritual , with Reflections of A Dawn, The Door of Possibilities , The Flight of Real Image , and Password for Entheogenic Experience , perhaps the culmination of the early phase, a stately 64-minute drone-based composition. The Hidden Spring collects rarities. Collaborations include Suspended Feathers , with Vidna Obmana, Fissures with Robert Rich, the mini-album Descendre Cinq Lacs au Travers d une Voile with Yannick Dauby, Healing Herb s Spirit with Antonio Testa, A Tapestry for Sorceres and Mesmeric Revelation with Raffaele Serra , Echo Passage with Vidna Obmana, Ad Infinitum and Mother Sunrise with Opium , Aquam Metallicam with Nick Parkin, Apsaras with Amelia Cuni, a mediocre incursion in Indian music, etc. Le Stanze della Trascendenza Incantamento Leaves Net Son-Dha is the duo of Alio Die and Red Sector A .Expanding Horizon is a double-disc collaboration between Alio Die and Mathias Grassow .The prolific Italian artist has also released: the elegant Il Tempo Magico di Saturnia Pavonia , Khen Introduce Silence , built around the processed sounds of Khen , Sunja , a collaboration with Tommaso Zeit Cimo in two lenghty tracks , the biological concept Sleep of Seeds , a collaboration with Saffron Wood, Sol Niger , originally recorded in 2001.Angel s Fly Souvenir is a collaboration with multimedia artist Francesco Paladino and one of Alio Die s most sophisticated productions. Il Sogno di un Piano Veneziano a Parigi was a collaboration with Festina Lente on prepared piano. Aqua Planing is a collaboration with German sound sculptor Werner Durand on self-made wind instruments.Alison Goldfrapp is a gothic, decadent, chanteuse that sings cryptic lyrics in the chilling tone of an agonizing lover over Will Gregory s subtle, gentle, noir arrangements of electronic and acoustic instruments. There is something stately about her dejected crooning in the singles Lovely Head , superbly contrasting nostalgic whistling and futuristic synths, and Utopia , as if she was fighting the forces of human destiny, not just describing her private sorrow. The similarities with the greatest metaphysical chanteuse of all times, Nico, stop here, as the singer s vocal range is amazingly broad , while Gregory s scores are inspired by Angelo Badalamenti, Barry Adamson, horror-film soundtracks, classical music, electronica Squarepusher s drum n bass and Portishead s trip-hop. The album Felt Mountain is simultaneously less creepy and more elegant, sexier and slower. Human and Deer Stop are the new gems, but for true magic one has to check the surreal fairy-tale atmospheres of the instrumental Oompa Radar and the closing Horse Tears. Very little can be salvaged from Black Cherry .Supernature is not as awful as its predecessor but it is even more derivative of synth-pop and disco-music of the early 1980s.Alkaline Trio, a Chicago trio formed by vocalist and guitarist Matt Skiba, debuted with the catchy emo-pop of the singles Sundials and For Your Lungs Only , and of the entire razor-sharp album Goddamnit . Maybe I ll Catch Fire adds Fuck You Aurora and Maybe I ll Catch Fire to their punk canon, but the trio failed to stand up to their debut. The Alkaline Trio is an anthology of their singles. From Here to Infirmary and Good Mourning were major disappointments.The split Alkaline Trio and One Man Army is not exactly state of the art punk-rock. Crimson boasts a more mainstream sound. The Poison and Mercy Me mark a sort of punk-pop maturity, but the rest of the album is unbearable to anyone who has spent 29 years listening to punk-rock. Falcon, that debuted with Unicornography , was a supergroup made of Brendan Kelly of the Lawrence Arms, Dan Andriano , Tod Mohney and Neil Hennessy .All Night Radio are the project of Beachwood Sparks Dave Scher and Jimi Hey . Spirit Stereo Frequency is a sort of tribute to the psychedelic civilization viewed through the eyes of the 21st century. The repertory runs the gamut from baroque psychedelic pop to space-folk a la Byrds to languid Pink Floyd-ian ballads . The closing track All Night Radio is their personal anthem, a sonic tornado that recycles a broad range of elements from the psychedelic age. Now that the Flaming Lips have become mainstream, All Night Radio can restore credibility to the format of the ever-mutating psychedelic song. Allan Holdworth, one of the great British guitar virtuosos, has taken an oblique path in which he has collaborated with the giants of the Canturbury school, with the monsters of Heavy Metal, and with the visionaries of jazz-rock. It was not this experimentation which defines him, but rather his unique, fluid, free-form style, often using abstruse scales, in which his notes sometimes fall like like a cloudburst. His first major assignment came when, while still a member of the Blue Mink, Holdsworth played the distorted riff on Donovan s Hurdy Gurdy Man . His career began in Igginbottom, where he released Wrench in Sunship with leader Alan Gowen, and later with Nucleus, Soft Machine and U.K. In 1975 he joined Tony Williams Lifetime, and shocked the jazz world with his incendiary guitar work on Believe It .O.U.His technique continued to evolve, culminating in in a spectacular series of records for small ensemble which continue the tour de force of soloist Jeff Beck. Holdsworth s fusion matured with Metal Faticue , particularly with Devil Take The Hindmost and Metal Fatigue, even if those records were marred by their vocal parts.The mini-album Road Games marked a return to a stronger sound, but the material was weak and erratic. Atavachron brought mixed news. The bad news is that Holdsworth embraced an electronic guitar-like instrument called synthaxe , which allows him to produce symphonic sounds but also overloads the arrangements .That format was improved on the six pieces of Sand and reached a baroque sort of peak on Secrets , whose subtle and sophisticated compositions are soothing the way soft jazz used to be without ever sounding moronic. The guitarist mostly abandoned the synthaxed and returned to a rocking sound with Wardenclyffe Tower . Subsequent albums Hard Hat Area , None Too Soon , with the title-track and Gordon Beck on piano, Heavy Machinery , a trio with Anders Johansson and Jens Johansson, The Sixteen Men Of Tain , with Above And Below, and Flat Tire-Music For A Non-Existent Movie , continued to display his skills and a unique vision of genre decomposition. All Night Wrong was Holdsworth s first live album. Against the Clock is a career retrospective.Allen Toussaint, pianista leggero e sincopato, alla fine degli anni 50 chiuse la stagione del sound duro e veemente, debuttando con l album strumentale The Wild Sounds of New Orleans , ed apri quella del