Articles
CYNE's Top 10
Yair Etziony's Top 10

Albums
2tall
Abbasi Brothers
Aerial
Argy
Austere
Bailleau & Williams
Beequeen
Black Devil Disco Club
Matt Borghi
The Bug
Celer
Leighton Craig
CYNE
Daedelus
Koen Daigaku
Thomas Feiner
Flying Lotus
Joe Grimm
Grouper
Marihiko Hara
Headphone Science
Akai Ikuo
Ariel Kalma
Like Kisses Of Thread
Lull
Yoshio Machida
Machinefabriek + Vitiello
Israel Martinez
Nurse With Wound
Oubys
Chris Paul and Mia V
Phasen
Pop Levi
Ruhlmann + Celer
Janek Schaefer
Henning Schmiedt
Sense Project
The Silverman
Slowcream
Spartak
Strom Noir
Subheim
TaughtMe
Cristian Vogel
Goro Watari

Compilations / Mixes
Adultnapper
Cocoon Compilation H
Marcel Dettmann
Emerging Organisms
Gothenburg 08
Onur Özer
Holgi Star & Harry Axt
Seed Records Vol. 2
Tech My House 2
Prins Thomas & Full Pupp

EPs
3ofmillions
A "New Generation" EP
Giesela
Brian James
Kontext
Outputmessage
Palac
Chris Paul
Lasse-Marc Riek
Simon Whetham

VA: Gothenburg 08
Fang Bomb

Like its distant predecessor Gothenburg 84, the hour-long Gothenburg 08 features previously unreleased work produced by innovative electronic and experimental artists associated with the city. The line-up's certainly promising, with The Skull Defekts, Porn Sword Tobacco, Jasper TX, and Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words four of the ten contributors. Gothenburg 08 is an album of sonic extremes with some tracks easy on the ears, and others less so. Anders Dahl's engrossing electro-acoustic exploration “Strätta, flockblomstriga 4” overlays slow-motion elements of peaceful calm with splintering shards of eardrum-shredding noise, while Joel Brindefalk's “Monitoring My Own Death” offers a four-minute lesson in bruising clatter and combustible noise; needless to say, Porn Sword Tobacco's pretty wonderlands of piano and synthesizer melodies (“Feminin arkitektur,” “Ett jaläger och ett nejläger”) go down considerably easier.

The compilation is almost split evenly between harsh and gentle moments: on the one hand, there's Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words' “Facelessness Erases Every Trace of Humanity,” where scarred guitars shriek over a pounding base so loudly they almost drown out the chanted vocals, and The Skull Defekts' eight minutes of churning snarl and rumble (“Invocation of Brother Rune Lindblad”); on the other, there's Jasper TX's “And I Close My Eyes,” a lovely ambient orchestral setting of melancholy romanticism, and Sewer Election's “Mot döden,” a dazed, Jeck-styled setting of hiss, vinyl crackle, and muffled loops. Inhabiting a rare middle ground is Viktor Sjöberg & Jonas Lindgren's shimmering drone “Guldheden.” Though some pieces may soften its blow, Gothenburg 08 remains a provocative and uncompromising collection that's designed with the open-minded listener in mind.

August 2008