Vuzh Music Blog

Beginnings are a bit arbitrary, for some reason I set my year one of music making as 1991, even though I have recordings going back well into the 1980s.
Thinking back that 2016 was the 25th anniversary of that arbitrary date, it occurred to me to package up some of my early work that was currently unavailable. There are three volumes of this now planned.
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Here is the first volume:
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Young Music, Vol. 1
https://c-reider.bandcamp.com/album/young-music-vol-1
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This first volume of collected early works spans the years 1988 to 1997, from when I was sixteen to twenty-six years old. It spans a period of time when I used many different ways to record music: first by borrowing equipment from friends, or by layering sounds by bouncing from one tape player to another – to a Fostex 4-track recorder – to an early hard-disk recorder, the Roland VS-880 – before I finally started doing work on computer (none of which you’ll hear on volume I, but there’s a smidge of it on volume II). Herein I explore a lot of areas of interest that I no longer find interesting, so there may be some novelty at that material, but there’s a surprisingly cogent expression of ideas I still use today on some material. This was a time when I had very little clarity on what I actually wanted to explore in music, and correspondingly, a lot of the stuff now is a little embarrassing to one degree or another. I can look past it because I know that I was really into what I was doing then, and I can hear myself fumbling awkwardly toward some of the things I’m doing now. Maybe in another twenty years I’ll look back on my current stuff with some embarrassment, who knows? Most of the tracks on Young Music vol. 1 feature the guitar, an instrument I relied on during my early years, but have since all but abandoned. All of this is lo-fi as fuck, much of it goes on for too long, and some of it may annoy. I fought the urge to completely remix and edit this material. Instead, all tracks are derived directly from mixes I made (either to tape or DAT) at or near the time I originally recorded the stuff.

An album of field recordings and “acoustic noise”
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Free to download:
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https://c-reider.bandcamp.com/album/anent
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A couple of nice shots of my performance at Trident in Boulder on July 7 have arrived. The first color photo is by Don Poe, and the others below, including the black/white photo are by Loretta Cummings.
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I’m playing a show on this upcoming Friday, July 7 in Boulder.
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If you’re nearby, and you’re into drone / noise you’re welcome to come.
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Here’s the event link on … (eughhh) Facebook (shudder) …
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https://www.facebook.com/events/1916420941959398
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And here’s a cool poster:
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I’m very pleased to announce a new release on the excellent Midnight Circles tape label!
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Chew Cinders is out now, available in free download or limited casssette C-26!
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https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/chew-cinders
https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/chew-cinders
https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/chew-cinders
https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/chew-cinders
https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/chew-cinders
https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/chew-cinders
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This music was recorded in Summer 2016, and I’m particularly happy with it. It’s the first music released that I made after my near-fatal illness in late 2015.
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The Midnight Circles label describes the work very well:

C. Reider – “Chew Cinders” C-26. 2 part sound-collage by C. Reider (USA). Great and dense combination of droning electronics, pitched voices and field-recordings. “Chew Cinders” possesses a resonating rhythm, sometimes flowing, sometimes cut-up in nature and blends generated and found sounds to an intriguing unity.
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Both parts of ‘Chew Cinders’ focus strongly on the manipulation of time and pitch. Throughout the record chunks of voice & field-recordings are slowed down and mixed into a sweeping array of synthesizers and noisier drones that evolve into long and dense passages from time to time. The cut-up character of the album blends electronics, effect-manipulations and field-recordings into a varied sound collage with parts that change abruptly in tone while other passages fade slowly into one another. ‘Chew Cinders’ combination of sounds spans from generated, synthetic tones to recordings of metals and bells, anonymous rooms as well as anonymous voices.

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I strongly encourage you to look into the other releases on the label as well. Midnight Circles releases some really high quality stuff.

Hello, again, I’m C. Reider. I release most of my own music for free on the internet, and I listen to a lot of music by people who do the same. This is a list of free-to-download releases from 2016 that I liked a lot.
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My reason for doing these lists is so that people will discover music that I think deserves to be discovered. Please share this list with anyone you know who may take an interest!
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I’ve done lists like this for several years, here are previous years’ lists:
2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.
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These lists have been getting really long, because I listen to a lot of music over the course of a year, so for my sanity and yours, I’m going to break up this end of year list into several smaller lists. This strategy will also allow me to consider albums released late in the year, while still being able to raise the profile of cool stuff from earlier in the year. This is part FIVE of the big list, and it is the final part of this 2016 round-up. Here are links to the previous installments:
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LINK TO PART ONE
LINK TO PART TWO
LINK TO PART THREE
LINK TO PART FOUR
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The ordering of these releases is completely arbitrary, no ranking is intended, and none should be inferred. I like everything I’m listing here to varying degrees, but ranking is a silly activity that helps exactly no one form their own opinion about music.
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I should clarify that by saying these are netlabel releases, I don’t necessarily mean they were released on proper netlabels, many of these albums were self released. To me, netlabeling is a community activity, involving releasing music online for free (or pay what you want)…
preferably (though not necessarily) with a CC license…
and EVEN MORE preferably (though not necessarily) with a CC license that allows for remixability and sampling. So I use the word “netlabel” even though the word is admittedly problematic. You could just see this as links to a bunch of free music if you wanted to keep things simple.
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This is the final part of this end of year round-up of freely downloadable music. There are 99 releases described in total across the five parts of this series.
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Here is some information about the releases described:
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Anyway, that’s some kinda cool info if you’re into statistics.
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So let’s get into the last batch of free music!
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Toaster – Divorce Songs EP
https://toaster.bandcamp.com/album/divorce-songs-ep
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Self released
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Some very nice, grooving, IDM-ish song tapestries with warm synth pads and bopping tick-tock drum patterns.
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Reid Karris – Lacrimis de ex Arborum
https://plustimbre.bandcamp.com/album/lacrimis-de-ex-arborum
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Plus Timbre
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A bevy of improvisations using percussion and electric guitar, each named after a different species of tree. Predictably sounds like a bunch of biscuit tins falling down a very long staircase (in a good way).
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Morten Rasz – Primal Spirits
http://www.panyrosasdiscos.net/pyr197-morten-rasz-primal-spirits/
No license listed (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Pan y Rosas Discos
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Morten Rasz, née Martin Rach is a prolific and inventive experimental artist. He presents work with a cornucopia of different approaches and styles, under a dizzying array of aliases, not all of which I can keep up with. He recently showed me a short video demonstrating a little synth that reads a graphic wave table that can be ‘drawn in’ in real-time with a mouse on a computer screen, like a scaled-down, digital version of Oramics. I suspect that’s what he’s using on this 30 minute collection of electronic music. Pops and buzzes accumulate and tumble all over one another, framed by sections that are either quiet or out of hearing range.
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Ian Watson – …
https://ianwatson.bandcamp.com/album/-
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Self released
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Three long (35-45 minutes each) sickly, denuded, bitcrushed drone tracks.
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Tobias Reber – Kolapse
https://tobiasreber.bandcamp.com/album/kolapse
Licenses vary per song
Self released
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This album (mostly remixes by guest artists) presents a kind of prog-industrial, quasi-dance-oriented, percussive, electronic music. The pieces are by turns hard nosed or slightly more subdued. There is a kind of steely, considered complexity to the music, holding firm the squiggling sound design. While there is a fair amount of variety here, and while each track can be bracing (some more than others, of course) when taken as an album it can be slightly fatiguing.
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Jøn Liefhold – Argusterfelder A-C
https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/argusterfelder-a-c
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Midnight Circles