nuovo soffice New Orleans sound , popolarizzandolo attraverso gli hit dei suoi cantanti: Ooh Poo Pah Doo di Jessie Hill, Mother In-law di Ernie K-Doe, I Like It Like That e Land of a Thousand Dances di Chris Kenner, I Know di Barbara George, It Will Stand degli Showmen, Whipped Cream di Herb Alpert, Ruler of My Heart di Irma Thomas, Ya Ya e Ride Your Pony di Lee Dorsey, il piu dotato, Tell It Like It This di Aaron Neville. Le sue canzoni costituiscono un repertorio a cui hanno attinto decine di complessi rock, da Fortune Teller a Southern Nights , da Brickyard Blues a Night People , i capolavori della maturita . After toying with funk music on Lee Dorsey s Yes We Can , which Toussaint almost entirely composed and arranged, he finally released a solo album in the vein of the singer-songwriter, Toussaint , that reprised several of his old compositions. Life Love And Faith and especially Southern Nights refined Toussaint s light touch to blues, boogie, funk and soul music.Allerseelen, the project launched in 1989 by Austrian exoteric writer Gerhard Kadmon, began in a style close to industrial music with Cruor , an anthology of recordings from 1989-1993, and Gotos Kalanda , that collects recordings from 1992-1994.Neuschwabenland continued to streamline the compositions but also introduced military beats.Abenteuerliches Herz and Flamme capitalize on all those experiments to concoct sophisticated post-industrial ballads. Archaische Arbeiten and Heimliche Welt are compilations.Allied Vision debuted with a sound akin to :Wumpscut: on Unburied . Cup of Sorrow, Demon Sect, Unforgiven and All the Dead compose Storm s abrasive rosary, but they are hardly revolutionary in stylistic terms. Increasing the dose of violence, Man Must Be Overcome tried to establish a more personal identity.Canadian composer Allison Cameron specializes in chamber music, some of which was collected on Raw Sangudo . There is something threatening, sinister and macabre about Cameron s compositions for unusual ensembles. The feeling in The Chamber of Statues is almost gothic: sparse piano notes, a haunting clarinet theme, random percussion beats. Raw Sangudo , with its melodic fragments that buzz like insects , highlights the intrinsic frenzy and manic tension of her compositional style. Runa s spacey anguish , that transfers the long languid droning of the Part Ligeti school to a slightly dissonant and very sleepy context, and the distorted beauty of Gibbons Moon s baroque counterpoint are virtual primers in the art of emphasizing the colors while maintaining a delicate balance of tones and rhythms. The high point is A Blank Sheet Of Metal , 26 minutes of claustrophobic kammerspiel haunted by the ghosts of Edgar Varese and Pierre Boulez. Piano, organ, synthesizer, tuba and bass roam the soundscape in an inscrutable manner, while adding a dramatic quality to the proceedings.Each new listening brings forth new elements of relish from this music of infinite possibilities and interpretations.The Allman Brothers, featuring two lead guitars , were the first major band since the Grateful Dead for whom the live performance was more relevant than the studio album. Their debut album, The Allman Brothers Band , introduced a form of loose, guitar-intensive blues-rock ballad, a southern version of the Band s roots-rock, but it was the live albums, Live At Fillmore East and Eat A Peach , that transformed those ballads into epic sonic excursions. Almamegretta coined a new form of world-music with an ambitious encyclopedic revision of traditional codes that bridged the ancient folk tradition of Napoli , electronic dance music, dub production techniques and Middle-Eastern scales. The EP Figli di Annibale and debut album Animamigrante enhanced the group s melody with arrangements that borrowed elements of funk, reggae, pop sprayed them all with atmospheric electronics. After Fattall , an awful collection of rarities, the group found a magic balance of all those elements on Sanacore , a work that was more electronic and drenched in the sound of dub music.Alog is the Norwegian duo of Espen Sommer Eide and Dag-Are Haugan.Duck-Rabbit further refined Alog s electroacoustic pop muzak, although it lost a bit of the debut s gentle emotional drift. Miniatures is a diligent retelling of their aesthetics with no particular insight into how it could evolve.Oak Or Rock Catch That Totem collects other people s music remixed revisited by Alog.Aloha hail from Cleveland and debuted with the EP The Great Communicators , five brief and intriguing blasts of jazzcore. The album That s Your Fire successfully merged progressive-rock, free-jazz, minimalism and post-rock in intricate pieces such as A Hundred Stories and Saint Lorraine. Tony Cavallario on vocals and guitar, Matthew Gengler on bass, Cale Parks on drums, Eric Koltnow on vibraphone and piano display the technical prowess of a fusion combo and the imagination of a Canterbury outfit.Sugar is better structured although a little less adventurous. They See Rocks, Let Your Head Hang Low, It Won t Be Long are still impeccable performances but tend to reward the musicians, not the audience. Aloha is moving from emocore to progressive-rock, increasing the doses of jazz , alienating the rhythm and indulging in subtle counterpoint. Some Echoes is a more structured work that distances itself from the previous album s jazz leanings.Alquimia is a Mexican female multi-instrumentalist and vocalist with a background in electronic and classical music.Her recordings are: Coatlicue , Wings of Perception , Dead Tongues with Jose Luis Fernandez Ledesma, Move Resonate with Roedelius, A Separate Reality , Underwater with Zinkl. The best moments on Dead Tongues are probably the four instrumental pieces titled Road To Santiago, particularly the first one, Night, a nocturnal scene in which a saxophone mourns over static piano pattern, and the fourth one , a circus-like bacchanal propelled by a demented disco beat.Angaelic Voices Alternative TV was one of the bands that expanded punk-rock s vocabulary with keyboards and experimental touches. Mark Perry, a radio disc jockey and the editor of one of the first punk fanzines, Sniffin Glue , started the band in March 1977 with Alex Ferguson on guitar, Micky Smith on bass, John Towe on drums. The singles Love Lies Limp , Knights of the Future Alternatives to Normal Eating and How Much Longer You Bastard heralded a new era for British rock music, an era that would soon revel in the modernist sounds of XTC and Magazine. The Image Has Cracked is a milestone of that era, as are the singles Life After Life Life After Dub , Life Love Lies Limp and Action Time Vision Another Coke . Only Perry and the