Guest EO columnist Richard Allen introduces his electronic picks for early 2015: brand new albums by Canned Fit, Deison & Mingle, Marreck, Muted, Rone and Sonae, plus the year’s first great video, from Jilk and Haiku Salut.  

As hundreds of submissions have poured in over the past few weeks, the staff of A Closer Listen has been drowned in sound.  But with only nine staffers, we’ve had no way to cover them all.  This leads to our first guest column, as Richard Allen rises to the challenge laid down by Jeremy Bye.  (Thanks for the privilege!)

2014 was a pretty good year for electronic music, but 2015 looks to be a great one.  These electronic releases stand out in an extremely crowded field.

Cologne’s Sonae has been recording since 2007, but Far away is right around the Corner (Monika Enterprise, 23 February) is her first full-length.  It’s an…

Once one gets past the name of the duo, a moniker that defies spell checking, one is freed to enjoy the music: in this case, a haunted house tape based on a detective’s personal journals.  Coffin bells ring, specters glide through the house, and around every sonic corner lies a trap or at the very least, a clue.  Can the mystery be solved?  Can the detective be saved?  Was there ever a detective in the first place, or is this all part of an elaborate scheme to lure new victims inside?

One thing is clear: April Larson and Matt Bower are having great fun with this production.  With the “new” popularity of podcasts and the near-complete failure of recent horror movies to unsettle (“Woman in Black 2”, we’re talking to you), it may be time to visit the sonic world for chills and thrills.  Try reading Poe to this; the…

Editor’s Note: Welcome to Sounding Out!‘s annual February forum! This month, we’re wondering: what ideas regarding gender and sound do voices call forth? To think through this question, we’ve recruited several great writers who will be covering different aspects of gender and sound. Regular writer Regina Bradley will look at how music is gendered in Shonda Rhimes’ hit show Scandal.A.O. Roberts will discuss synthesized voices and gender. Art Blake will share with us his reflections on how his experience shifting his voice from feminine to masculine as a transgender man intersects with his work on John Cage. Robin James will return to SO! with an analysis of how ideas of what women should sound like have roots in Greek philosophy. Me? I’ll share a personal essay/analysis of what it means to be called a “loud woman.”

Today we start our February forum on gender and sound with Christine…

I am currently putting some sort of order into a large number of audio files connected with a documentary project I am working on, so I thought it might be interesting to share a few of my own work tips on this particular process.  Whether you are working towards a written piece or an audio programme, I hope these will come in handy.

So what is logging? This consists of transcribing a recorded audio interview (in my case writing it into a Word doc).  Although this might strike most people as tedious or even superfluous, it is in fact a fundamental step in the process as it will provide you with a ‘blueprint’ that will help shape the editing process (and by extension the finished project) – as well as being a lifesaver at a later stage when rooting through any material you have archived.  Another essential area this is going to come in handy for, is working…