It's a leap year, and an extra day in February means more time for more new music.
Album: Ghosts
Artist: Monolake
Genre: Industrial, Ambient
Two years after Monolake’s Silence release, Robert Henke is back with a new Monolake album entitled Ghosts. Dark and colorful, with haunting and deep excursions into magic worlds of sound and grooves, held together by a fragmentary story as part of the artwork that indicates a continuation of themes present on Silence: Precisely crafted earthshaking beats, rough dirty noises, wide lush soundscapes and little sonic creatures inhabiting a fascinating planet in which a lot of things go badly wrong and nothing is taken for granted. Music that augments reality when listening to whilst commuting, music to get lost in when experienced loud in a club. There is nothing minimal in that music, it is bass heavy and full of detail.
Label: Chemikal UndergroundAlbum: Thirteen Lost & Found
Artist: RM Hubbert
Genre: Alternative
RM Hubbert is a guitarist from Glasgow in Scotland. He writes music about love, death, friendship, mental illness and occasionally a dog called D Bone. It’s not as depressing as the previous sentence suggests. His second full-length album, Thirteen Lost & Found was produced by long-time friend Alex Kapranos (Franz Ferdinand) and features collaborations with some very special artists including Hanna Tuulikki (Nalle), Emma Pollock (The Delgados), Luke Sutherland (Long Fin Killie, Mogwai), Aidan Moffat (Arab Strap), Alex Kapranos and Alasdair Roberts amongst others. Having found that it was easier to connect with people through music, Thirteen Lost & Found was conceived by Hubbert as a way of reacquainting himself with old friends while making some new ones. Each piece was written collaboratively with the respective artists; with the emphasis placed on spontaneity and experimentation. The resulting collection is eclectic and beautiful: voice, percussion, violin, piano, banjo, accordion, vibraphone and gu zheng all joining Hubbert’s idiosyncratic guitar over the eleven songs.
Album: Volume 3
Artist: Maxilla Blue
Genre: Hip Hop
Solidifying in 2006 and releasing its debut album less than 2 years later, Maxilla Blue remains as a well preserved tribute to the classic raw hip hop combo of one producer, one DJ, and one emcee. Bolstered by each component's instrumentals and intricate cut work with power poetics, the Maxilla crew is perhaps most known for its affinity for captivating live audiences. Led by the cue of DJ TouchNice, powered by the production of Aeon Grey and anchored by the vocal illustration of Asphate Woodhavet, the Des Moines based trio provides listeners with a dense, immovable, and often somber or "blue" bite of this reality as well as the next. Hailing from an often overlooked and undernourished locale, Maxilla's creative approach has found it unnecessary to bend to the common trends and popular evolution of rap culture. As a result, the crew's intepretation of music remains intact amidst failed fads, and followers of the work understand the natural encouragement to bend the enigmatic sound illustration to their own interpretations, adding to the timeless quality of each piece.