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A nicely composed set of ringing high frequencies, crackling loops, pendular keyboard phrases, angel choruses and unidentifiable, distorted scrapings. Constantly shifting into new scenarios of pretty sounds and silences.
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Luong Hue Trinh – Illusions
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/luong_hue_trinh/illusions/
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Pan y Rosas Discos
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The introductory fanfare is a startling recording of breaking / bouncing glass bottles, followed immediately by a very quiet drone that builds on itself slowly, introducing mechanical rumbling, factory floor whirring and Bertoia-esque gongs. This first piece is a musical collage of field recordings made in an industrial district in Vietnam. The machine noises are joined by fragments of music played on Vietnamese lutes and zithers. The artist statement describes the string music as a traditional style, evoking a longing for home. Pairing that with the factory sounds gives the music an emotional and political punch. A very beautiful and charged album.
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Méryll Ampe – Void if Removed
https://archive.org/details/at083_MeryllAmpe_VoidIfRemoved
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Audiotalaia
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An intense, complex collection of electronic noise compositions, with crisp sounds and inventive arrangements.
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Gabi Losoncy – 16f
http://www.impulsivehabitat.com/releases/ihab114.htm
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Impulsive Habitat
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The cover photo for this hour and twenty minute long field recording situates it historically within the alarming horror of the American election season of 2016. The recording is an urban soundscape, milling city activity as heard from the relative peace and quiet of a docile area, just slightly removed from the bustle. Possibly the recording was made in the café pictured in the cover photo. Pairing the calm mundanity of this everyday scene with the Daily News headline declaring Donald Trump as “RACIST!” in all capitals perhaps reflects the banality of such a monumentally historic moment. As placid as the recording is (occasional, sporadic emergency announcements notwithstanding), I can’t help but wonder how the sounds of places like this might change given the global instability of politics at the moment. Aside from the possible historic implications of recordings of this nature, it’s also just a pleasant thing to listen to, especially when doing something tedious, like paperwork.
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Hinnerk Schmidt – Camas
https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/camas
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Midnight Circles
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A laboriously slow, repeating piano phrase muffled by a blanket of tape hiss, a hint of maybe clarinet or ebowed guitar shows through, threatening to develop into something larger, but instead retreating, giving way to that ever cycling piano loop. On ‘Seite B’ the piano is even more distant, cloaked in reverb and heavily foregrounded tape hiss. Rather than only one phrase cycling throughout, however, this piece has more indeterminate playing, still delivered in that very slow pace. Haunting stuff.
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Book of Kells – Depiction of Saturn and Other Planets Floating in Space
https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/depiction-of-saturn-and-other-planets-floating-in-space
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Midnight Circles
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Twenty seven brief songs for a little over an hour’s worth of material here. The music is one of seeming restrained longing, where synth tones resonate and linger in long, lo-fi reverb tails. It’s simple and minimal, but effective. The title implies that this might be some sort of space music, but it feels pretty grounded to me.
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Budhaditya Chattopadhyay – Wandering Shadows of Sound
http://www.impulsivehabitat.com/releases/ihab116.htm
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Impulsive Habitat
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Wind over water. Rain with cars and trucks passing. A steadily rattling quack that I think may be a spinning weather vane, perhaps. Quiet, rural activity. Unidentifiable sounds from mechanical and organic sources. The presence of humanity is heard throughout, but it doesn’t often become overt, only occasionally does a human voice pierce my attention. I haven’t listened to very many field recordings this year, for several reasons. This is definitely a good exception.
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Escape Hatch / Thekla Munk – Brise / Vitre
https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/brise-vitre
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Midnight Circles
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Two ten minute long pieces from each band on this split. ‘Brise’ by Escape Hatch starts off like something from Aphex Twin’s perennial SAW II, but adds some noisy scratchings that sound like the labored channel searching of a burned out old car radio. This quick cuts into a lo-fi drone which then scoots aside from some tone pulses and finally into some ghostly piano. Wow, a lot of nice variety for such a brief piece, and still it sounds full and unrushed. Thekla Munk’s ‘Vitre’ has textured sounds feeling like a raging thunderstorm just outside a high speed rail line on which sad Dadaists shuffle cards. This track is probably the noisiest thing I’ve heard so far on Midnight Circles. A triumphant split, very nice stuff.
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Scy1e – 2 Untitled for CTRL Valve
http://www.controlvalve.net/blog/index.blog/2361758/ctrlvlv063__scy1e__2-untitled-for-ctrl-valve/
No license listed (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Control Valve
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I was very happy to have discovered this group earlier in 2016 with their excellent release on Phinery called “Canard”, which was sort of an unmoored minimal techno-industrial music. This release features two hour-long tracks and is significantly less focussed, but that’s not really anything so bad. It’s abstract modular synth noodling with room to stretch out and tweak.
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Chemiefaserwerk – 4
https://etchedtraumas.bandcamp.com/album/4
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Etched Traumas
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Following on from my good experience with their work on Midnight Circles, I was happy to find another new release on the Etched Traumas netlabel. This is another well considered mesh of textured noise and harmonic-heavy dronings with sudden edits to keep things away from becoming too comfortable. This is absolutely a name I’m going to be looking for going forward. High quality music.
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Floating Mind – Deep Reflections
http://www.inoquo.com/release.php?&id=75
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
InoQuo
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This is minimal techno music that, when it’s at its best sounds like alien neon bar music, but also has many sections that are just bippity-boppity drum patterns with off-beat hi-hats. I would love to see more minimal techno producers work more in ambiguity, but the lure of the oontz is strong. Not bad, could be better.
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Half Evidence – Graines de silences
https://eg0cide.com/2016/06/26/eg0_166-half-evidence-graines-de-silence/
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Eg0cide
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A group that can be counted on for thoughtful, well-constructed, abstract guitar music. This one is fairly intense and dark, sounds like the mother ship landing outside a machine shop.
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Aaron Yabrov – Glass Forest
https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/glass-forest
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Midnight Circles
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An ambient piece with a looping foundation of organ rocking back and forth between dissonance and consonance. Over this, some whispy, proto-melodic synth phrases flit by, cloaked in reverb. Quite nice.
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Amanda Irarrazabal / Cecilia López / Cecilia Quinteros – La Corporación
http://www.panyrosasdiscos.net/pyr201-cecilia-lopez-amanda-irarrazabal-cecilia-quinteros-la-corporacion/
No license listed (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Pan y Rosas Discos
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Intense and attentive improvised music using cello, contrabass and synthesizer. A lot of patience, space and give and take. The anti-capitalist song titles are a bonus.
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Asha Tamirisa – Callus / Redux
http://www.panyrosasdiscos.net/pyr198-asha-tamirisa-callus-redux/
No license listed (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Pan y Rosas
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First piece is a long, very slowly modulating drone, comparable in sensibility to the Arp work of Eliane Radigue, (and indeed the notes say it was recorded using an Arp 2500 system). The second piece introduces an aqueous field recording, perhaps at a lake, joined later by more Arp droneage.
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Atilio Doreste / José Guillén – This Side of Paradise
https://archive.org/details/at082DoresteGuillen
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Audiotalaia
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Free improv with acoustic allsorts and understated fart-synth. Some tracks are either recorded outside or are augmented with field recordings. I was very fond of Doreste’s 2014 release “Shifting Boundaries”, and this is a worthy follow-up.
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Javier Piñango – i.r.real 8
https://plustimbre.bandcamp.com/album/i-r-real-8
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Plus Timbre
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Deep electronic musique concrete made with Korg MS-20. Like a great set of bells being sandblasted by swarming waves of insects.
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Minimalnun – And
http://www.inoquo.com/release.php?id=74
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
InoQuo
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Lowercase minimal techno-ambient that oontzes along with kick drums made of wet towels. Soft thuds abound.
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Savvas Metaxas / Dalot – It Can Only be Attributable to Human Error
http://www.notype.com/drones/cat.e/pan_094/
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
No Type + Panospria
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I can be assured that when I find work by Dalot’s Maria Papadomanolaki, I will discover some wonderful, restrained, soft, mature drone music. Here, there is no exception. I’m not so familiar with Savvas Metaxas, but I can say that this is a very well paired split release.
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SM Milligan – The Fortification of Ears
http://www.impulsivehabitat.com/releases/ihab122.htm
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Impulsive Habitat
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A very well made work using collage editing to dramatize a large set of field recordings.

