Balance and Sleazy were one of music’s great romances. In the early 1980s, Geoff Burton, aka John Balance, utilized fan letters and zines to will himself from a troubled childhood of precocious homosexuality and occult aspirations into the arms of… Read More
If 2020 had turned out differently, the debut album by Il Quadro di Troisi might have been the perfect soundtrack to the arrival of breathless exchange students in Italy’s ornate university cities, its winsome synth-pop spilling out of the headphones… Read More
Shadow of Fear, the first new Cabaret Voltaire album in 26 years, finds the UK post-punk/proto-industrial act reduced to just one person: founding member Richard H. Kirk. That has been the case since the project was resurrected in 2014 at… Read More
In the remarkably unsexy year of 2020, you wouldn’t expect an artist to evoke the glowing grime of a club so exactly, but Shygirl manages to do it with her latest EP, ALIAS. Similar to 2018’s Cruel Practice, ALIAS finds… Read More
Cakes da Killa knows there’s nothing more lethal than a deep cut swiftly dealt. The Brooklyn rapper is a master of unrelenting flows and skewering affronts, made all the more ruthless by his razor’s-edge humor. On the new EP Muvaland,… Read More
In Emily A. Sprague’s indie-folk project Florist—sometimes accompanied by her bandmates, sometimes solo—the Catskill, New York native makes music of startling intimacy. Her last album, the self-explanatory Emily Alone, was as unadorned as a Shaker chair, stripped down to mostly… Read More
For the past 40 years, Carl Stone has been atomizing recordings of ubiquitous and obscure music alike, transforming his source material into kaleidoscopic fantasies. His electronic compositions, stuttering and illusory, repurpose minute sonic elements from a wide variety of different… Read More
Unlike the howling sirens that opened A.k.Adrix’s debut, the chaotic and aggressive Album Desconhecido, the Portugese electronic producer’s second LP begins, instead, with a deep breath: tender “ooh-oohs,” delicate piano trills, and syncopated beats that crackle like static. It’s soothing,… Read More
Domenique Dumont’s music has traditionally entailed a game of hide-and-seek, concealing vocals behind layers of reverb and placing the drums right up at the front of the mix, daring the listener to dig to get to the center of it… Read More
On June 20, 1969, Mort Garson began his 45th year on Earth hunkered around a television set with family and friends. It was, after all, the day of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but for Garson, the moment held special… Read More