bassist were left on the album Vibing Up the Senile Man , a much more experimental album at the border between free-jazz and electronica, while the market also received a couple of live albums and a bootleg or two.Perry also released a solo album, Snoppy TUrns and released records under the names Good Missionaries and Here And Now. The original line-up reformed for the album Strange Kicks and the singles The Ancient Rebels Dub in Bed and Communicate Obsessed . Perry used different line-ups for the album Peep Show and the EP Sol . Splitting in 2 is an anthology of material from the first album and the singles. Alex Fergusson joined Psychic Tv and later started a solo career devoted to a baroque and psychedelic pop sound with Perverse Ballads .Alternative TV resurrected for the single Purpose In My Life Company Of Lies and the album My Life As A Child Star , mostly in the vein of 1970s pub-rock. Yet another incarnation of the band would convert to trip-hop with Punk Life .Chicago-based post-rock act Aluminum Group, formed by brothers Frank and John Navin, debuted with a slab of easy-listening muzak and Sixties bubblegum, Wonderboy Plus , but derailed that genre with electronic and acoustic arrangements on Plano , occasionally bordering on Pink Floyd-ian languor and sometimes achieving real melodrama . The band became even more intellectual on Pedals , produced by Jim O Rourke and virtually a spoof of Burt Bacharach s sophisticated orchestral pop. Stalwarts of simplicity in the age of post-rock complexity, the Aluminum Group harks back to the pre-rock years and attempt to recreate the feeling of safety, security and mindless happiness of those years.For better and for worse, More Happyness is a senseless repetition of the senseless pop ballads of the previous albums. Featuring many of Chicago s post-rock intellectuals , it embellishes its crooning litanies with synths and horns that basically photocopy the old easy-listening orchestras.Alva Noto is the code for Carsten Nicolai s recordings. His audio installations employ music of a special kind, music which is not meant to be music in the traditional sense of the word.Carsten was the instigator behind the audio journal 20 to 2000 : a series of CDs designed by a team of design artist and performed by artists of Carsten choice to provide a snapshot of the state of the art at the end of the millennium, including his own contribution, the EP Time..dot . His early musical recordings include Spin , Mikro Makro , which is a collaboration with Mika Vainio, and the flexidisc track Polyfoto . His mature season began with Kerne and peaked with the EP Empty Garden and the album Prototypes . The music employs techniques as diverse as minimalistic repetition, a musical form of abstract painting, musical pointillism, industrial music , quantum mechanics , glitch music and dissonant electronic music . Wohltemperiert is another collaboration with Pansonic. Transform is another demonstration of his audio construction techniques, a sort of summary of his entire career so far, from deconstruction of techno to LaMonte Young-ian wandering ambient drones . The EP Telefunken is an attempt to replicate his installations by plugging the stereo into the tv set and letting the sounds create the images. The limited-edition EP Uniform documents a fragment of a three-hour collaborative exhibition by Nicolai and Robin Rimbaud in San Francisco. Carsten Nicolai returned to his Noto moniker for the double EP Endless Loop . The EPs Transall Cycle Part One: Transrapid , Transall Cycle Part Two: Transvision and Transall Cycle Part Three: Transspray form a trilogy of music for the age of digital globalization, restless and chaotic. The marriage of Alva Noto s alien electronic soundscapes and Ryuichi Sakamoto s ambient piano vignettes yielded the mediocre Vrioon , Insen and Revep . For collected recordings of the 200s dedicated to various composers.American-born composer Alvin Curran , a student of Elliott Carter , relocated to Rome in 1964. In 1966, Curran and two other American expats, Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, founded the collective Musica Elettronica Viva, an agit-prop avantgarde and improvising group. On his own, Curran crafted intensely-spiritual works that mixed natural sounds, live electronics, improvised voice and keyboard patterns: Canti E Vedute Del Giardino Magnetico , his most lyrical collage, scored for for tape, voice, flugelhorn, synthesizer and tape of natural sounds ; Fiori Chiari Fiori Scuri for or ocarina, voice, piano, toy piano, synthesizer, and tape; Libri D armonia for conch shell, zither, voice, piano, synthi, and tape; and especially Canti Illuminati , a vast sonic montage based on the human voice. Alvin Lucier has been active since 1962 in the field of concrete music. He has introduced new paradigms to the field, by employing bold and radical methods to process unusual sources of sound and to perform scores in ever more unconventional manners. Works such as Music For Solo Performer , that used the performer s brainwaves, Clocker , for performer with galvanic skin response sensor; I Am Sitting In A Room , that used the room s background noise, and Music On A Long Thin Wire , that used the vibrations of a metallic wire, basically merged research in ambient, minimalist and concrete music, and found a common meaning behind the teachings of John Cage, LaMonte Young and Pierre Schaeffer. Amazing Blondel were formed by John David Gladwin and Terry Wincott to play the uninspired soft rock of Amazing Blondel . Somehow the duo came up with a better idea, teamed up with guitarist Edward Baird and recorded Evensong , a folk album that harked back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Madrigals and ballads performed on period instruments became their specialty and the trio s creative ideas led to the concept album Fantasia Lindum , which belongs more to progressive-rock than to folk-rock.Gladwin left and the surviving duo veered towards Steeleye Span s hard-folk with Blondel , entirely composed by Baird, Mulgrave Street , Inspiration , Bad Dreams . The band reunited 21 years later for Restoration .Arto Lindsay s atonal guitar and Ikue Mori s tribal drumming gave DNA the quality of utter nausea.The adult career of former DNA guitarist Arto Lindsay focused on a convoluted form of Latin-funk-jazz fusion. Ambitious Lovers, the combo he formed with Swiss keyboardist Peter Scherer, penned works such as Envy and the formally impeccable Greed that merged Brazialian music, disco-music and avantgarde. The ballet music for Pretty Ugly marked the zenith of this phase, which soon evolved in a pop phase, with Lindsay crooning his Latin roots in the