Hi, again, I’m C. Reider. I release most of my own music for free on the internet, and I listen to a lot of music by people who do the same. This is a list of free-to-download releases from 2016 that I liked a lot.
I’ve done lists like this for several years, here are previous years’ lists:
2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.
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These lists have been getting really long, because I listen to a lot of music over the course of a year, so for my sanity and yours, I’m going to break up this end of year list into several smaller lists. This strategy will also allow me to consider albums released late in the year, while still being able to raise the profile of cool stuff from earlier in the year. This is part FOUR of the big list, I will post links just below this line of other parts as I publish them.
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LINK TO PART ONE
LINK TO PART TWO
LINK TO PART THREE
LINK TO PART FIVE, THE FINAL POST
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The ordering of these releases is completely arbitrary, no ranking is intended, and none should be inferred. I like everything I’m listing here to varying degrees, but ranking is a silly activity that helps exactly no one form their own opinion about music.
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I should clarify that by saying these are netlabel releases, I don’t necessarily mean they were released on proper netlabels, many of these albums were self released. To me, netlabeling is a community activity, involving releasing music online for free (or pay what you want)…
preferably (though not necessarily) with a CC license…
and EVEN MORE preferably (though not necessarily) with a CC license that allows for remixability and sampling. So I use the word “netlabel” even though the word is admittedly problematic. You could just see this as links to a bunch of free music if you wanted to keep things simple.
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You can be notified when the next part of this year-end list gets published by either following me on twitter @vuzhmusic or by subscribing to the RSS feed for this blog’s “Recommended Listening” category:
http://www.vuzhmusic.com/blog/category/recommended-listening/feed/
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Pollux – &+
https://pollux0.bandcamp.com/album/-
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Self Released
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A compilation / remix album that sounds like it started down the path toward being calming, sunlit, and ambient… but as things progressed, things blurred, got more fractured and granular and gained enough instability to give the album a bit of an unsettling feel. Not “dark” precisely, just slightly “off” – things feel a little skittish and tense-muscled. To be clear, this “off-ness” I’m describing is what gives the work a bit more character than similar things I don’t quite find as good.
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36 – Indigo / Expanse
http://3six.net/album/indigo-expanse
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Self Released
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A fluffy bit of undemanding ambient techno that gives the nod, musically to both the Orb as well as Jean Michel Jarre, while still maintaining its own sound. Not my favorite from this group, but 36 is always worth a listen. They know how to do their stuff very well.
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Catalan Coast – Catalan Coast
https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/catalan-coast
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Midnight Circles
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A sort of stoic, minimalist art music that leans away from the ambient tag as much as it couldn’t be classified as much else. Reminds me a bit of the legendary Tear Ceremony, who did some of this kind of thing to some acclaim throughout the nineties & early 00s. The first track sets the pace with long, reedy tones in the upper-mid register, drones punctuated by short, crescendos of chords in the same voicing. Distant, soft pops could possibly be described as the percussion element of this piece. The second track is a shimmering tonal drone of ringing bells, looped. This is interrupted by some solemn, stringed chords. The final piece is a pretty, spare, melancholy repeating refrain that sounds like a duet between a concertina and a glass armonica in a big reverberant space. What it does, it does beautifully, and when it ends I would prefer it lingered a bit longer. I liked this so much that I had to get it on tape, and ended up getting a large batch from the label… and liked it all so much that I submitted my own music to the label for release. So I guess that you can infer my enthusiasm (or bias) from that.
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Martin Hoogeboom – the Garden
https://etchedtraumas.bandcamp.com/album/the-garden
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Etched Traumas
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Three brief tone poems made in tribute to Derek Jarman: e-bowed guitars, slowed-down laughing gas vocals, wet streets, backstreet clinics, steam vents. More interlude than destination.
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Phil Maguire – Structuur
https://philmaguire.bandcamp.com/album/structuur
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Self Released
Phil Maguire – This This
https://linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/this-this
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Linear Obsessional

