她是Holly Herndon，一位年轻电音奇女子，出生美国，十多岁就跑到德国，其后染上电瘾，积极在学院钻硏电子声音，在这十一月，于美国小型独立唱片公司Rvng旗下推出处女大盘子Movement。
初在网页遇见这位女子时，已觉得她很有趣，红红橙橙的长发，浅蓝色的大眼睛，木然的神情，坦白说，不像人，像披着人皮的机械人，知道她搞电音，就估计是冷冰冰的作品，试听以解惑，又不完全冰冷，热情的戏份还是有的，整体沾上实验味，声音处理倾向烈性，与她的形象反差颇大，她似乎很喜欢探索人声与电音的交合，对人声执行严苛的手段，不近人性的扭曲，衍生出可听性很高的新颖电子音乐，当中有节拍感极重的前卫舞曲，也有抽象之极的电气雕塑，用高音量聆听，别有一番震撼。
以上介绍选自（四方聽音）電音男女 by 李子健

45.3

When Gabriel Szatan asked Teki Latex for his thoughts on so-called deconstructed club music, the French DJ said lot of it was "experimental for the sake of being experimental." He meant that some producers are stuck in a technical exercise, aiming to achieve increasingly weird or sophisticated sound design with no concern if it actually works, musically. The reality is, world-changing electronic music happens when you have both: the drive to push the medium forward coupled with a musical instinct that goes beyond novelty factor. The Los Angeles producer Amazondotcom nails that sweet spot on her first EP, Mirror River, the inaugural release for Subreal, her label with Siete Catorce. It's got the imploded rhythms and wilfully dissonant synths we tend to associate with deconstructed club music, but it also has the visceral power it needs to make a dance floor move in earnest.
Abundant sub-bass is key to unlocking that visceral body response, and Mirror River doesn't skimp on the ultra-low-end frequencies. All four tracks contain traces of golden-era dubstep in terms of how the bassline takes center stage—"A Flower, Nocturnal And Permanent" especially, with its LFO wubs and resounding negative space. It's decorated with a rich collage of highly processed samples (birds, trees, crowd noises), providing an element of cybernetic sound design you might not hear on a Deep Medi record. "A Drum To Ward Off Language" has a similar vibe, pairing classic UK bass with a modern textural flex, though there's urgency stemming from its nearly 150-BPM tempo. "Leopard's Dream" is full of sawtooth and square wave melodies which might be grating to some ears, or just sharp enough for others. The hand drum samples on "Priestess" are a nice counterpoint to the buzzing digital synths, which don't quite reach alarm-clock levels of intensity, though they get close.

Too Many Voices is the fourth album from Andy Stott, a follow-‐up to 2014’s Faith in Strangers. It was recorded over the last 18 months and sees a diverse spectrum of influences bleed into 9 tracks that are as searching as they are memorable.
The album draws for inspiration from the fourth-‐world pop of Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra as much as it does Triton-‐fuelled Grime made 25 years later. Somewhere between these two points there’s an oddly aligned vision of the future that seeps through the pores of each of the tracks. It’s a vision of the future as was once imagined; artificial, strange and immaculate. Full of possibilities.
The album opens with the harmonised, deteriorating pads of the opening Waiting For You and arcs through to the synthetic chamber-‐pop of the closing title track, referencing Sylvian & Sakamoto’s Bamboo Houses as much as it does the ethereal landscapes of This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance. In between, the climate and palette constantly shift, taking in the midnight pop of Butterflies, the humid, breathless House of First Night and the endlessly cascading Forgotten.
Longtime vocal contributor Alison Skidmore features on half the tracks, sometimes augmented by the same simulated materials; voicing the dystopian breakdown on Selfish, at others surrounded by beautiful synth washes, such as on the mercurial Over, or the dreamy, neon-‐lit New Romantic.
It’s all far removed from the digital synthesis and the abstracted intricacies that define much of the current electronic landscape. The same cybernetic palette is here implanted into more human form; sometimes cold, but more often thrumming with life.

最初听到巴乌的声音并没有给我留下太深的印象，更谈不上喜欢，可能是因为那首烂大街的巴乌名曲《月光下的凤尾竹》的缘故。和这首曲子一样，在我的印象中，大多巴乌演奏的音乐都很欢快，我不太喜欢这类欢快的音乐，因为大多欢快的事物都让人觉得有辱智商，这也许是时代的错，欢快是无辜的。后来，我接触到这个乐器，把它吹响，才发现它的音色如此的阴郁，百思不得其解，这幽暗的声调，何以一直用来演奏那些如此欢快的乐曲……
这张专辑一共九首曲子，除了《首陀罗》一曲加入了一轨简单的古琴之外，其他的曲子都是由巴乌构成。录音用了几种不同的巴乌，包括云南巴乌、越南巴乌、定制的高音巴乌等。另外，由于我并非专业的吹管乐手，以及巴乌这个乐器本身在音域上的限制，我借助了音频软件在某些地方对巴乌的音高和速度进行了编辑，以达到需要的效果。
录音、混音：梁奕源
作曲、演奏：梁奕源
摄影、封面设计：梁奕源

