Eclectic edition, in no particular order…

My brother-from-another-mother turned me on to Birdcloud and I couldn’t listen to anything else for like a week. Strangely compelling; funny and also not.

“The complicated sensation of listening to Birdcloud‘s music and the simultaneous urge to laugh, vomit, and maybe break down and cry a little at how familiar and sad and true it all is and has won the band fans across the lower 48, stupefying and sickening audiences in equal measure.”

Their latest, Tetnis, came out in September. The rest of their stuff is pretty awesome, too. AND they’re going back on tour this spring, so don’t miss that!

BØRNS‘ debut album, Dopamine, is some finely crafted, brilliantly crystalline pop.

In terms of quality and influence in electronic music, Aphex Twin is kind of the successor to Kraftwerk (that damn good). Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 EP followed 2014’s
Syro and is meant as a follow-up to 2001’s Drukqs.

Available from Bleep, Amazon, and iTunes

Imagine the animatronic band at Chuck E. Cheese playing house music on a piano… without using the keys.

Probably the most beautiful tuba music that will ever grace this earth.

Favorite track: Mistral Noir

Friend that told me about this put it best: “If you find yourself wishing there was another classic Skinny Puppy album from the late 80s suddenly discovered, this is about as close as you’ll get. Pretty damn good stuff, aside from being a blatant copy of another band…”

2015 has been a great year for the future retro/synthwave/retrowave/darksynth/outrun scene (check out synthetix.fm for more on that). 80s synth aesthetics brought to imaginary soundtracks for cop & horror movies, video game soundtracks, and high-speed car chases along the ocean… what’s not to love? Carpenter Brut’s EP III is a great, hard-driving example of the genre.

The same John Carpenter who made such classic movies as Escape From New York, They Live, and Halloween has 36 movie soundtrack credits to his name. Many of them laid the foundations for and inspired the current future retro scene. Contrary to the usual 80s drift toward excess, Carpenter’s album does more with less and is the big dog of the year. Lights off, headphones on.

“…pull from the traditional gospel canon in tandem with circus music, noise rock & good old fashioned feeling good.”

Other favorite track: Road

Flawless old-school coldwave. 2015 also saw Bernard release Transcriptions From the Otherwhere Vol. 1 and Transcriptions From the Otherwhere Vol. 2.

“Based on Mesopotamian texts from as early as the 4th millennium BC and composed for voice and the Lyre of Ur (a reconstructed 4500-year-old instrument excavated in the early 20th century from the Royal Graves at Ur), the album is the first ever CD of new music sung entirely in Sumerian and Babylonian. The incredible texts have inspired some of the strangest, rawest and most gripping, otherworldly songs you will ever hear, as well as some fun, amusing and often downright bizarre little excursions into the ancient Mesopotamian world, which reveal that in many ways, people in that remotest of times were actually a lot like us!”

The Lyre Ensemble

Without a doubt the flyest tuba-house going.