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A collection of what the composer calls “strangled sine waves”… Somone call the sine police! ‘Structuur’ is a dense knot of FM synthesis that churns constantly over high heat. On ‘This This’, the waves are more given to popping and bouncing off one another. There’s a lot more space here, sounding like circuit-bent crickets moving ever away from synchrony. Apparently all this stuff was made with Raspberry Pi, hm.
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Project Mycelium – Pulse
https://linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/pulse
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Linear Obsessional
Project Mycelium – Pyramiden
https://linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/pyramiden
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Linear Obsessional
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My ears go up when I hear associations of mycelia with music, as I’m a bit of a mycophile. Nothing too overtly mushroomy to be found here, however, so fungiphobes are safe enough. ‘Pulse’ is a twenty minute long, almost soundtrack-ish bit of ambient proto-jazz that noodles around and eventually coalesces around a little calliope groove. ‘Pyramiden’ is equally brief, equally atmospheric, but it evokes darker spaces and isn’t likely to fall into any comforting groove. It’s all skitter, dart for cover and linger a while in hiding, waiting for danger to pass. Says in the notes that all sounds on ‘Pyramiden’ were made with water and steel.
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Ave Eva – Panamint
https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/panamint
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Midnight Circles
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Minimal, pretty, synth music that leans toward the drone.
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Reier – g(f(x))
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Reier/gfx/
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Southern City’s Lab
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I admit this first caught my attention due to the similarity with my name, but it’s stuck around because of its percolating noise synths and cold-filtered machine drones. The album by this Ukranian artist smartly oscillates between prettiness and technical difficulties.
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Steve Hamann – Set and Subset
https://sighup.bandcamp.com/album/set-and-subset
CC BY NC (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Self Released
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A collection of new work from a composer I’ve been enthusiastic about for years. These synth-realized pieces are musical (i.e. tonal) constructions that call to mind the work of David Borden (of Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company) in that they’re serious pieces, but stripped back, uncomplex and repeating, conveying a kind of zen-like quality of “this is all this song needs to be”.
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Schemawound – Heart Removal Kit
http://music.schemawound.com/album/heart-removal-kit
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Self Released
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In a not entirely surprising move, Schemawound steers his project – already diverse with industrial beat music and lyrical ambient works – into the area of psychedelic techno dub championed by people like Cevin Key & Ryan Moore. That he does it well is also no huge surprise. The production is slick and tight, the grooves are decent, and while melodic development has never been J. Siemasko’s strong point, nothing gets monotonous.
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Thistle Group – Thistle Group (2016)
https://stabbiesetc.bandcamp.com/album/thistle-group-2016
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Stabbies Etc.
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Brief seventeen minutes of what I presume are two sides to a tape release. Spooky little tunes with lo-fi sound loops, some percussive bashings, disaffected, post-goth-punk vocals and thoroughly fuzzed out basement-guitar plonkings.
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Rashida Prime – Damaged Interface
https://bludhoney.bandcamp.com/album/damaged-interface
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
BludHoney
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Serviceable, non-threatening, light, not especially intellectually stimulating ambient chill music. The kind of thing that apparently feels comfortable with having the word “cyberpunk” associated with it. I do rather like to listen to this kind of stuff early in the morning, when I’m traumatized by waking up and having to go to work. The album has been released by two different labels. The one I downloaded it from changed from a free download to charging a dollar, but the one I’m linking to now, in keeping with the theme of this end of year list, is pay what you want.
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TVSky – What the Moon Brings
http://www.cyan-music.com/releases-060.html
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Cyan Music
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Straight ahead, four on the floor minimal techno that sounds like it could easily have come out on the DeepChord label back in the early 00s. It’s really as good as any of that stuff was. I’m always surprised that new artists are still doing such on the nose stuff almost twenty years later, because it really seems like such a musical dead-end, but I must admit I still like listening to it. I have my reasons, so I reckon they have theirs too.
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Vavabond – No-Brain Improv
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/vavabond/no-brain_improv/
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Pan y Rosas Discos
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The title brings to mind Alvin Lucier’s brain wave piece “Music for Solo Performer”. I don’t believe that this group followed a similar method, as the description only discusses aspects of improvisation with body impulse as opposed to mental consideration, but Lucier’s description of his experience of performing the piece does talk about getting out of the conscious frame of mind in order for it to work at all. At any rate, I am not certain what the three credited performers are doing to make this very, very nice set of electronic clicks and buzzes that are sparsely arranged. There is not a huge amount of textural variance throughout the album, but to me it is a strong and fascinating collection of sounds.
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Prone – Grand Theft Honda Civic
https://prone1.bandcamp.com/album/grand-theft-honda-civic
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Self-released
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Techno for alien milk bars. Perfect weird Eurorack grooves, for staring off with stoned fascination at your nearest lava lamp equivalent. This is actually one of my favorite releases overall from 2016, I really dig it.
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Wëska Project – TV Mirror
http://sonicsquirrel.net/detail/release/TV+mirror/20190
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
HAZE
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Tones flicker by like an old cathode ray tube TV set when the vertical hold is shot. Bursts of 60 cycle hum and crackle join in sporadically. Probably time to call the repairman.
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Piod – Stage One 2013-2014
http://phonocake.org/release.php?release_id=235&lang=2
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Phonocake
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Decent electronic dance music done with tasteful sounds. Sometimes gets a little Ableton-y, but I’ve enjoyed it.