jungle of orchestral arrangements, as on Lust . Lindsay ended up wedding the appeal of abrasive, intellectual noise and the appeal of sensual, languid Brazilian music on albums such as Prize , which were post-rock s version of world-music.The Amboy Dukes were formed in Chicago by guitar prodigy Ted Nugent, a native of Detroit and already the former leader of two bands, the first begun when he was only twelve. Their historic anthem, a version of Baby Please Don t Go, from The Amboy Dukes , is a passionate blues screamed against a wall of unrelenting rhythm and guitar dissonance, played at supersonic speed. Feedback, distortion and electronic sound effects are also the main ingredients of Journey To The Center Of The Mind and Dr. In the earlier albums, including Migration , Nugent s destructive emphasis is restrained by Steve Farmer s composing talent, managing to release its full fury on very few occasions, namely in the instrumental Migration and in Prodigal Man. With Marriage Of The Rocks Nugent prevails as the absolute boss of the group, directing the production towards the eclectic suite, such as The Inexhaustible Quest For The Cosmic Cabbage, a surf parody Bartok s second quartet atonal jazz heavy strumming by Nugent, in accordance with a progressive rock that is is rowdy, long winded, exhibitionist and violently stirred. In 1971 they recorded a twenty minute pyrotechnical live version of Prodigal Man on Survival Of The Fittest, perhaps their masterpiece. A new lineup produced the album Call Of The Wild , featuring wild hard rock instrumentals, notably Renegade. In the 1975 Nugent began a prolific solo career. The monster guitarist archetype, the champion of Hendrix s orphaned style, situated at the crossroad between psychedelic rock and heavy metal, Nugent continued the excesses of the Amboy Dukes last albums, in the same epic but much too rambling style. Fame reached him through his excessive histrionics, that led him to boast about his wild hunger for sex and violence, and compelled him to engage in stage duels with colleagues of the caliber of Wayne Kramer and Frank Marino, as documented in Double Live Gonzo .American Music Club stood apart in the late 1980s as one of the groups that transformed roots-rock into an intimate, almost transcendental experience. Mark Eitzel s laconic pessimism, halfway between Gram Parsons s calm despair, Nick Drake s funereal lament, and Tim Buckley s dreamy agony, acted as the center of mass for the atmospheric psychodramas of Engine . The dialectics between instruments and vocals punctuated the otherwise evanescent melodies of Big Night, At My Mercy, Outside This Bar, in a manner that was also reminiscent of Van Morrison. Eitzel s stream of consciousness reached for a visceral tension on California , a work that was both more austere and more introverted. It was also a vocal tour de force of Eitzel, who followed his stories modulating both anger and romance, impersonating both the crooner and the shouter. The bleak and lyrical United Kingdom seemed to complete Eitzel s spiritual self-flagellation, besides absorbing more of the jazz, soul and gospel eloquence for tracks as adventurous as The Hula Maiden and Heaven Of Your Hands. The nightmare relented on Everclear , the album that marked a transition from the closed landscape of the first phase to the open landscape of the second phase. Less intense but more humane, only a couple of moments recalled past agonies, but the playing was more accomplished and the arrangements more articulate. The more complex, dense and atmospheric sound Mercury , which features The Hopes And Dreams of Heaven s 10,000 Whores, and the sophisticated soul-pop of San Francisco , capitalized on Eitzel s ability to merge elegant melancholy and roaring passion. Formed in the early 1990s in Providence , Space Heater was an odd ensemble of two bass players and a percussionist, that eventually expanded to a small chamber ensemble and changed name to Amoebic Ensemble. Led by accordionist and composer Alec Redfearn, and featuring trumpet player Shawn Wallace, Jonathan Thomas on cans and kitchenware, Matthew Everett on bouzouki and mandolin, Laura Gulley on violin, Steve Jobe on bassons, Paige Van Antwerp on drums, they recorded Limbic Rage , that contains brief surreal vignettes such as Tertullian Waltz and Waxing Neuralgic , and Amoebiasis , again at the border between progressive-rock and cartoon music. Jonathan Thomas has released Septimania , featuring Rick Brown , Chris Nelson and former Amoebic Ensemble members. The album contains divinely cartoonish kitchenware novelties such as Don t Worry About Rupture and Bali Hoo, as well as the organ-driven proto-surf music of In Praise Of Crabgrass, the demented fanfare of Here Come The Cool Jerks and the cosmic free-jazz of Visitors 1 Univers 0. The Pianosaurus used to do something similar with toy instruments, but Thomas could turn even your kitchen utensils into an orchestra.Amon Duul II were perhaps the most teutonic among the great German masters of the 1970s.They soon abandoned the most blasphemous and provocative stances, and their sound more clearly revealed the influence of Californian acid-rock.Amon Duul 0 were a free-jazz trio, formed in 1966 in Munich by guitarist and violinist Chris Karrer, by bassist Lothar Meid and by drummer Christian Burchard . Amon Duul were instead the musical expression of a commune that included both artists and political activists, and in particular Karrer. The early Amon Duul were perhaps the most politicized group of Germany s 1968 . A 48-hour session, improvised towards the end of the year, yielded enough material for three albums: Psychedelic Underground , reissued as This Is, Collapsing and Disaster , besides the bootleg Experimente. Paradieswaerts , instead, comprises only three pieces and sounds like the work of another band, so different is its paradisiac sound from the anarchic mess of the other albums. Towards the end of 1968, Karrer decided to leave the commune and start a rock band.For Amon Duul II s debut album, Phallus Dei , the line-up increased to seven or eight units, absorbing bassist Dave Anderson and drummer Dieter Serfas. The album, mostly instrumental, set a new standard for black music, and remains one of the most infernal bacchanals in the annals of rock music. Phallus Dei, a 20-minute suite, begins with muffled electronic sounds and Stockhausen-like dissonances, while the vocalist rattles in an overdose trip. A killer violin riff, that seems to come out of a square dance, resumes the bacchanal that soon delves into an orgy of African percussions. Finally the wild, chaotic sabbah coalesces in a solemn march, and the voice screams