Review by Ned Raggett

Subtitled "Special Low Frequency Version" on the front -- and if one opens up the CD, the reverse of the booklet shows a wide selection of pills -- arguably Earth and its stoned and droned appeal in a nutshell. If Carlson and his bassist du jour, in this case Dave Harwell, weren't quite Sub Pop's answer to the ranges of U.K. guitar extremism from the likes of Godflesh, Main, and Skullflower, Earth still came pretty darn close to it, creating a record even the Melvins would find weird. Consisting of three long instrumentals edited together as one long monster slam of feedback and howling, Earth 2 dedicates itself to the proposition that there's no such thing as too loud, trudging, or doom-laden. Opening track "Seven Angels" does show that for all the semi-chaos, things are still based around riffs, or at least one key riff endlessly repeated and drove directly into the ground through layers of hum and delay. Had Tony Iommi written it, nobody would have blinked an eye, but not even Sabbath gave itself over so thoroughly to the power of the amplifier -- and all this without drums. Without even a slight pause, "Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine" takes over, namely all 27 minutes of it. With a more paced, clock-chime-from-damnation melody leading the way deep into the track, stretching out and getting even more end-is-nigh as it goes, it's a bizarre but strong, weirdly fascinating performance -- ambient music completely and totally suffused with threat and fuzz.

恐怖份子呀！最接近群眾的一次(還是很恐怖)。

Luke Younger returns to PAN with an eight-track album of his most direct work to date. Composed alone at NO studio in the Essex countryside, to start an album with a piece called ‘Capital Crisis (New City Loop)’ seems an intentional misnomer. Long, sustained periods in the rural studio setting see Younger working with an array of fragmented, disassociated sound sources to build upon 2015’s Olympic Mess. It shares a similarly inclined vision of the urban environment, but here Chemical Flowers makes reference to paradoxical notions of authenticity and creative practice by way of questioning the structures around us. Collages are assembled and dismantled, temporal and spatial boundaries fluctuate and movement is an overarching theme.
Surrealist drowned world atmospheres sculpted far enough away from the source of inspiration leave plenty of room for ambiguity. The nocturnal nature of the recording process is self-evident, and pieces like ‘Leave Them All Behind’ tap into a deep psychedelic undercurrent. Confused
narratives, emotions and aleatory hallucinations ebb and flow throughout. ‘I Knew You Would Respond’ evokes murky soundtrack terrain with eerie repetitive strings and ambient respite, disrupted periodically by brief bursts of granular noise. It’s one of the records most unnerving moments, possibly as it’s one of the most recognisably human.
The album navigates dense passages with recurring signifiers. Hollow percussion, modulating delay and curious field recordings come and go, maintaining a perpetual state of flux where nothing stays the same for long. The drowned world theatricals return on the swamp-like ‘Lizard in Fear’ whilst string rhythms creep in on the penultimate track to incite momentary electroacoustic harmony. Floating synthesis slowly washes over and the title track unfolds - five minutes of reverb-laced portamento, visions of decay and Editions EG influenced world-building. Movement is key.

Holly’s third full-length album PROTO isn’t about A.I., but much of it was created in collaboration with her own A.I. ‘baby’, an entity called 'Spawn'.
For the album, she assembled a contemporary ensemble of vocalists, developers and an inhuman intelligence housed in a DIY souped-up gaming PC to create a record that encompasses live vocal processing and timeless folk singing, and places an emphasis on alien song craft and new forms of communion.
'PROTO' makes reference to what Holly refers to as the protocol era, where rapidly surfacing ideological battles over the future of A.I. protocols, centralised and decentralised internet protocols, and personal and political protocols compel us to ask ourselves who are we, what are we, what do we stand for, and what are we heading towards?
‘Eternal follows the 2018 release of Holly and Jlin’s collaborative song ‘Godmother (feat. Spawn)’. The skittering track, which was created by Spawn reimagining the artworks of her ‘godmother’ Jlin in a trained model of her mother’s voice with no editing or sample trickery, was praised everywhere from NPR to The Guardian to New York Times, and elsewhere.
You can hear traces of Spawn throughout the album, developed in partnership with long time collaborator Mathew Dryhurst and ensemble developer Jules LaPlace, and even eavesdrop on the live training ceremonies conducted in Berlin, in which hundreds of people were gathered to teach Spawn how to identify and reinterpret unfamiliar sounds in group call-and-response singing sessions; a contemporary update on the religious gathering Holly was raised amongst in her upbringing in East Tennessee.
“There’s a pervasive narrative of technology as dehumanizing,” says Holly. “We stand in contrast to that. It’s not like we want to run away; we’re very much running towards it, but on our terms. Choosing to work with an ensemble of humans is part of our protocol. I don’t want to live in a world in which humans are automated off stage. I want an A.I. to be raised to appreciate and interact with that beauty ”
Since her arrival in 2012, Holly has successfully mined the edges of electronic and Avant Garde pop and emerged with a dynamic and disruptive canon of her own, all while studying for her soon-to-be-completed PhD at Stanford University, researching machine learning and music. Her LP Platform closed out 2015 by gracing year-end lists from Pitchfork, The Guardian, NME, and The Wire. In the aftermath, Radiohead hand-picked her to open up their European tour.
Just as Platform forewarned of the manipulative personal and political impacts of prying social media platforms long before popular acceptance, PROTO is a euphoric and principled statement setting the shape of things to come.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Kelsey Lu left home at 18 to study cello. Now based in New York, she has collaborated with, and contributed to albums from, many of her peers including Blood Orange, Kelela, Wet and Organized Noize.
The EP’s title comes from its unique recording process—Kelsey Lu recorded live in a single take at the Holy Family Roman Catholic Church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn with her cello, her voice and her loop pedal.

Keiji Haino is a Japanese musician and singer-songwriter whose work has included rock, free improvisation, noise music, percussion, psychedelic music, minimalism and drone music. He has been active since the 1970s and continues to record regularly and in new styles.