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Matthieu Lemontagne / Emmanuel Toledo – Belle Chemise
https://arbee.bandcamp.com/album/belle-chemise
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Self Released
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Not a lot I can say about this other than it’s really some pretty, very well made ambient music. If you like pretty, well made ambient music, then you can’t go wrong here.
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Faastwalker – Geometrics
http://www.kahvi.org/releases.php?release_number=371
No License Listed (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Kahvi Collective
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Decent enough, mellow IDM, definitely could’ve fit right in back in the 90s when this stuff was so big. There were some parts that kinda reminded me of Wendy Carlos’ soundtrack for Tron, and another part where it’s overtly a cringey hommage to Boards of Canada. Otherwise, yeah…
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Kamera Obscura – Speleology: Kamera Obscura Live
https://linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/speleology-kamura-obscura-live
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Linear Obsessional
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Pairing vocals with abstract electronic noise soundscapes is an approach that is fraught with perils and missteps. As a result, I can’t point to very many who do it well, but can point to a crowded field of power-electronic bands fronted by wannabe shock-jocks, and singer/songwriters who try to niche themselves with extemporaneous weird sounds and come off as gimmicky and aggrandizing. Coil was one group that successfully pulled it off, but they had built up a lot of goodwill and willingness to “go there” on the part of their audience over the course of many years of their moving away from and stretching song structure (and never entirely abandoning it). It’s not entirely surprising, then, that Coil is explicitly referenced in Kamera Obscura’s music. There are similar song structures and vocal effects and an air of mystique. The vocals are sometimes melodic with words, and other times chatter in explorations aided by effect chains. Often the music has an on-the-fly feeling of being (at least partially) made up in real time, but I don’t know if that’s actually the case. Along with Coil, other influences, such as Blixa Bargeld, Diamanda Galas, and Magma are expressed in ways that are just slightly too close to the source to take fully seriously. I always have a certain level of admiration for someone who can go do some of this stuff in front of an audience using that must vulnerable of musical instruments, the human voice (especially a capella, as some sections are here), but ultimately I can’t say I’m entirely convinced yet. I think this is worth checking out, and I hope that in time there is potential for a fully realized, strong, unique voice to emerge.

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Chemifaserwerk – Idatec
https://midnightcircles.bandcamp.com/album/idatec
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Midnight Circles
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Chemifaserwerk is a name I’ve seen around a bit, but this is the first thing I’ve listened to from them. If they’ve got a following, it seems deserved. This reminds me somewhat of the early, anything-goes ambient/industrial of Mark Spybey under his Dead Voices on Air moniker. Softly rattling drums, bike-spoke percussion, long-delay electronic buzzing, flitting fans, synth drones, field recordings and the like.

I will oppose the flagged regiments of order
I will be the embodiment of entropy
Where there is harmony, I will be a sour note
Where there is regularity, I will gleefully pulse offtime
Where there is smoothness, I will be rough
Where it is rough, I will be smooth

Hi, again, I’m C. Reider. I release most of my own music for free on the internet, and I listen to a lot of music by people who do the same. This is a list of free-to-download releases from 2016 that I liked a lot.
I’ve done lists like this for several years, here are previous years’ lists:
2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.
–
These lists have been getting really long, because I listen to a lot of music over the course of a year, so for my sanity and yours, I’m going to break up this end of year list into several smaller lists. This strategy will also allow me to consider albums released late in the year, while still being able to raise the profile of cool stuff from earlier in the year. This is part THREE of the big list, I will post links just below this line of other parts as I publish them.
–
LINK TO PART ONE
LINK TO PART TWO
LINK TO PART FOUR
LINK TO PART FIVE, THE FINAL POST
–
The ordering of these releases is completely arbitrary, no ranking is intended, and none should be inferred. I like everything I’m listing here to varying degrees, but ranking is a silly activity that helps exactly no one form their own opinion about music.
–
I should clarify that by saying these are netlabel releases, I don’t necessarily mean they were released on proper netlabels, many of these albums were self released. To me, netlabeling is a community activity, involving releasing music online for free (or pay what you want)…
preferably (though not necessarily) with a CC license…
and EVEN MORE preferably (though not necessarily) with a CC license that allows for remixability and sampling. So I use the word “netlabel” even though the word is admittedly problematic. You could just see this as links to a bunch of free music if you wanted to keep things simple.
–
You can be notified when the next part of this year-end list gets published by either following me on twitter @vuzhmusic or by subscribing to the RSS feed for this blog’s “Recommended Listening” category:
http://www.vuzhmusic.com/blog/category/recommended-listening/feed/
—

