ARTICLES
2006 Top 10s and 20s
2006 Artist Picks

ALBUMS
17 Pictures
Angina P
Ateleia
Benni Hemm Hemm
The Boats
Cappablack
Celer
Dead Letters Dead Words
Deceptikon
Deerhunter
Denzel + Huhn
Displayaz
Dollboy
Drone
Eluvium
Emanuele Errante
The Eternals
Fear Falls Burning
Marcus Fjellström
Fonoda
Funkstörung
Goldfrapp
Gyroscope
Robert Henke
James Holden
The Idealist
Anders Ilar
Landing
LCD Soundsystem
Library Tapes
L Pierre
Lullatone
Tor Lundvall
Mad EP
Mahogany
Melodium
Mem1
Daisuke Miyatani
Mole Harness
Momus
Monoceros
Mormo
Mothboy
Original Hamster
Pierson & Horton
Prince Valium
Radical Face
Retail Sectors / Yaporigami
Rylander & Elggren
Scott Solter Plays PIM
Sideshow
Silicone Soul
Skream
Splinters
Mark Templeton
Thread Pulls
T. Raumschmiere
Tycho
Ultre
Virculum
Xela

COMPILATIONS/MIXES
AudioArt 03
Cumulous
Dubstep Allstars Vol. 4
Eriksen / Toft / Utarm
Katapult VA Vol. 3
Let's Lazertag Sometime
Mr Geoffrey & JD Franzke
Skagen / Halvorsen / Toft
Tectonic Plates

3"/7"/10"/12"/EPs
Gabriel Ananda
Robert Bardini
DAT Politics
Dead Letters / R. Sundin
Dogmixer
Benjamin Fehr
Fenin
HL
I Make This Sound
Zoë Irvine
Kyriakides and Moor
Lamont & 2tall
Ljud. & Piloten / Kama Aina
Jacob London
Sam Mcqueen
Miskate
Ryo Miyashita & Hiiragi_
[nara]
New Faces
Of / Greg Davis
Charlemagne Palestine
Phon.o vs Litwinenko
Portable
PostPrior
Samarah
Nicholas Sauser & Ditch
Someone Else
Hannes Teichmann
Tractile
Andy Vaz

IMAGES
F.S. Blumm

Tor Lundvall: Empty City
Strange Fortune

Rare for an electronic album, New York-based musician Tor Lundvall's Empty City is strongly programmatic, though that shouldn't surprise too much given Lundvall's other vocation as a painter (the album's landscape images were created by him); song titles alone tell an evocative story of metropolitan desolation that's consistent with the album title. Lundvall's music has been called ‘ghost ambient' and the description isn't inaccurate. He transcribes the lonely, pre-dawn grey of a city's industrial outskirts into slow-moving pulsations where muffled Rhodes melodies and subtly woven vocal emissions are smothered in atmospheric gloom; silences are interrupted by piercing bell tones and soft whistles while phantom-like voices creep along the music's edges, thereby humanizing it by adding a wispy subliminal presence to the muted, almost drowsy, material. “Buildings and Rain” drenches the percussive pitter-patter of rainfall in billowing clouds of reverb, “Night Work” echoes with a distant steelyard's clanging and machine hum, and the soot-covered “Scrap Yard” and “Wires,” with its bleeding neon and guttural tones, ooze industrial grime. If ever a music invited the appellation ‘somnambulant,' it's Lundvall's.

January 2007