terrible formulas that echo in the caverns of hell. The violin plays the role of a call from hell, that leads the crowd of the damned towards the eternal fire. The album s black mass is rounded up on the other side by the witches dance of Kanaan and the incontrollable pow-wow urge of Luzifer s Ghilom . On the other hand, the driving gypsy rhythm and the satanic screams of Dem Guten Schoenen Wahren hide the first hints of spirituality . The whole album is played in a naive and casual tone that pales compared with the austere and calculated approach of British progressive-rock.The CD reissue added Freak Out Requiem I - III and Cymbals In The End The macabre excesses and the instrumental diarrhea of the early days found new meaning with the double-LP Yeti , another masterpiece notable for its Wagner-ian intensity and monumental undertaking. The album is vastly more professional than the first one. On the other hand, the conceptual, structured pillar of the album is Soap Shop Rock, a fast-paced suite whose four movements mix elements of hard-rock, guitar-driven raga, middle-eastern tones, operatic singing, and the usual gypsy violin improvisations.The album covers a broad stylistic spectrum and reinvents progressive-rock as a less brainy and more open genre.The third album, Tanz Der Lemminge , is a more sophisticated work, but no less terrible . The 16-minute Syntelman s March of the Roaring Seventies is an odd fusion of Stravinsky s ballets, Bob Dylan s narratives and and Frank Zappa s tempo shifts. The instrumental passages are more atmospheric than apocalyptic, and they are typically sustained by the gentle strumming of the acoustic guitar. A virulent Hendrix-ian electric riff and a deep groove open the 20-minute Restless-Skylight-Transistor-Child in a more aggressive vein, but soon the the male vocals engage the sitar in a psychedelic duet, under the threatening shade of eerie Stockhausen-ian electronics. At 11:30 the piece mutates into a frenzied boogie, the groove getting bigger and bigger, the guitar work echoeing the Allman Brothers or Grateful Dead. The title of the seven parts are: Landing in A Ditch, Dehypnotized Toothpaste, A Short Stop At The Transylvanian Brain Surgery, Race From Here To Your Ears, Riding On A Cloud, Paralized Paradise, H.The all-instrumental jam The Marilyn Monroe-Memorial-Church is the album s masterpiece, and has little in common with the rest of Amon Duul II s career. An organ echoing Pink Floyd s A Saucerful of Secrets prevails for a few minutes, but then the music falls apart again, leaving the instruments to test the limits of free improvisation.The dance concludes with three shorter pieces, of which the psychedelic futuristic blues-rock instrumental Toxicological Whispering is the most disturbing. Amon Duul II had mastered the fusion between rock n roll, avantgarde and world-music, using such fusion to pen long and dynamic post-psychedelic musical journeys that reinvented the form of the classical fantasia in the age of post-modernism. It wasn t meant to last. As if afraid of the complexity of these three albums, Amon Duul II soon reneged on its own style and retreated to a more traditional sound. Influenced by Popol Vuh, with Carnival In Babylon the band adopted a hippie-spiritual stance, suddenly indulging in celestial choirs and ethereal atmospheres. The line-up now included Danny Fichelscher of Popol Vuh on drums, Lothar Meid on bass, Olaf Kubler on saxophone and Karlheinz Hausmann on electronic keyboards.I.D. In Uruk is a fragile song that features gentle guitar strumming and a la-la choir, until a group of female voices appears that seem to recite a prayer. The tune All The Years Round recalls both the gentle psychedelic folk of the Incredible String Band and the solemn hippie odes of the Jefferson Airplane. Kronwinkl 12 is an embryonic Phallus Dei, but is now entrusted to the male-female vocal harmonies of the leaders: the jamming is only a brief coda. The rhythm picks up slowly, but then dies away and the voice is left in a Pink Floyd-ian outer space of loose drumming and organ noises.The group retreated to a gothic house that became the reference point for a group of hippies and freaks. Wolf City , only 34 minutes long, was an attempt at selling out that kind of mystic acid-rock. The album as a whole is a more cohesive and less acid set of songs , and it boasts a superior production. Knaup s operatic vocals and Karrer s galopping gypsy violin create a charged atmosphere that the rest of the band sustains with thick and intense playing. The raga Wie Der Wind Am Ende Einer Strasse has the most surreal arrangement , that warps the folk tune sung by the guitar.Elsewhere, the band offers a simpler brand of progressive-rock. Green Bubble Raincoated Man features a melody and a tempo that recall the Eagles Desperado and a synthesized choir in the background. The martial and Wagner-ian Deutsch Nepal has the gothic overtones of their early days, but the realization recalls Emerson Lake Palmer at their most pompous. The first three minutes of Sleepwalker s Timeless Bridge feature perhaps the best prog-rock passage of the album, a fusion of folk, hard-rock and Eastern music a la Led Zeppelin. The other two compositions are light-weight, to say the least. A similar sense of humour leads them to Wolf City, which is simply a sustained boogie groove while Karrer recites his lyrics. Technically speaking, this is the most accomplished of their albums.Vive La Trance is not only even more structured but it is also melodic. The exception is the new multi-part suite, Mozambique, but that, too, sounds like a melodic fantasy: no exotic tempos, no gypsy violin, and, instead, a piano leading the melody and a loud guitar riff. If innovation is not its forte, the album at least excels in variety: Apocalyptic Bore recalls early Bob Dylan; Fly United alternates between Velvet Underground-ian boogie and Cream-like blues jamming, and contains a sax and piano interlude; Pig Man is a country-rock novelty; Trap is a gentle ditty; Jalousie belongs to Brech Weill s operatic cabaret; Fly United is a folk-rock ballad with Rolling Stones overtones; Manana and Ladies Mimikry wink at glam-rock. Hi Jack continued the decline, but the concept album Made in Germany , originally a double LP , was a decent follow-up to Vive La Trance s pop course amid fits of hard-rock and remnants of space-rock .Following albums got more and more conventional: Pyragony X , Almost Alive , Only Human . Yet another line-up recorded the last Amon Duul II s albums: Meeting With Menmachines , Hawk Meets Penguin, Die Losung, Fool Moon, and Airs On a Shoestring. The original six members of Amon Duul II reunited for a 1992 