February 7th, 2012 | 3:45 pm | Tim Sendra
Later this month, Dirtnap will release the second record from Mark Ryan's latest project Mind Spiders. Before you say "Mark who?", let me head you off by saying he was in the Marked Men and High Tension Wires and therefore, you can expect nothing less than snotty brilliance from this new project. 2011's self-titled album was pretty hot, but this new one, Meltdown, is even better. Very hooky, very tough, with lots of fuzz, reverb, and rickety guitar and synth clatter. Ryan sent us a list of stuff he's been liking lately; it kind of reads like an instruction manual for building the Mind Spiders' sound....
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February 2nd, 2012 | 8:00 am | AMG Staff
By some measures, 1986 may be the most '80s year of the decade. Sure, Michael Jackson was absent from the charts but his impact could not be denied, nor could his little sister Janet who had one of the year's defining albums in Control. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis gave Control a Minneapolis flavor just as Prince continued to mine the Paisley Underground for inspiration on his decidedly weird Parade. Counteracting this neo-psychedelia -- also apparent on the gorgeous Skylarking by XTC -- was the rise of Americana in the form of debut albums by Dwight Yoakam and Steve Earle and hip-hop breaking into the mainstream via Run-D.M.C.'s Raising Hell and Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill. American Underground began to inch its way into the mainstream through Husker Du signing to Warner and R.E.M. working with John Mellencamp producer Don Gehman, and MTV still kicked out plenty of one-hit wonders like the deliciously weird Baltimora and his "Tarzan Boy," all of which gives us plenty of reasons to love 1986.
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Decades before the contemporary era of electronic music, which includes both synthesized soundscapes and computer-generated electronica, there were experimental works called Musique concrète. Painstakingly crafted from recorded natural sounds and manipulated on bits of magnetic tape, this futuristic music was pioneered Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, yet was soon raised to an art by such innovative composers as Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and popularized by The Beatles and Frank Zappa.
