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SOMETHING OLD
There’s a sorely missed strain of pop that proliferated around the turn of the millennium, when glitchy beats jostled with cutesy vocals, as if to suggest a robot suddenly acquiring emotions. The evolution of that optimistic sound might have culminated with the Postal Service’s Give Up, but it’s also epitomized by “The Light 3000,” a wonderful version of the Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” sung by the German-accented charmer Schneider TM in collaboration with clicks-and-cuts maestro KPT.Michi.Gan.
SOMETHING NEW
“Rudolf Klorzeiger” is actually Gerald Donald, a Detroiter who was one half of the great 1990s Afrofuturist techno duo Drexciya. His collaborations with the even more mysterious Michaela To-Nhan Bertel as Dopplereffekt continue his old band’s sci-fi world-building and rich textural experimentations, and the new Neurotelepathy is one of the best albums in his catalog: cold, melancholy, unexpectedly moving, and permeated with the kind of rich weirdness that comes from being a seasoned vet.
SOMETHING LOCAL
Daniel Crommie is one of Portland’s most challenging New Age artists. He prefers harsh, oblong sounds to dulcet tones and drifting synthesizers; don’t come to his music for comfort but to feel like you’ve been thrust into some obscure ritual. His new Twenty Twenty Two is some of his most forbidding work yet, with stretches of industrial clamor separated by brooding, richly colored ambient tracks that don’t provide relief so much as heighten the tension.
SOMETHING ASKEW
Tape-loop collagist William Basinski and experimental turntablist Janek Schaefer work in aged and deteriorated media, yet their first full-length collab, …on reflection, teems with life. Made from piano loops and field recordings plundered from their vast sound libraries, it’s one of the most accessible and luxuriously sound-designed albums of either’s career, though hardly representative of the lo-fi murk in which these artists usually work. It’s out this Friday on Temporary Residence Ltd.
