A new record store (Rough Trade) just opened in NYC, and this is exactly the sort of new record one might hope to discover in the front racks: intricate, creative, pleasing to the eye and ear.  The Coke bottle vinyl is an appealing factor: hard plastic backed by a hard plastic sleeve containing the cover art.  An additional tiny touch is a thin, clear postcard containing the track listing; one almost misses it until one removes the record from the sleeve.

Bertucci has been honing her skills for many years in multiple arenas, including photography, video and sound installation.  The latter discipline comes to mind when listening to Resonance Shapes. The sounds seem to have been assembled in vertical layers rather than in horizontal layers, providing the impression of walking through a room even when sitting still.  Sounds move into the foreground and fade into the background, untethered by…

German label raster-noton has been quietly building an empire of astute dance floor and headphone wizards; amassing producers with a progressive bent to their love of heavy techno music. Producers who are not content to hit for par or sail the known course of safety and calm waters. Producers who want to challenge the load-bearing capacity of your speakers, and your hips. So, if raster-noton is a burgeoning techno armada, growing in parallel to the early rise of Ninja Tune, then Kyoka is the Neotropic to Kangding Ray’s Amon Tobin in the raster-noton canon. But I would hesitate at making any further direct comparisons to Riz Maslin’s Ninja alter ego.

On Is (IsSuperpowered), Berlin-based and Japan-born Kyoka offers a brilliant bouquet of flavors and influences. There is the kosmische cut-up flow of Jan Jelinek wed to the heavy dance floor deconstructions of Andy Stott, but a bit more…

Editor’s Note: February may be over, but our forum is still on! Today I bring you installment #5 of Sounding Out!‘s blog forum on gender and voice. Last week Art Blake talked about how his experience shifting his voice from feminine to masculine as a transgender man intersects with his work on John Cage. Before that, Regina Bradley put the soundtrack of Scandal in conversation with race and gender. The week before I talked about what it meant to have people call me, a woman of color, “loud.” That post was preceded by Christine Ehrick‘s selections from her forthcoming book, on the gendered soundscape. We have one more left! Robin James will round out our forum with an analysis of how ideas of what women should sound like have roots in Greek philosophy.

This week Canadian artist and writer AO Roberts takes us into the arena of speech synthesis…