“Triggering Back” is one of my favorite songs from Tom Meluch’s incredibly catchy and well-crafted Kranky debut Précis.  I recently heard Tom on a very good “Session from the Box” in which he talks about various aspects of his music and plays some acoustic renditions of his songs.  What a gorgeous musical voice this guy has, so unique and emotional and tasteful with a touch of nostalgia, his second album Temper being equally as breathtaking as his first.

Somehow Lustmord can turn ambient music into the darkest and most evil-sounding genre.  How he does it is a mystery to me (are those synths? field recordings? no-input effects processing?); this one is a collaboration with Robert Rich whose work in my opinion kind of nudges the line of new age which is obviously something best stayed away from.  No sign of that stuff here, though, as the duo creates an imagined soundtrack to the scoreless Tarkovsky classic Stalker.  So, is the music a good fit for the movie? It’s a bit too drastic for me, to be honest – plus I think Tarkovsky would find it unnecessarily dark with too few brighter moments (not that the film itself is all beaches, horses and apples; just sayin’ though) – but still the work of an inimitable master.

Autechre is coming out with a new album, entitled Oversteps, on March 23.  Let’s all get excited and listen to tracks from their back catalog!

Chain Reaction was really a one-of-a-kind label.  Releasing music from 1995 until 2003 (most of it between 96 and 2000), they took a more experimental angle on the minimal dub techno-meets-Detroit techno of Basic Channel, of which they were a sublabel.  Most of their artists are little known with few or no releases elsewhere, though names like Monolake and Vladisav Delay are familiar to a broader electronic audience.  Matrix’s Various Films was always one of my favorites from the label, having that feeling of pushing forward at a brisk pace while maintaining a cool, almost non-techno vibe.

Twin Peaks is arguably one of the most innovative, creative and thoughtful programs TV has ever seen.  Its cinematographic counterpart, the prequel Fire Walk With Me, is also one of David Lynch’s finest works.  Angelo Badalamenti – as in all of his Lynch soundtracks – did an amazing job capturing the dark, mysterious and otherworldly mood that prevails throughout the film, the main theme being a perfect example.

Here’s an interesting take on Terry Riley’s minimalist classic In C. Released in 2001, this version was performed by Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso UFO, a Japanese psychedelic/noise-rock band operating in remotely the same musical sphere as Boredoms.

“Triple Sun” is a nice example of Coil’s approach on their final album The Ape of Naples.  Simultaneously Steve Reich, Massive Attack and Raster-Noton, this album is what happens when a small group of people get together and decide to truly express themselves without holding back.  It is quite eerie too at times listening to the album as it was the last recording of Jhonn Balance’s life and in some of the songs it actually feels like his coming death made a mark on the music.

Recently, thanks to Alex Ross’s book, I have had a bit of a fascination with twentieth century composition.  Here is one very beautiful piano piece written by Erik Satie in the late 1880s that happens to be very famous, despite the mind-blowing fact that much of its harmonic content was actually quite avant-garde at the time. An example is the opening intro of a I major 7 to a V major 7, which today we hear as pretty normal and definitely not particularly dangerous.

“Bug/Golem” is from what is probably my favorite Nadja album (they have about a million of them, not even close to all of which I can claim to have heard), Truth Becomes Death.  It’s very harsh and heavy – in contrast to much of Aidan Baker’s solo work which tends to be more gentle drone – and like all of the duo’s stuff, it takes a long time to develop, feeding me in very small spoonfuls bits of ambient and bits of metal that I love oh so much.  The group performs at NYC’s Unsound Festival tonight with experimental guitarist David Daniell.