The Art of Electronics: The x

The Residents are an American art collective best known for their over 60 studio albums that were recorded over a period of over forty years. They also created some outstanding multimedia works, mainly three CD ROM projects and ten DVDs. Working as an anonymous collective, their identitites were kept secret until in 2017 Hardy Fox revealed himself as their primary composer. Hardy died in October 2018, but the group continue to record and perform. Recently, several new albums have been released, among them the brilliant Intruders and Ghost of Hope.

The Legendary Pink Dots exist in the fields of experimental and psychedelic music. The band is fronted by Edward Ka-Spel, who doubles as singer and chief lyric writer. Phil Knight (The Silverman), Erik Drost, and Raymond Steeg make up the current lineup of the band…

As audacious as the sleeve it comes housed in, the UK’s most eccentric audio malefactor returns with his eighth studio album, Practical Electronics with Thighpaulsandra. Unique in the Thighpaulsandra oeuvre, this one eschews the usual group based recordings, consisting of electronics and vocals only. Hovering between haunted narratives and extended instrumental sequences Practical Electronics is an eccentric excursion into playful pop and fearless electronic experimentation. Simultaneously intimidating and accessible, the energy of this untamed mind unleashes an artefact where high art unfolds as an oblique electronic cabaret. Having cut is teeth amongst such legendary outfits such as Coil and Spiritualized Thighpaulsandra has constantly catapulted himself further and further into a musical landscape utterly of his own devising. Practical Electronics is the latest exemplary installment of a voice that is uncompromising as it is outlandish.

While the Norwegian jazz scene has been pursuing its own course for decades, the period of 1996-1997 represented a significant watershed, a milestone where an entirely new kind of music emerged, linked to jazz but distanced considerably—some might say completely, but they'd be mistaken—from its roots in the American tradition. Three seminal and groundbreaking albums were released within a year of each other: trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær's Khmer (ECM, 1997); noise improv group Supersilent's 1- 3 (Rune Grammofon, 1997); and, beating the others by a year, keyboardist Bugge Wesseltoft's aptly titled New Conception of Jazz (Jazzland, 1996). All three explored the integration of electronics, disparate cultural references, programming, turntables and—especially in the case of Supersilent, the most avant-garde of the three— noise, to create aural landscapes that were innovative, otherworldly and refreshingly new.