Electronic

Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner have a unique musical companionship. Both artists bred the '80s British music scene into pop candy delight thanks to Marr's charming guitar hooks while fronting the Smiths, and Sumner, whose ingenuous lyrical poetry pushed New Order's dance-oriented sound into the new wave mainstream. But since their musical collaboration began back in 1991, the duo continues to make music for themselves, uninhibited by current norms and marketing success. Twisted Tenderness, the band's third album, is certainly a vast improvement over their sophomore effort, 1996's Raise the Pressure. Twisted Tenderness steps back into Marr's talented guitar work: carefree, a bit rollicking at times, but in classic Electronic fashion…

Hard as it is to believe, George Harrison, guitar picker, was also an electronic music pioneer, as these two lengthy, abstract tone poems for early-vintage Moog synthesizer reveal…

Both more and less than what a partnership of Sumner and Marr would promise, Electronic's debut has weathered time much better than might have been thought upon its release, but ultimately only half works. When it does, though, it's fantastic, sometimes shifting from okay to fantastic within the same song. Opening number "Idiot Country" is a bit like that - the beginning sounds a little too rushed, Marr's heavy wah-wah riff OK enough but Sumner's semi-rap/semi-sung vocals a bit ham-handed. By the time the full combination of gentle keyboards, crisp rhythms, and the gentle, reflective chorus comes to bear, though, everything feels just great. Perhaps understandably Electronic leans much more toward New Order than the Smiths - Marr had already proven his desire to work in dance-crossover since his previous band's breakup, while Sumner's immediately recognizable, melancholic vocals call to mind New Order's rich history…

Delia Derbyshire’s incredible 1969 library record 'Electronic', written under the Li De La Russe and Nikki St. George pseudonyms along with a few collaboration/contributions by her BBC radiophonic workshop colleagues, David Vorhaus and Brain Hodgson, who were collectively known as Kaleidophon. The material here tends towards Delia's minimal and best work, carefully detailed sketches full of sci-fi feels and abstract scapes, each with their own apt description in the liner notes, and including among them highlights such as the proto-Ø styles of Restless Delays and the sublime series of Delia-suffixed reveries, waltzes and ideas, plus Vorhaus’s brilliantly titled and tripped out Snide Rhythms, including material that eventually surfaced on The Tomorrow People.

Roland Kayn - Electronic Symphony I-III (1997) {2CD Set, Reiger-records-reeks KY-CD 9701-2}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 694 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 335 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 13 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1997 Reiger-records-reeks | KY-CD 9701-2
Experimental / Modern Classical / Cybernetic Music / Electronic / Musique concrète

In Kayn's Electronic Symphony series, the past and present continually encounter each other anew, each time casting new reflections on the given moment. Kayn's autonomous studio processes remove context from what he termed (markedly in the language of synthesis) the "carrier" material, for the most part music of the orchestral tradition at its most texturally oriented – even drone-like – but alternately seething and volcanic in its drama.

Roland Kayn - A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound (2017) {16CD Set, frozen reeds fr7/22}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 3.81 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 1.93 Gb
Full Artwork | 5% repair rar
© 2017 frozen reeds | fr7/22
Experimental / Modern Classical / Cybernetic Music / Electroacoustic / Electronic

Twenty-two movements, 14 hours and 16 CDs worth of spangling cosmic sound play: this premiere release of the magnum opus by German composer Roland Kayn is a colossus and a marvel. Roland who? In a profession that glorifies big egos and fetishises the kind of creative genius that demands total control, Kayn went to more selfless extremes. He worked in the pioneering electronic studios of Germany and the Netherlands in the mid-20th century and built fastidious command systems with the aim of making “self-sufficient cybernetic music”.