concert and then recorded Nada Moonshine In the annals of rock, only the Velvet underground moniker was so badly abused by unscrupulous musicians.Amon Tobin, born in Brazil but active in London, is a classical composer of the hip-hop age.Under the moniker Cujo, Tobin debuted with the album Adventures in Foam . Hip-hop is the main influence in Cat People, Break Charmer and Sighting, but the rhythmic element is more often reined in to let the superimposed sounds flow naturally. Ornette Coleman s bass-driven funk is another influence, and, while few tracks sound like funk, that praxis is often encountered in Cujo s songs.The singles Creatures, Mission, Chomp Samba marked further progress in his compositional technique, and led to the monumental Bricolage , credited to Amon Tobin.A loud bass line opens Stoney Street, mimicking a rhythm and blues theme. The surface of the song is a dialogue between a jazz trumpet and decadent violins, and it keeps merely looping, one voice alternating to the other, each voice merely repeating its tune. A new structure arises in which the leitmotiv is assigned to the bass, while the other instruments simply embellish the atmosphere, although it is the other instruments that are actually laid out in the front. Easy Muffin is hypnotic and dreamy, as different weeds alternate at uttering simple melodic patterns, but never reaching the consistency of a refrain, while the drum machines erect a bush of impenetrable beats. Creatures is another highlight, a cloud of ghostly free-form noises segueing a geometric shower of piano notes over machine-gun beats, while a grotesque and languid trumpet lingers by. The hawaian guitar of Yasawas, the cool-jazz trumpet of The New York Editor, the romantic sax line of The Nasty, are all counterposed and juxtaposed to disorienting textures, and revitalized by a process of musical introspection.In Chomp Samba it is the frantic, tribal rhythm itself to be subjected to such a treatment, and the result is a futuristic ode to primal insticts. Tobin s studies on timbre should also not be overlooked. Tobin warps the distinctive tone of an instrument to produce a new kind of instrument, and then weaves a few of them into an organic flow of sound.Dream Sequence exploits that techique to lay all sorts of bridges between genres, as the tones mimick country and raga, while its essence is kosmische musik. Needless to say, jazz fuels and dresses these compositions. However, Tobin does to jazz what Picasso did to impressionism: it uses only discrete fragments of the image to reconstruct the whole. For example, the sax solo of Wires And Snakes coexists with industrial metronomic pulses and with soothing ambient waves of electronics. The jazz feeling is pervasive throughout One Small Step, and the choppy bossanova of One Day In My Garden is the only regular, hummable, linear song on the album.With this album, Tobin unified classical, jazz, rock and dance music in a genre and style that is universal. Permutation was not as innovative as the earlier albums, mainly because his experiments blending jazz and noise or exotica and noir were not as groundbreaking. Tobin kept refining his art of producing amazingly sophisticated and seamless puzzles and crafted Supermodified , whose Get Your Snack, Rhino Jockey and Chocolate Lovely represent the equivalent of baroque art in the sampling world. Out From Out Where marks another peak of creativity. His artsy manipulations of jungle music would be nothing new, but his dressing for Back From Space , Chronic Tronic , El Wraith , and Verbal , show his perverted genius still progressing towards ever more daring abstractions. Searchers is another peak of unbridled imagination: a chaotic crescendo of strings , drums, bells, cheeping electronics, warped lyric-less vocals and middle-eastern flute. The noisy sci-fi vignette Triple Science, with machine-gun beats worthy of grindcore, the marching robots of Rosies, the simulation of exotic dancing of Cosmo Retro Intro Outro, the atmospheric jazz shuffle of Hey Blondie, that sounds like an instrumental remix of a Pink Floyd track from Dark Side of the Moon, emanate from the same, unfocused center. The album s closer, Mighty Micro People, that dumps a gentle melodic theme inside a confused container with a piano that echoes tv-series music and the electronic simulation of a shy quavering voice, is perhaps a tribute to himself. It appears that Tobin is carrying out several philosophical debates at once, while entertaining his audience with catchy numbers of an extra-terrestrial music hall. Tobin is debating on the meaning of music itself, on the nature of composition, on the viability of communication, on the ultimate constituents of sound. His neglect for form is a new kind of form, a form that has reduced form to the annihilation of form. The dualism of content versus form was resolved by the post-modernists as a non-issue: Tobin redefines it as a process, a process of form-abatement by which content is created, as if content and form were the same substance, and more of one means less of the other one. Tobin s music is also unique in evoking a broad range of moods, from witty amusement to sheer paranoia .After the mediocre Verbal Remixes Collaborations and the awful live dj set Solid Steel , Tobin worked on Tom Clancy s Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3 , the soundtrack to a videogame that recycles his cliches with an impressive lack of imagination or variety.Amp is the project of London-based musician Richard Walker, a project vaguely related to Bristol s psycho-ambient tribe of Flying Saucer Attack and Third Eye Foundation. Walker recorded his first cassette under the monicker Amp, Green Sky Blue Tree , with help from friends such as Dave Pearce of Flying Saucer Attack .Sirenes contains both songs and avantgarde pieces. The two songs quite different in nature, although the basic reference point is Flying Saucer Attack : the distorted whispered shoegazing melodies of Souvenir, versus the spoken-word recital of Merry Go Down floating in a whirlwind of electronic drones. The more ambitious compositions attempt different strategies of soundsculpting, but they have in common the result: a chaotic ambience that is not quite relaxing chill music, but rather a claustrophobic and almost apocalyptic meditation on the post-industrial world. The instrumental Frieze harks back to the archetype of the British cosmic-psychedelic raga, Pink Floyd s Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun. Rave Mantra is the fresco of a terrifying land, in which Scharff s voice appears to mumble senseless words while being engulfed in a boiling magma of senseless noises. Its