–

Martin Rach – Late Autumn Quartets
https://martinrach.bandcamp.com/album/late-autumn-quartets
Martin Rach – Piano Attic
https://martinrach.bandcamp.com/album/piano-attic
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Self-released
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‘Late Autumn Quartets’ sounds like a room full of automatons dispassionately hammering on dulcimers, a child’s xylophone and perhaps a banjo or two. Whatever setup Martin is using to strike and excite his sound objects is put to good use here, revealing a decent variety of tone colors, even considering the relative staticity of the strange-attractor rhythms. The second half of the 4 track album integrates electronics, with the third track somewhat inexplicably meshing the clattering machines with electronic dance music, failing interestingly.
On ‘Piano Attic’ the titular instrument is played such that no easily identified repeating rhythm or melody can be discerned. The very slow pacing of the beginning of track one is joined by more rapid, digitally spasms of tinkling keys. The second track is a sample collage of sounds recorded by bonking, or prodding, or poking various less audibly identifiable territories on the instrument.
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Miquel Parera and Computer – nxI2016-06-30_04_56_08
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Miquel_Parera/nxI2016-06-30_04_56_08/
Miquel Parera and Computer – nxI2016-07-03_04_33_13
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Miquel_Parera/nxI2016-07-03_04_33_13/
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Self-released
–
If the code-like alphanumeric titles and co-credit given to his computer doesn’t entirely prepare you for the abstracted music collected on these two albums, then I’m not sure anything I say is gonna do the trick. Both of these collections have four tracks of consistent lengths, on ‘nxI2016-06-30_04_56_08′ each is five minutes fifty-nine, and on ‘nxI2016-07-03_04_33_13′ each one is seven minutes, two seconds. With this in mind, I guess we could claim that there is a discernable 4/4 rhythm on these two records! The buzzing soundscapes presented here do not signify meaning other than that of the math used to derive them, although they do seem to find some representation in the multicolored lattice-like tiles in the artwork to the two albums. If you need your music to have “soul”, then don’t look for it here. I’m so glad I don’t need any such imaginary thing.
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Naoyuki Sasanami / Stabilo (speaker gain teardrop) – Immersive EP
https://stabilo-loadbang.bandcamp.com/album/immersive-ep
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Self-released
–
The two composers achieve a kind of stylistic unity, even though it appears they worked on their respective pieces separately. A very open sounding, minimalist, ambient music of suspended, mentholated synth-tones. Pretty, but light in bearing enough to avoid being cloying.
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Nate Scheible – Breezewood
https://natescheible.bandcamp.com/album/breezewood
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Self-released
–
That tape loops are all the rage nowadays is okay by me. The waft and warble and fluttering cut-outs reflect a glitch aesthetic through the older technology, in this case augmented by noisey electronic effects and accompaniments. It’s a sort of shoegaze for tougher times than the nineties, (certainly a mopey decade, but not existentially threatening). Very impressive shit.
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Noisesurfer – In Motion
https://archive.org/details/InMotiontafe-46
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Tape Safe Netlabel
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Somewhat gritty little (maybe modular?) synth sketches. Not a whole lot of development or complexity, but those aren’t things I always need in music. Some tracks are characterized by whoofing bass overloads and repeating phrases that are modulated slowly as they go along. Other tracks have drum beats that kinda just grind along on rails, occasionally having glitch hiccups.
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Norah Lorway – Drone Bølge
https://xylemrecords.bandcamp.com/album/drone-b-lge
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Xylem Netlabel
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Always a composer to watch for, I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve heard from her up to this point. These are slow, airy drones with very sublimated tones that kind of threaten to break out into a larger, orchestral fanfare, but instead retreat back into reverb clouds.
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Oscar Santis – Desde la Caja
https://pueblonuevo.cl/catalogo/desde-la-caja/
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Pueblo Nuevo Netlabel
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This is some of the best noise music I’ve heard all year. Dense, complex clumps of noise, in varying grits of abrasive power, spin out in rapid twitches from sometimes identifiable sources, such as ultra-detuned guitar. Other pieces seem more purely electronic. There really is a lot of variety and dynamics within these tangled pieces, not something that I can always say about noise. Correspondingly, the fatigue factor is pretty low. If you like weird sounds at all, don’t miss this one.
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φορέας – Annoyances
https://citrusounds.bandcamp.com/album/annoyances
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Citrus Sounds
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What do we call this now… Blade-Runner Ambient? A nice pile of short ambient pieces that are slightly neutral, slightly melancholy, slightly chilly, with sparse beats that occasionally butt-in and cause everything to get pumping-compression sickness.
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Professional Flowers – Ars Botanica
https://professionalflowers.bandcamp.com/album/ars-botanica
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Self-Released
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Some very nice synth noodlings with hissy field recordings. Yeah, it’s impossible for me to find fault with it, it’s just simple, charming music.
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Thuuooom – Aste EP
http://texturalhealing.blogspot.com/2016/07/thuuooom-aste-ep.html
Thuuooom – Kaiut
https://archive.org/details/thuuooom-kaiut-thump313
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Textural Healing / Self-released
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These are probably the most minimal things I’ll recommend this time. Drone music that permutates extremely slowly. Kaiut may be the more ‘progressive’ of the two, but not by so much.
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tsone – The Earth’s Reply (tracks for Nagual)
https://tsone.bandcamp.com/album/the-earths-reply-tracks-for-nagual
CC BY NC ND (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Self-released
–
Looping ambient music going through a process of breaking out of some low-lo-fi distortion process. Loses a bit of the inherent tension once the music smooths out, but it’s still nice enough.
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psph.S – {enter / reenter / out}
https://archive.org/details/eg0_163
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Eg0cide
–
Having all the ingredients of your standard harsh noise performance, (feedback, fast-tweaking of effect pedals, twitchy abuse of contact mics…) but adding up to something a bit more reflective than reflexive.

