Dan Snaith, a.k.a. Caribou a.k.a. Manitoba a.k.a. “The Professah,” seems to follow a chronologically retroactive pattern. His earliest work reflected IDM and glitch standards prolific in the ’90s. Then his breakthrough full-length, Up in Flames, evoked silky ’80s dream pop and shoegaze. 2005’s The Milk of Human Kindness took cues from the heyday of krautrock. This eventually propelled Snaith squarely in the baroque pop part of the space-time continuum circa 1966 in the form of Andorra, an album that all but references The Left Banke by name. So what of Swim? Will Caribou continue his time traveling trajectory, make good on the album title, and release his surf rock / doo wop / Skiffle album? Not quite. Caribou hinted with the somewhat disappointing “Odessa” a possible move toward more dance-oriented material. For the most part, this is true. However, the result is much more interesting than “Odessa” suggested.

Snaith makes it clear this time around that he’s going balls to the wall, trying on a variety of new hats. “Jamelia” juggles dub beats, Colin Bluntstone-channeled vocals, orchestral arrangements, and non-linear songwriting in one of Caribou’s most driving efforts. “Bowls” is an exploration of the more minimal and ambient works under the Manitoba moniker, replete with David Fridmann ethereal harp accents, Aphex Twin-informed minimal techno, and glitch flourishes.  ”Hannibal” acts as a compromise betwixt the splattered rhythms, bubbling low end, and horn explosions of Scratch Perry and the fluid, galactic vibe of Boards of Canada circa Twoism. “Kaili” shows Caribou experimenting with acid house samples over pop vocals and Love-inspired psychedelic orchestration. The idea has more value than the actual product, but the bold jump should be applauded nonetheless. Despite some pitfalls, Swim showcases some real moments of brilliance and clarity, best demonstrated on the psilocybin-saturated “Sun” – an angelic, blissed out motorik club banger augmented with hauntological synths and the self-evident mantra of “sun.”

Though not as strong as his mid-decade releases, Swim is a surprising follow-up that, while not groundbreaking, is thoroughly enjoyable and a great juxtaposition of electronic and psych genres spanning every decade Snaith has covered in his impressive repertoire. Moreover, Swim set a new paradigm for Caribou by breaking his old pattern, which may be one of the album’s biggest triumphs.

Swim drops courtesy of Merge on April 20 (hurhur, 420 lol), which should be available for pre-order soon. And lest ye forget, Caribou swings through Louisville with Toro y Moi on June 8th at the Zanzabar.

MP3 :::
Caribou – Sun

Over the past few months I’ve listened to a ton of poorly recorded drone music, so it’s pretty refreshing to hear a beautifully mixed ambient album like loscil’s Endless Falls. loscil, a.k.a. Scott Morgan, is from Vancouver, and this is his fifth album under the loscil name (he also drums in Destroyer). Beginning and ending with the sound of rain, Endless Falls is a dour, contemplative album that uses the tools of dub techno (phasers, heavy echo, flangers) and instruments like viola, piano, and harp (?) to create poignant soundscapes that are both tense and becalming. Like fellow Canadian Tim Hecker, Morgan is a master at creating instrumental music with hidden depths; songs that seemed pleasant on the first listen later sound on edge, and vice versa.

According to the album’s press release, many of the songs are built around samples of rain recorded in Morgan’s backyard. This is most apparent on songs like “Showers of Ink” and “Shallow Water Blackout,” which capture the way in which the rhythm of the rain can be both eerie and comforting. “Lake Orchard,” which I’m including for streaming, has a deep low end that pulses beneath shimmering loops and strings–it’s an amazing track.

Endless Falls will be available March 1 on Kranky.

timelapse1 from loscil on Vimeo.

MP3 :::
loscil – Lake Orchard

By naming himself Run DMT and giving his albums and mixes names like Bong Voyage and Get Ripped or Die Trying, Baltimore’s Mike Collins has done a wonderful job of branding himself. Minute long fragments of sped up African guitar solos, hazy, ghostly Hawaiian luau music, overdriven tropical psych, and mournful drone music cohere together because it’s easy to imagine that this is the soundtrack to the world of a pop-culture addicted, sarcastic-about-some-things-painfully-earnest-about-others, polyglot stoner.