counterpart is the brief piano sonata that closes the album, So Be It, a glimmer of hope in a broadly hostile universe. The first venture into dance music, Mathilda s Shorts Wave, is perhaps the most un-emotional of all tracks: its protagonist is a frantic drum-machine set against a ghostly breeze of echoes. The second one, Eternity, boasts an equally hysterical beat, and even more syncopated, set against a wall of guitar noise a la My Bloody Valentine. The first album was preceded by the single Get There Remember and was followed by an intense sequence of singles: Frise Le Petit Chat , Ombres , Beyond Lutin , later collected on Passe -Present .The double EP Perception , almost totally improvised, is made of four extended pieces for a total of 88 minutes. While the self-indulgent pieces do not achieve the nirvana of the major works, they do show a more languid and placid attitude towards ambient music. On Stenorette Walker proves that he knows how to learn from his past mistakes. The piano leaves a strong mark on the music, thanks to melancholy patterns that are reminiscent of Brian Eno s Music For Airports and invent a rarified form of lounge balladry .On the other hand, while Robert Hapmson helps fill the blanks with his sampled guitar loops.The Nico-esque lament of You Are Here is set against an almost symphonic backdrop that even borrows ideas from Pink Floyd . Zoe is the most experimental piece: loud distorted guitar and keyboard utter melodies that are juxtaposed with a sample of disconnected vocals over a dub-like industrial rhythm. Sunflower, that adapts Cocteau Twins dream-pop to Walker s hypnotic guitar shuffle, sounds like pop music compared with the rest. Stenorette has a heart and a mind, whereas Astral... This marks a return to form for an artist who is easily prey to fashionable sounds, but who displays true talent when challenged by new ideas. A.M.P. Syzygy offered a bizarre mixture of ambient and psychedelic music, and the two suites of the mini-album Lost Found , also known as Unconscious Country, steered towards avantgarde music, but Alien Registration Office returns to the rock song format, albeit with a German twist .Recorded in 1999 during their European tour, Amp s Saint Cecilia Sinsemilla recycles some tracks of Stenorette and adds a few new songs.Amp s L Amour Invisible does not break any new ground, but offers the usual dose of classy, dreamy trip-hop. The reformed Amp is quite a different ensemble than it used to be, much more eclectic and specializing in surreal ambience . Kinski formed in 1998 in Seattle as the trio of guitarist Chris Martin, bassist Lucy Atkinson and drummer Dave Weeks. The technique is a mad compromise between British shoegazing and Japanese noise, which ultimately lands them in the netherland inhabited by Acid Mothers Temple. Armed with a second guitarist, Matthew Schwartz, Kinski recorded Be Gentle With the Warm Turtle , that features more experiments with droning counterpoint and betrays the influence of Roy Montgomery. Chris Martin is also active as Ampbuzz. His This Is My Ampbuzz is a bit immature and indulgent, but pays homage to the masters of modern instrumental music in an almost devotional manner. The album alternates cosmic soundpainting in the vein of Klaus Schulze s Irrlicht , ecstatic oscillations of the kind introduced by Brian Eno s Music For Airports , electronic sound collage and sheer psychedelic folly . Kinski s Airs Above Your Station explores the idea of fusing stoner-rock and ambient psychedelia. The problem with these lengthy jams is that they rehearse the same pattern, which is anchored to the suspense of waiting for the rubber band to snap as it is being stretched. Escaping the cliche if not the process, the understated tinkling of Your Lights Are creates an atmosphere of Eastern-style meditational concentration, before being accelerated into a swirling dervish dance, and the pulsing cartilage of Waves of Second Guessing unleashes perhaps the most intense two minutes of the album.Kinski, Paik and Surface Of Eceyon share Crickets And Fireflies . Its highlights are Kinski s 20-minute jam Keep Clear Of Me I Am Maneuvering With Difficulty and Surface of Eceon s 30-minute droning concerto. The highlights of the collaboration between Acid Mothers Temple and Kinski are Kinski s 10-minute Fell Asleep On Your Lawn and AMT s Virginal Plane 5:23. Kinski s Don t Climb On And Take The Holy Water is an album built around the 29-minute monolith The Misprint in the Gutenberg Print Shop. It takes eight minutes for the decline to stop, and then it s only to launch into a chaos of distortions a la Astronomy Domine.The other songs are mostly filler. The subliminal noises of Crepes the Cheap, the cingulate nightmare of Bulky Knit Cheerleader Sweater, There s Nothing Sexy about Time are songs built out of sound effects. While no less redundant, Alpine Static was at least played with a modicum of brainy finesse. Thankfully, amid all the formulaic riffage Kinski also indulges in a few moments of uncontrolled creativity, the eight-minute The Party Which You Know Will Be Heavy and Passed Out on Your Lawn.Andre Duchesne was the guitarist in legendary Canadian progressive-rock band Conventum, which released A L Aff t d un Complot and Le Bureau Central des Utopies , and whose work is collected on Re-Edition 1979-80 .Le Temps des Bombes and Le Royaume Ou L asile displayed a surreal synthesis of classical music and jazz . Duchesne was also one of the Les Quatre Guitaristes de l Apocalypso-Bar, that released World Tour and Fin De Siecle . In 1989 he composed L ou L , his most ambitious work, a suite that alternates between different styles and different chamber ensembles. Polaroide , also composed in 1999, is a set of improvisations for trio of guitar, viola and percussion. From 1991 till 1995 he was also a member of Locomotive, an ensemble a la Henry Cow which released Locomotive . He has also composed the opera Le Reve de Marguerite Belley and La Symphonie du Mill naire . Reflexions is an album of solo acoustic guitar.Andrea Parker is a classically trained cellist, a disc jockey of the drum n bass scene and, last but not least, an electronic composer with a penchant for analog synthesizers who collaborated with Philip Glass and Steve Reich. After recording Melodious Thunk in an ambient drum n bass vein, the following single The Rocking Chair was more like a concert for 40-piece orchestra and creative samples than a hip-hop track.The twelve tracks of Kiss My Arp better highlight her passion for David Sylvian s decadent exotic elegance and Dead Can Dance s eerie gothic atmospheres. The minimalistic Elements of Style , the suspenseful voodoobilly of Going