Articles
H. Nakamura's Twilight
Mark Templeton's Ballads

Albums
A Cloakroom Assembly
Ametsub
Anthesteria
Arandel
Alexander Berne
Boxharp
Joseph Capriati
Enrico Coniglio
Cristal
Dapayk Solo
Taylor Deupree
Distant Fires Burning
Federico Durand
Fear Falls Burning
Alan Fitzpatrick
Flying Lotus
Roel Funcken
Harley Gaber
Tobias Hellkvist
Christopher Hipgrave
Hummingbird
Ital Tek
Mathew Jonson
Kabutogani
Haruka Nakamura
Lance Austin Olsen
Ontayso
Pawn
Psychoangelo
ROTFLOL
Michael Santos
Dirk Serries
Signaldrift
Talvihorros
thisquietarmy & Cortez
Jennifer Walshe
Weisman & Davis
Tim Xavier
Year Of No Light

Compilations / Mixes
Arto Mwambe
Clicks & Cuts 5
Dark Matter
dOP
J
Ben Klock
Party Animals
So Far (So Good)
We Are One, In The Sun

EPs
Automobile, Swift
Breitbandkater
Pacheko & Pocz
Cylon
Dirty Culture
Terrence Dixon
Kyle Bobby Dunn
Enduser
Timo Garcia
Kez YM
Little Fritter
Monoceros
David Newlyn
One Second Bridge
Padang Food Tigers
Rameses III
Ryonkt
Nigel Samways
Simon Scott
Shoosh
Mark Templeton
Ten and Tracer
Tracey Thorn
Stanislav Vdovin
Vdovin + Shaydullina

Enrico Coniglio: Songs from Ruined Days
Touch

In keeping with its title, Enrico Coniglio's Songs from Ruined Days exudes a primarily desolate and even dystopic character during its uninterrupted, forty-five-minute presentation. A download-only release that's part of Touch's Spire project, the Italian artist's latest work is a shape-shifting ambient-drone collage based on 2009 field recordings made in Porto Marghera, an industrial coastal area on Venice, Italy's mainland currently afflicted by severe economic and environmental crises, and in Vienna, Austria. If there's one thing in particular that distinguishes Coniglio's work from that of others in the field recordings-based soundscape genre, it's the degree to which it's focused on distilling environmental settings into sonic form and on capturing the evolution—degradation included—of the urban landscape.

Against a static-encrusted bedrock of reverberant industrial churn, glassy tones and vaporous surges appear, with the mass gradually giving way to a liturgical passage that suggests a church setting where organ playing and rustling movements of people intermingle. Blurry, windswept episodes follow, as do ones involving speaking voices, choral interjections, and industrial ruptures of one kind or another until the piece descends into an electrical swamp in its closing minutes. The impression formed is of a society undergoing collapse, its technological advances undermined by unanticipated cracks in the seams and its rusting machines poisoning the environment as much as benefiting humanity. Shrouded in gloom, the piece unfolds with patient deliberation, moving from one ruined setting to the next, with fragments of choral illumination (a children's choir the most affecting) offering tentative hope for salvation.

July 2010