Articles
2010 Top 10s and 20s
Will Long (Celer)

Albums
Bilxaboy
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Celer & Yui Onodera
Cepia
Dead Leaf Echo
Ferraris & Uggeri
Ernesto Ferreyra
Flying Horseman
The Foreign Exchange
Les Fragments de la Nuit
Ghost and Tape
Andrew Hargreaves
Head Of Wantastiquet
i8u
Anders Ilar
Quintana Jacobsma
Kaiserdisco
Leafcutter John
Clem Leek
The Lickets
The Machine
Magda
My Fun
Ostendorf, Zoubek, Lauzier
Part Timer
Phillips + Hara
RV Paintings
Set In Sand
Shackleton
Shigeto
Matt Shoemaker
Sun City Girls
Supersilent
Swartz
Ben Swire
Collin Thomas
Tomo
Upward Arrows

Compilations / Mixes
Exp. Dance Breaks 36
Fünf
Lee Jones
The Moon Comes Closer
Note of Seconds
Tensnake

EPs
8Bitch
Celer
Jasper TX
Jozif
Lerosa
Machinefabriek
Patscan
Pleq
Simon Scott
SHEMALE
Thorsten Soltau / Weiss
Jace Syntax & BlackJack
Weiss

SHEMALE: Opening The Astral Doors
Further Records

A bizarre story lurks behind the SHEMALE concept that involves a failed lab experiment in the Bio-weapons division of ManCorp that resulted in a lab technician being transformed into a “hybrid humanoid robot” called—what else?—SHEMALE. S/he escaped ManCorp's clutches and went into hiding in a subterranean cave system beneath Newcastle-upon-Tyne where s/he retreated “into a parallel universe to create dark, dystopian machine-music, influenced by a synthetic dream of Hyperborea, the land beyond the North Wind.” There's certainly more than enough truth in advertising in this case, as the cassette release (100 copies) features five eerie incantations originating from the darkest reaches of space. Sounding at times like rumbling astral transmissions, the material, dominated as it is by synthesizer warble, whooshes, alien squiggles, and ominous bass tones and identified by evocative titles such as “Crossing the Pentagram” and “Summon the Sea Witch,” oozes dark portent through its every pore. Think of SHEMALE's ebony black miniatures as some viral hybrid of Coil, Drexciya (“Horned God Ritual” in particular), and kosmische musik, and you're touring through the right galaxy, as it were.

December 2010