Nowhere and the ritual music of Clutching At Straws , three elaborate compositions that bridge several different genres, coexist with the instrumental Kraftwerk-ian ballets of In Two Minds and Some Other Level, with the pounding syncopated dance music of Breaking The Code, and with the ethereal cantillation, the futuristic polyrhythms and the baroque orchestration of The Unknown .The EP The Dark Ages is equally engaging.Chicago-based violinist Andrew Bird, who played with the Squirrel Nut Zippers, debuted solo with Music of Hair . His albums with the Bowl of Fire offer a brilliant mixture of cabaret, dancehall music, jump blues, Appalachian folk, swing bands, and orchestral easy-listening: Thrills and Oh The Grandeur , featuring Candy Shop. The Swimming Hour marked the formal apex of the band , whether they were indulging in garage-rock , blues , Caribbean music , rhythm n blues , or orchestral ballad , or penning ditties such as Way Out West and Waiting to Talk. The spartan mini-album Weather Systems failed to introduce new elements, and in fact reduced the stylistic range of the previous album, but still offered the gloomy Tom Waits-ian meditation I and the Mark Kozelek-ian litany Lull. Bird returned to the sound of the Bowl of Fire with the dizzying stylistic whirlwind of The Mysterious Production Of Eggs , a collection of elegant and catchy ditties that sound like the ultimate synthesis of the decade. Will Oldham is the troubadour of alt-country, Jeff Buckley was the imtimate psychologist, Devendra Banhart is the gentle psychedelic bard, Rufus Wainwright is the sophisticated popsmith. Andrew Bird is all of them at the same time: master of deeply-felt singing, master of layered arrangements, master of lyrical imagery, master of celestial melodies, master of the bizarre and of the subtle.British audio-visual technician Andrew Lagowski launched both Legion the dark ambient project of Legion, that released False Dawn for found sounds and white noise, and especially Leviathan , a six-movement symphony of exoteric electronica, and the project SETI, at the border between techno, ambient and dub. Andrew Lagowski started his career of experimental electronic artist in 1990 with two self-produced cassettes, Nadir and Lagowski . The following year he began releasing the singles that would make him famous in the world of techno music: Vermillion , Storms , Formant , Blue Sparks , Artificial , Europa , In The Steel Room . Legion is Lagowski s dark ambient project.Under the monicker SETI, Lagowski has released The Geometry Of Night , where he experimented with a sophisticated muzak at the border between techno, ambient and dub.Lagowski s Ashita features the moody cosmic music of Replicator, but little else noteworthy. S.E.T.I.TZ and Digital Force Planning came out under his last name, Lagowski. Legion returned with Zodiac . The Fuschia DVD contains the video used for live shows.Sexy Detroit-born poster-boy Andrew W.K. offers party music that is a hilarious, almost parodistic, mixture of heavy-metal, garage-rock, disco-music and Tamla-soul, like Ted Nugent, the New Bomb Turks, Chic and the Supremes performing together. The results on I Get Wet were mildly entertaining: Party Hard, Party Til You Puke, It s Time to Party, Ready to Die, Fun Night, etc. The party is mostly over on The Wolf . Except for flashes that transpire from the rapid-fire cliches of The Song, Long Live the Party, Free Jumps, and Your Rules, Andrew W.K.Kletka Red is the project of guitarist and vocalist Leonid Soybelman and guitarist Andy Moor .The instrumental Fist Of Leg and Persecution Complex display the apocalyptic jamming that the two guitarists can concoct on Hybrid . In the meantime, Andy Moor had also launched a prolific solo career, particularly collaborations with avantgarde composers.Angel Corpus Christi is a San Francisco singer and accordionist, who started recording with guitarist and husband Rich Stim . The early works were mainly covers, as documented by self-produced cassettes on debut album I Love New York and on Accordion Pop Vol I . Wake Up Cry and Dim The Lights were the first original albums. The 80 s is an anthology of the decade. White Courtesy Phone was her first major recording, although it assembled mainly old songs played anachronistic new wave style .Even if less powerful overall, IV shows further progress. The same solemn drumming and dark guitar riffs sustain the longest track, Fate, with a touch of Siouxsie Sioux s dark punk. There are no precedents in the world for a band that plays this kind of rock and roll with this kind of classical-music attitude.Alla fine degli anni 80 Adam Grossman e Danny Lohner suonavano nel gruppo Angkor Wat, titolari di When Obscenity Becomes The Norm e di Corpus Christi . Innocence 89 si apre con un pianto di bimba in folate spettrali di elettronica, stoccate di chitarra elettrica, cigolii, un arpeggio di chitarra classica, linee di basso jazzate... Brani come Seat Of Power e The Search sono animati da una ferocia subumanoide e postnucleare, tutta scatti isterici e urla miasmatiche. Il loro sound discende in realta dal punk-rock dei Dead Kennedys, come dimostrano Prolonged Agony, rabbiosa ma anche epica e Emotional Blackmail, tutta d un fiato. Al tempo stesso il gruppo ostentava una sperimentazione quasi progressive . Nel picchiare e urlare bestiale di Warsaw trovava spazio un intermezzo strumentale quasi classicheggiante e il complesso melodramma della conclusiva Circus Of Horrors si avvaleva di una lunga ouverture strumentale, seguita poi da continui cambi di scena. Album tetro e spaventoso, in cui la disperazione dell adolescente punk acquista i toni della profezia apocalittica, rimane uno dei piu potenti affreschi della generazione hardcore. Il canto di David Brinkman, il basso di Mike Titsworth, la batteria di Dave Nuss, le chitarre di Grossman e Lohner componevano un commando temibile. Il secondo si spostava verso un sound piu industriale, per esempio nelle scansioni metronomiche alla Nine Inch Nails di Indestructible Innocence 1990, e psichedelico, nel lungo e tormentato incubo di Sour Born, anche se il cuore continuava a battere truculenze grindcore come Corpus Christi e Golden. Il capolavoro, nonche il brano piu sperimentale della loro carriera, e Ordinary Madness, sette minuti di riff selvaggi, loop in cascata e campionamenti di chitarra acustica Perso il batterista, Grossman assunse una drum machine e ribattezzo il gruppo Skrew. Con tastiere, campionamenti e tutto l arsenale techno-industriale gli Skrew registrarono nel 1992 Burning In Water Drowning In Flame , album in cui fusero le sonorita grunge dei Black Sabbath a torrenziali ritmi da discoteca, pervenendo pertant