warm

Noted electronica/IDM artist Jonathan Cannup aka Ten and Tracer has pulled a soothing “opium-ambient-drone” album contrasting his previous glitchy IDM on netlabels like Zymogen and Archipel . It is actually quite calm & blissful and it has some amazing artwork.

Swedish psychedelic combo Dungen is back with a new one on Subliminal Sounds. Their 4th album aptly titled “4” is an extremely well crafted album of eclectic influences such as psychedelic pop, 60s soul, swedish folk, acid jam rock and jazz. The ingredients might sound a little awkward. Swedish folk, jam rock and soul?

Icy Demons from Chicago has their 3rd album out on the Japanese Easel label. Man Man’s Christopher Powell & Bablicon’s Griffin Rodriguez seem to be the main men of this band, assisted by other Chicago musicians with such silly names as Ali Hawkbar and Ta-Freek-Ya!.

It was surprising to see middle eastern music on Berlin’s Staubgold which release electronic acts like Leafcutter John, Kammerflimmer Kollektief, To Rococo Rot. It turns out that Thilges ‘ second album on Staubgold is a commision by “Jeunesse“, which features 2 main guest artists, the Iraqi oud player Asim-Al Chalabi and Persian vocalist Zohreh Jooya and 4 other guests like the viola player Eyvind Kang.

Do you remember those dark periods of your life when you didn’t have last.fm? I sure don’t! A comparatively new and overlooked service by last.fm is the labels pages, where participating labels put their wares online for the global market.

Carrying on the good songwriting ethos from the previous post, I should quickly mention Alela Diane to you. Portland’s Holocene Music released her self-released second album in October, after she made 650 copies by hand, that is “sewing lace and paper bags for the case, drawing golden ships, lettering ink, and burning each cd”.

Hadouk Trio is the brain child of Didier Malherbe and Loy Ehrlich with percussionist Steve Shehan. All three are multi instrumentalists, and the music sounds very rich and the instruments are warm, especially the Dodouk (from which the second part of the word Hadouk comes from) is ultra warm…