The music of Run DMT (and that of similar sound collagist Dem Hunger) mirrors the kind of ecstatic rush you can get just following YouTube and Mediafire links, jumping from a clip of a Sierra Leone television show to a DJ Premier instrumental to Gary Busey as “the game warden” in a matter of minutes, extracting the “oh sweet!” moments from them and moving on. Because most Run DMT songs are beat-less, the movement through genres and sounds feels easygoing, creating a chill, contemplative feeling, more like looking through a photo album than moving through stations on a radio dial.

Bong Voyage and Get Ripped and Die Trying are both available for free download on Run DMT’s MySpace, and his collaborative mix with Happy Family amanda huggakiss is available on the Wigflip label site.

MP3 :::
Run DMT – Mad Weed
Run DMT – Ramona

Shiver me timbers. Reader Benjamin in Atlanta shot me a message letting me know that Broadcast has a tour EP available called Mothers of the Milky Way (as you might’ve inferred from, ya know, the title of this entry). Anyway, I did not see this EP at the Columbus show, as the band had no merch presence, so I’m a little bummed I wasn’t able to grip a physical copy there. It totally rules, as is expected. Mother is the Milky Way is, in some ways, a continuation of Witch Cults, though I’m not sure if The Focus Group was involved in its recording.

Turns out the second song they played in the show’s second half Sunday night was “In Here the World Begins” from this EP.

MP3 :::
Broadcast – In Here the World Begins

Our favorite round, beachball-sized, constantly beeping friend turns 51 today. Or would’ve turned 51 today had he not burned up a bit in the Earth’s atmosphere. I like to spend my Tuesday evenings with PBS’ science program Nova, and this week’s installment covered all that you probably didn’t know about the Sputnik program and the advent of the Space Race…

“Listen now,” said the NBC radio network announcer on the night of October 4, 1957, “for the sound that forevermore separates the old from the new.” Next came the chirping in the key of A-flat from outer space that the Associated Press called the “deep beep-beep.” Emanating from a simple transmitter aboard the Soviet Sputnik satellite, the chirp lasted three-tenths of a second, followed by a three-tenths-of-a-second pause. This was repeated over and over again until it passed out of hearing range of the United States.

The satellite was silver in color, about the size of a beach ball, and weighed a mere 184 pounds. Yet for all its simplicity, small size, and inability to do more than orbit the Earth and transmit meaningless radio blips, the impact of Sputnik on the United States and the world was enormous and unprecedented. The vast majority of people living today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, were born after Sputnik was launched and may be unaware of the degree to which it helped shape life as we know it. Now is an especially good time to take a fresh and focused look at the event whose impact looms even larger with the passing of time. In the last decade an incredible amount of once-secret material has been declassified and made public. Scholars and writers both inside and outside government have coaxed key Cold War documents out of hiding. Collectively, this material has given new dimensions and twists to almost every aspect of the events leading up to and following the launch of Sputnik.

For example, one recently released document reveals evidence of a long-forgotten pre-Sputnik “olive branch” extended by Russian scientists, who asked their American counterparts to supply a piece of scientific equipment for a planned launch. By most indications, this piece of equipment was meant for the third Sputnik.

It is not widely known even now that one of the reasons President Dwight D. Eisenhower and those around him did not react with alarm over Sputnik going into space ahead of an American satellite was that Eisenhower welcomed the launch to help establish the principle of “freedom of space” [the idea that outer space belonged to everyone, thereby allowing satellite flights over foreign countries]. At the time of the Sputnik “crisis,” the White House, Central Intelligence Agency, Air Force, and a few highly select and trustworthy defense contractors were creating a spy satellite that was so secret that only a few dozen people knew of it. Even its name, CORONA, was deemed secret for many years. Instead of being concerned with winning the first round of the space race, Eisenhower and his National Security Council were much more interested in launching surveillance satellites that could tell American intelligence where every Soviet missile was located.”
- Continue reading at Sputnik Declassified

To celebrate the beep that bummed the Western World out, here’s a space related Super Swingin’ Mix. Can YOU guess how each song relates to Sputnik? I’ll get you started – Laika was the name of the dog who accompanied Sputnik II a month after the first launch and the name of the British space pop group whose song “Almost Sleeping,” off their album Sounds of the Satellites, is found below.

MP3 :::
Laika – Almost Sleeping
Spacemen 3 – Hypnotized
Boards of Canada – Over the Horizon Radar
Raymond Scott – Twilight in Turkey
Raymond Scott – Ripples (Excerpt)
Belbury Poly – The Moonlawn
Stereolab – Golden Ball
Astral – Blinder
Space Needle – Scientific Mapp