Hi, again, I’m C. Reider. I release most of my own music for free on the internet, and I listen to a lot of music by people who do the same. This is a list of free-to-download releases from 2016 that I liked a lot.
I’ve done lists like this for several years, here are previous years’ lists:
2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.
–
These lists have been getting really long, because I listen to a lot of music over the course of a year, so for my sanity and yours, I’m going to break up this end of year list into several smaller lists. This strategy will also allow me to consider albums released late in the year, while still being able to raise the profile of cool stuff from earlier in the year. This is part TWO of the big list, I will post links just below this line of other parts as I publish them.
–
LINK TO PART ONE
LINK TO PART THREE
LINK TO PART FOUR
LINK TO PART FIVE, THE FINAL POST
–
The ordering of these releases is completely arbitrary, no ranking is intended, and none should be inferred. I like everything I’m listing here to varying degrees, but ranking is a silly activity that helps exactly no one form their own opinion about music.
–
I should clarify that by saying these are netlabel releases, I don’t necessarily mean they were released on proper netlabels, many of these albums were self released. To me, netlabeling is a community activity, involving releasing music online for free (or pay what you want)…
preferably (though not necessarily) with a CC license…
and EVEN MORE preferably (though not necessarily) with a CC license that allows for remixability and sampling. So I use the word “netlabel” even though the word is admittedly problematic. You could just see this as links to a bunch of free music if you wanted to keep things simple.
–
You can be notified when the next part of this year-end list gets published by either following me on twitter @vuzhmusic or by subscribing to the RSS feed for this blog’s “Recommended Listening” category:
http://www.vuzhmusic.com/blog/category/recommended-listening/feed/
–-

