OTHER MUSIC GOES DIGITAL!
In late-February, Other Music will step into the Digital Age with the launch of our new download store! We'll be sending out more details via email; you can sign up to this list by going to digital.othermusic.com. There's also a short interview about the new site in this week's Wired.com. Interested labels, distributors and bands should contact labels@othermusic.com.

On Friend Opportunity, the band’s first release since the amicable departure of bassist Chris Cohen, all the aforementioned are true, well, except maybe for the last thing, but I haven’t seen them play these songs yet. As with each of their past several records, the initial listen is a bit confounding -- What is going on here? Do I like this? Is this really necessary? After a few listens answers to these and other questions come easily -- an outstanding rock record is going on here, that I do like, and yes, it is really necessary. The angular rhythms that fans have come to love, as well as the child-like vocals of Satomi Matsuzaki are in full effect right off the bat on the title track “The Perfect Me,” but the record quickly reveals fresh approaches to the pop song: the Latin-tinged / low rider sounds of “Believe E.S.P.” and the minimal funk-soul beats of “Choco Fight.” In the current climate of mountains of cookie-cutter bands and musical trends, Deerhoof stands out, creating challenging music (e.g. the nearly 12-minute “Look Away”) for challenging times, all the while with a sense of humor and respect for the listener. Some of it is downright gorgeous too (e.g. twisted Bernstein meets Bill Evans piano balladry of “Whither the Invisible Birds”). What more could you ask for? [KC]

Well, that’s not the case here. We Have Won, from True Primes (which incidentally features OM staffer Che Chen), is one of those special records that mixes elements that you wanna hear together: Think the shambolic living room mess of Shadow Ring (but dynamic and not funny or monologue-ish) meets Majick Markers (gentler and not as go-for-it, but definitely getting there more consistently), occasionally backed by the communal/unison vibe from some close friend of La Monte Young or Tony Conrad. Slow-crashing instruments and relentless caveman drums share airspace with united vocals and ascending noise. I couldn't keep from liking this better than Charalambides (admittedly, I’m not the biggest Charalambides fan… to each, their own); it had that gentle, female-led vocal thing, but offset by a focused sense of intermittent chaos. Things suddenly and inevitably get wild --my kinda s**t. The balance of force and letting things happen is cool. Like Jandek, it's deceptively loose and open, everything happening, and not happening, being completely intentional. But unlike how most things which share similar qualities with Jandek tend to be, True Primes is good. Didja like Kousukuya’s early live record? I did too. This shares that extreme DIY/art-ness but not as aggressive/relentless. Remember what I said about the varied gentleness/chaos? This is pleasingly liberating music peppered with small doses of transcendence. [SM]

If you're a fan, you're probably already planning on getting this. If you're new to the world of microhouse and want to discover some of the roots from where heavies like Villalobos, Akufen, and most of the Perlon stable have blasted off, look no further. Unequivocally essential listening. [IQ]

Well, Bombay Connection Records in Netherlands (?!?) has kicked off a 6-CD series of absolutely KILLER Indian Film Music with these first two volumes, and I must say - these are without a doubt the NICEST and most well-packaged collections of this music that I've ever seen... and that's including official CD reissues of some of these films' soundtracks! There are a few familiar faves here (yes, "Jaan Pechaan Ho" is here yet again, but in its unedited form for a change), but plenty of obscurities are offered up, with some of the best transfer and mastering work I've heard on this music. Top it off with packaging that features gorgeous glossy digipacks popping with technicolor photos of shots from the films, along with -- get this -- plot synopses, Hindi lyrics AND English translations, and production info.

The discs are all themed. Volume One is entitled The Bombay Connection: Funk from Bollywood Action Thrillers 1977-1984, with the emphasis on a harder, funk-edged sound of the Shaft/Bond/Columbo (I'm kidding) variety -- in other words, something off of this is going to be in a hip-hop/R&B track in a few months. Volume Two, meanwhile, is called Bombshell Baby of Bombay: Bouncin’ Nightclub Grooves 1959-1972 and features the requisite epileptic sexified dance sequence songs that were thrown into many a rather prudish production back in the day. My girlfriend tried to play her new PS2 Dance Factory game with Volume 2 of this series in the Playstation (it generates moves from songs in your own CD collection -- brilliant concept), and she nearly gave herself a coronary when she finished dancing to the steps that it programmed for her. If I (or anyone else for that matter) go to a party at your house and I'm dancing to this stuff, you're gonna get kissed -- on the mouth. Consider yourself warned. [IQ]

