Sigmataf

Starting out with Prohja hip hop group, he continued as a lyricist and performer with Babylon under the stage name Koraki, and since 2010 has been releasing his albums as Sigmataf. You listen electronic sounds, heavy basslines and strong beats but you feel the cynicism and a sarcasm vibe. Trully a nice project.

 

AOTY #16. Karima Walker - Hands In Our Names

Fulfilling Funk’s post-postmodern vision, Hands in Our Names sees Karima Walker reconstruct an array of varied elements into something larger and more meaningful than they could ever be alone. Field recordings from her present and found recordings from someone else’s past swirl above and beneath her own words and guitar notes, drones of every pitch filling the background and stretching the songs into worlds of their own. When atomised into separate parts, the album is impressionistic, blurry and strange and difficult to describe, though when listened to as a whole, a blanket of stitches, it becomes something vivid and intuitive. As such, Hands in Our Names is able to convey things normal songs cannot, a freedom not just born of trope-avoiding experimentalism but somehow inherent in the very combinations of sounds, as though arranged into secret patterns or codes, magic spells that trump postmodern convictions. Rather than dying in open air upon leaving her mouth, Karima Walker’s communications bubble from within, stirring that dormant empathy that lies somewhere near the centre of us all.

Yuri Morozov

An other Soviet gem from 70s. Amazing instrumental electronic prog-rock from the “Russian beatnick” Yuri Morozov. The multi-instrumentalist, sound engineer and composer built his own home record studio where he produced around 60 of his own albums or as he stated “14,7 kilograms of tape”. Shadoks released his first album Cherry Garden of Jimi Hendrix in 2015. Back in 1973, it was only available in Russia if you had a friend who had a friend who had tape of his great but officially banned music. His creative output ranged from psychedelic folk and rock to experimental and abstract electronic compositions. Here’s a really interesting one-and-a-half hour Documentary  about him. He sadly died in 2006.

Malaria!

Malaria! was an experimental electronic band from Berlin formed in 1981 by Gudrun Gut  and Bettina Köster following the dissolution of Mania D with Karin Luner, Eva Gossling later Die Krupps and Beate Bartel (of Liaisons Dangereuses). Other members included Manon P. Duursma, Christine Hahn, and Susanne Kuhnke (also a member of Die Haut). They are most often associated with Neue Deutsche Welle and post-punk.

Muslimgauze

Muslimgauze was the main musical project of Bryn Jones (17 June 1961 – 14 January 1999), a British ethnic electronica and experimental musician who was influenced by conflicts and history in the Muslim world, often with an emphasis on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With dozens of albums released under the Muslimgauze name, Jones was prolific, but he never made mainstream success due to his work being issued mostly in limited editions on small record labels and being deeply experimental in style. His music has been described by one critic as "among the most startling and unique in the noise underground."

Beau Wanzer

Beau Wanzer’s music sometimes makes me think of the kids I knew growing up who stayed up really late in their parents’ basements to smoke pot, watch B-movie horror flicks and discuss esoteric shit with a side of junk food. In aural terms, the Midwesterner producer makes spooky, straight-to-tape hardware jams that often feature samples of creepy laughter and unsettling vocal snippets, murky sound palettes and oozing rhythms. Take “Groove’s No Zone” from his first untitled LP: as echo-y whispers flicker in the periphery of the mix, a lurching, emetic synth rhythm woos the listener as if it were a sonic fly zapper seducing intoxicated bugs who want to, well, zone out to something groovy.

Femminielli Noir

Collaboration between Jesse Osborne-Lanthier (Noir) and Bernardino Femminielli ''To us, it is plainly obvious that the act of mixing traditional structured musical visions causes one to become extremely bored. We have chosen hybrids, and hybrids of hybrids. To put it concisely, the flowing forms of any given vision must never clash with the ultimately contrasting endeavour of transforming inventions. In the vapours of all this garbage art and shit music that floats around, misleading us and polluting our minds with mindless stupidities, we have decided to work for the better understanding of the future of conceptual music and performance. We advocate the use of provocative theatrical-devices, concurrently, contemporarily, creating a wide array of heterogeneous genres.''