–

Eeem [eim] – Shades
https://eeem.bandcamp.com/album/shades
Eeem [eim] – Shores
https://eeem.bandcamp.com/album/shores
Eeem [eim] – Skylines
https://eeem.bandcamp.com/album/skylines-2
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Self-released
–
A triptych of pretty synth compositions that comes probably as close to what I’d call “traditional ambient” as I’m likely to enjoy. There are also plenty of kosmische inflections to be heard in the drift, especially little hints of Popol Vuh, Tangerine Dream and Ashra. I could see these having really wide appeal, they’re done very well.
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Ela and PomPom – My New Music
https://thepompom.bandcamp.com/album/my-new-music
Jennifer and PomPom – Circles
https://thepompom.bandcamp.com/album/circles
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Self-released
–
These two releases feature compositions and performances by people who live with cerebral palsy. Ela’s compositions have lo-fi-guitar + percussion + piano backings to her soaring, pretty vocals with mysterious lyrics. Sometimes her voice is draped in spacious reverb or spooky delay.
Jennifer’s works are a litte more spare, and feature her performances on (mostly) keyboard with the percussive pluckings of the PomPom group murkily cycling in accompaniment. This is utterly unique, lo-fi psycedelia that is moving and beautiful. Some of the absolute top music I’ve heard this year. I could see these recordings becoming very influential. Listening to this music makes me happy to be alive.
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Eucci – In Marianne District
http://euc.cx/rive/073/index.html
Eucci – On Verdant Shores
https://sunhill.bandcamp.com/album/on-verdant-shores
Eucci – Land’s End
https://sunhill.bandcamp.com/album/lands-end
Eucci – Mimeotin
http://www.controlvalve.net/blog/index.blog/2359640/ctrlvlv061__eucci__mimeotin/
CC BY SA / CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Self-released except ‘Mimeotin’ which is out on Control Valve
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Eucci had a very productive year, here’s a survey of what I heard. ‘In Marianne District’ is a beautiful collage work of drones and field recordings and interesting sounds cut with sudden transitions and captivating juxtapositions. The style reminds me of some of my favorite work by the Hafler Trio, such as ‘Kill the King’ or ‘the Sea Org’.
‘On Verdant Shores’ is a spasmodic take on pretty IDM music, rough and unsettled, wriggling its ways through not entirely predictable tone lines.
‘Land’s End’ continues the trajectory laid on on the previous release, and refines it a bit. Drums are slightly more upfront here, maybe making it a bit more obvious that this is electronic dance music, perhaps? I mean, I’d love to see someone dance to it. Autechre is the obvious touchstone here, though I feel like a lazy reviewer by pointing that out, (but hell, not like I’m getting paid to do this!)
‘Mimeotin’ is where things get significantly thornier. This is noise music, but labelling it that way is probably misleading, and definitely feels nearly wrong when comparing to some of this artist’s blistering work under the artist name AODL. No, ‘Mimeotin’ takes a really dynamic approach, exploring the softly twitching rhythms and weird, labyrinthine tone lines heard on the two previous releases, but augmented with more abrasive sounds and squirts of complex noise events… nothing that outright pummels, but enough to certainly not pass by unnoticed.
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Gregg Skloff – All Way Relay
https://greggskloff.bandcamp.com/track/all-way-relay
Gregg Skloff – Go Dead Aces
https://greggskloff.bandcamp.com/album/go-dead-aces
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Self-released
–
Skloff, whose main axe is bass (electric, double bass and cello) employs sitar for the two tracks of ‘All Way Relay’. The droning qualities of the instrument pairs well with his sensibilities as a composer, but he does use the melodic side as well. He neatly sidesteps any tacky attempts at ethnic pastiche, thankfully. The first track is couched in mammoth reverb, and the second runs the sound through a fuzz amp to get some feedback-harmonics.
It sounds like ‘Go Dead Aces’ is primarily a synth-based work, with long bassy drones that slowly ebb and wane, throbbing away while the upper harmonics swirl around. Very pretty stuff.
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Gurdonark – Reflections on Self
https://gurdonark.bandcamp.com/album/reflections-on-self
CC BY SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Self-released
–
There’s not a whole lot I could say about this album that I haven’t already said about Gurdonark albums that have come before. There is a certain inevitability that comes anytime he releases new work, you know it’s going to sound just like new work by Gurdonark. The happy thing is, I really like that sound, and so the stability of his style is something I find comforting in an odd way. His music is not quite like music by anyone else. His loping compositions for keyboard synth (using sounds that he’s sampled in himself) are simultaneously bouncy and ponderous. His albums are simple, musical, calming and ever-so-slightly oddball. Some of the pieces on this album, especially those toward the end, have a slightly darker mood, and some hints of avant-garde ideas. These are paired with such titles as “Regret” and “Conceit.” It seems this course of musical introspection does not overlook the parts of himself that may be harder to look at.
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He Can Jog – Characteristics Associated With Unpredictability
http://music.hecanjog.com/album/characteristics-associated-with-unpredictability
He Can Jog – Nightsound
http://music.hecanjog.com/album/nightsound
CC BY (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Self-released
–
A couple of very different releases from this artist, presumably making works using his own programming language Pippi. ‘Characteristics Associated With Unpredictability’ starts off with a kind of galactic random-number funk which swiftly slips into continually evolving scenarios of what sounds like a bunch of smiling DMT baubles yammering and chittering vigorously, while hopefully not overcooking your inner ear with radiation too much. Yeah, yeah, ok. I suck at describing music, especially when it sounds like a fusion reactor come to life.
‘Nightsounds’ is ambient music after the Eno model; tone plates shifting over and under one another, cloud-like with some tinkly nooding happening too. These two releases are pretty radically different in mood, but are pretty interesting to listen to back-to-back.
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Janne Nummela – Level Crossing
https://archive.org/details/eg0_159
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Eg0cide Netlabel
–
A number of compositions, realized on computer, in various Modernist, avant-garde styles. A little more constricted and formal than what I tend to like these days, but it’s really very enjoyable.
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Jonáš Gruska – Site Specific Resonances V
https://jonasgruska.bandcamp.com/album/site-specific-resonances-v
CC BY NC SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Self-released
–
A sixteen minute long piece that begins with the sound of air ducts (I presume it’s the same system pictured on the cover.) A very loud set of ductwork that rattles and clacks together percussively fades out as some ambiguously sourced droning which sounds vaguely organ-like fades in. This builds, and later is joined by some really nice vibrating material sounds that resemble a low-pitched brass instrument like a tuba or trombone. I believe that materials from the space are activated by some vibrating mechanism by the performer(s?) to produce these sounds. The room’s reverb gives the buzzing and moaning drones a beautiful situatedness. The drone section culminates with a percussive climax.
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Chinese Hackers – (wiretrap)
https://bedlamtapes.bandcamp.com/album/–2
Copyright (No derivs! No sampling / remixing 🙁)
Bedlam Tapes
–
Another solid release from Bedlam Tapes. This music really does come off in some ways as a very appreciative hommage to 1980s Industrial Music, with a very lo-fi approach using drum machines, over-saturated synths, people banging on 55 gallon drums in a warehouse, and weird, charged vocal samples clicking in and out of the mix. It could sit alongside early stuff from Controlled Bleeding or SPK nicely. Thing is, this album also integrates some vaporwave influences too, filtered through the same overleaded-four-track aesthetic. This leaves me drawing some (perhaps dubious) comparisons between industrial & vaporwave, both of which seemed to start off as an anti-establishment, protest music, and both of which rapidly ended up embracing the establishment and polishing themselves up to gain wider audiences. In the process each became something else entirely.
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Linden Pomeroy – Ikiryo
https://pilot11.bandcamp.com/album/linden-pomeroy-ikiryo
CC BY SA (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Pilot Eleven Netlabel
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It’s that classic combination of guitar through a system of delays and reverbs. I guess I’m just a sucker for this kind of shit. It was one of the first ways I started doing ambient / experimental / whatever music, and it still never gets old.
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Lingua Lustra – Slow Time
https://archive.org/details/Lingua_Lustra_-_Slow_Time
CC BY (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Breathe Compilations
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Slowly looping, filtered and strained musical phrases swaddled in disorienting effects. A very romantic melancholy pervades this album. Very beautiful stuff. “Phantasmagoric” seems like a good word I should use somewhere in this review, but I don’t know what kind of sentence to use it in, so you can make one up yourself if you like.
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Linus Lemont – Marginalia
https://linuslemont.bandcamp.com/album/marginalia
CC BY NC (Derivs allowed! Remix / sample away! 🙂)
Self-released
–
Linus’ first album released with his new name (earlier releases came out under the name Jess Lemont, you may have seen a few recommendations from me for his earlier stuff). Linus is an immensely talented composer with deep jazz chops and some incredible moves on the drumkit, as well as seemingly every single instrument ever made. They have a gift for inventing new ways to splatter those sounds in weird new shapes. This is avant-garde as fuck… If you’re in the market for some extremely well done “difficult” music that never gets boring or predictable, do not miss this one.