Thing is, maybe that move to Norway was the best thing that could’ve happened to Of Montreal. It’s Barnes’ hell and he’s gonna dance if he wants to. Creatively, commercially, whatever, the dude can’t lose. And though, I hate superlatives, everybody wants to dance away the pain, even better if you can dance away the pain to a song that goes on for 12 rousing beat-addled minutes (”The Past Is A Grotesque Animal”). Like “The Past..,” much of Fauna sounds absolutely huge -- even “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse,” lives up to its unwieldy title. I surely miss the classicist pop of the Of Montreal of yore, but Fauna has managed to leave my not-so-impressionable 26-year-old mind, once again in that bewildered pre-calculus knot. Some things never change. [HG]

Excepter offer up a stellar slab of live space jams for its side. Recorded in New York and Montreal, “KKKKK” opens with a kaleidoscope of superimposed rhythms, indecipherable secret language, and futuristic paranoia before going totally white somewhere in the middle of the record and dropping you off in another dimension altogether. One of the better come down records out there, and further evidence that these guys are onto something. [CC]

On The Shins’ long-awaited third album, Wincing the Night Away, Mercer has never sounded more liberal, playing with the space within his songs. For a group that previously seemed so easy to pin down, utterly identifiable all as there own with little of their alleged influences ever bleeding through the din of cryptic boyish alliteration and reverb-soaked clean-channel guitar lines, Wincing is the sound of a band trying to reinvent themselves in a myriad of ways, as quickly and as carefree as possible. Most of the time, it works; and yet, even when it doesn’t, the Shins have never sounded more exuberant. “Sleeping Lessons” kicks off the set with a mercurial aquarium keyboard line, that goes for about two-minutes until the band explodes into a chugging (dare I say “Arcade Fire-esque”) power-chord shake-down; the next song, “Australia,” kicks off with Animal Collective yelps only to transform into a full-on Marr and Morrissey minor-chord mope-pop rocker. The first single, “Phantom Limb,” is pure Jesus and Mary Chain from the very first fuzzy keyboard note. And sure, “Girl Sailor” and the trademark drum-less bucolic closer “A Comet Appears” are pure Shins-territory. Pastiche after pastiche, references abound only to be discarded, songs careen off in every direction possible, and somehow this experimentation managed to not compromise the accessibility of Mercer’s jams in the least. Three for three. [HG]

Having cut their moniker in half to sidestep a lawsuit from the original Glimmer Twins (a/k/a Mick and Keith), the Belgium production/DJ team drop the latest mix for the Fabriclive series. Foregoing some of the funk in their excellent DJ Kicks installment for more of an eclectic assortment of songs, the selection isn’t always seamlessly blended, and it is all the better for it. The Glimmers kick off the 21-song set with their own Roxy Music remix, transforming Brian Ferry and Co.’s “Same Old Scene” into a sparkling, disco-house thumper. (It’s an amazing reworking!) They keep us in the early-‘80s for a few more tracks with “Wet Job,” from post-punkers Fingerprintz, and the League Unlimited Orchestra’s (a/k/a Human League) instrumental mix of “Things That Dreams Are Made of,” but the Glimmers don’t focus on one decade or style for too long. Unexpectedly, Prins Thomas Vs. Blackbelt Andersen (“En Real T Jukkas”) paves the way -- via a short detour through the throbbing techno of Holy Ghost’s “The Word” -- for Scottish rockers Sons and Daughters (a JD Twitch/Optimo remix of “Dance Me In”), and after that, the mix gets even more unexpected. An Italo-styled version of Freddie Mercury’s “Love Kills” (More Oder Rework), a dub of Freeez’s “I.O.U” (remember the breakdance movie Beat Street?), LCD Soundsystem’s “Disco Infiltrator” and George Kranz’s electro classic “Din Daa Daa” leads us to some deep reggae vibes, a la Black Slate’s “Sticks Man” and, soon to come, the breakneck ragga of Howie B’s “My Speedboat Is Faster Than Yours” into Pierre Henry’s “Messe Pour Le Temps: Too Fortiche”!?! Told you it was diverse and fun…and, believe it not, it flows. I hope the Misshapes are listening and taking notes. [GH]

Aside from being about as far out and tweaked a collection of sounds imaginable, these recordings are also exciting because they capture that period of paradigm- shifting experimentation that came with the realization that the studio was not just a means of recording sounds, but generating them as well. The ingenuity of the composers featured in this series -- Joji Yuasa, Makoto Moroi, and Toshi Ichiyanagi -- is especially impressive when one considers that they were using equipment that wasn’t really intended to do what they were doing (these were “tape recorders,” remember). The sounds that make up these compositions are of every imaginable type -- voices, field recordings, instruments, “non-musical,” and electronically generated sounds -- and have been manipulated in every imaginable way, often beyond recognition, and one can hear the strong influences of both the European avant-garde and Japanese classical art forms. The austere, emotional minimalism of Noh theater, in particularly, seems to have been a deep resource for these composers, but one that they clearly felt at liberty to combine with twelve-tone theory or the contemporaneous ideas of someo