Records which employ structures and rhythms typically associated with minimal techno tend to be recorded to sound sterile and detached. Polmo Polpo contradict this aesthetic. They combine sometimes...
Norway's Midnight Choir create dramatic - sometimes melodramatic - tension through simplicity and subtlety. To capture their pretty and often quiet songs, they turned to engineer Phill Brown and...
These two records capture the raw and trashy sound of two powerful rock bands playing. They resemble the sound of Spot's Husker Du recordings or Chris Burgess's work with My Dad is Dead more than...
Dating back to the Swell Maps and the Styrenes, bands approaching home recording with inexpensive technology often combined conventional pop elements with strange approaches to texture and layering....
In the US and England, bands whose recordings in the early 1970s sounded great often made excessively slick and polished records as technology evolved. The earliest recordings on this compilation CD...
While it has grown common for rock bands to record on cassette decks in houses, jazz artists still tend to capture their work in studios. In 1976, before most rock bands recorded themselves at home,...
Many current recordings employ an unnecessarily cartoon-like style that abandons natural instrument sounds in favor of exaggerated caricatures of these sounds. Recorded both with Nicholas Vernhes in...
An equal balance among all players provides a guiding principle for freely improvised music. Hef presents engineer Colin McClean the challenge of balancing electric and acoustic instruments. The...
Lozenge's music combines a powerful sonic density with carefully composed melodies. To capture this challenging mixture, they turned to Cheer-Accident guitarist Phil Bonnet, who until his untimely...
The CD reissue of Linda Perhacs's Parallelograms illustrates that a CD mastered carefully from a vinyl pressing can still sound great. More importantly, it returns to print a beautiful...
The prominent use of synthesizers tends to overshadow other common tendencies on new wave records. While Brooklyn duo Beautiful Skin rely very little on synthesizers, they probe far less obvious...
Ready for the House and Later On CD reissues The mysterious figure known only as Jandek started lo-fi home recording in 1978, long before anyone thought of using those words. The Beginning marks his...
Even with the recent reissue of Bruce Haack's 1971 Columbia album The Electric Lucifer, his innovative approaches to home recording and electronic sound generation remain unfortunately overlooked....
