After meeting at the MUTEK Festival in 2002, sharing the bills on various festivals all over the world and a previous collaborative effort in 2003 along with Radbound Mens and Timeblind ("Quality Hotel" out on the Mutek label), Stephan Mathieu and Janeck Schaefer decided to spend some days together in the home of a classical composer in the English countryside and there they recorded a huge amount of material that they later reprocessed and assembled in York Music Research Center. Basically Mathieu plays all the instruments and Schaefer does all the field recordings and in most of the tracks you can recognize both artist's distinctive trademarks but sometimes the symbiosis works so well and results in a new, unorthodox glitch-psychedelia. The highlight here is the sixth track called "Quartet for Flute, Piano and Cello", where you can hear pops and crackles of a worn-out vinyl over a complex sound patchwork somehow resembling Ehlers' "Plays" series. Due to its amazing sound quality it surely sounds better through loudspeakers rather than headphones. Recommended.

Freaky, psychedelic, seventies release for this international combo. Somebody defined it pastoral folk and indeed that's not wrong at all, but I'd put the emphasis on the psychedelic ambiental side o the whole project since that's perhaps the "file rouge" running between the different songs. The whole folk spirit of the project arises in the third episode of this cdr: "descend", I'd also say that it represents one of the most inspired moment of the whole recording. Old fashioned music but you know sometimes "old fashioned" stands for quality trademark and that’s far from the occasion in which it just means anachronistic. I think the result of Yonder Garden is quite good. Probably it may remember Third Ear Band, Pink Floyd and to some newcomers it can also make think to Cerberus Shoal after the fourth album. Perhaps that’s not outstanding but certainly enjoyable.

Itto is the collaboration between Ian Holloway and Neil Rowling respectively from Psychic Space Invasion and Directive 4. A long drone that shifts in pitches is just a prelude for the unexpected core of the work where field recordings of various sources intertwine with a dismal guitar plucking. Maybe the only point against this one is that when you start to get comfortable with the difference it suddenly ends leaving you longing for more. Sound On An Empty Road is surely at its best when it's at its gloomiest. A good display of creative verve, worth checking out for both the Die Stadt & co. fanatics and the lovers of the darker side of the Kranky label out there.

This Zairo guy behind Where is probably into scary music and into the aesthetics of the dark ambient/industrial scene judging both from the cover and from the music, but also considered he's put some Atrax Morgue's quote in the booklet. This guy obviously is not a newcomer since I've seen he's already put out something on cdr format. Dark ambient to the bone but with a couple of odd elements like the "werewolf/inhuman" laments that dyes the first track in black on black. Misanthropic and horrorific as you can easily imagine, Zairo seems to be obsessed by rats more than GBH in their famous song. Talking about rats, it could be the perfect soundtrack for that scene of Herzog's Nosferatu where the ship brings the rats and the subsequent cholera in town. In the second track you have those warlike "beats" that speaking about the genre are quite a standard but it's not another pale imitator of Death in June or Blutharsh. In the last two tracks of the records the soft ambiental white noise is pushed so far that there’s an hypnotical side effects and that's probably the part of the cd I’ve enjoyed the most. I'm not such a fan of dark ambient where the keyboard sound is still intelligible but Where is ok due to the production and to the cure with which he's developed all of the tracks without using goth elements.

After several full-length, some 7"es and many tours, Rollerball are back in town with a new self-titled cd on Wallace. Let's cut it short by saying I've just this and another record titled "Behind the barber" but I must admit I love them, honestly I think they're one of the most underrated bands of the last decade. This digi-pack features another extravagant and delicious cocktail of heterogeneous influences with which this band from Portland creates little gems. Acid folk, poppy-psychedelia, free sketches drew with an incredible intensity and "phatos" is what makes the difference in most of their songs. The singing is top notch as always, above all those of Mae Starr (the vocalist in most of the tracks). Funny, depressed, dreamy, melancholic and if it was an "all you can eat" I'd comment "the banquet is damn tasty and rich". The production is rough here and there, but really good (I can't say if a more refined mix and post-production would have improved the release or not) but it's hard to find the Achilles’ heal of this collection of songs. Freaky extravaganza with a "pop-stimmung" and for what it worths, I've played it in the car and my girlfriend was not even complaining as she usually do. Some may think to a more organized and "songwritten" answer to Jackie O' Motherfucker or Alexander Tucker but this music is less country-folk and deals more with varied influence than with the root of American tradition. Recommended.