This viral beauty from Orange Amps combines fake douchebaggery, goofball humor, an adorable Labrador, and Mastodon’s Troy Sanders for a video that, while offering little information about the Orange Micro Terror, is worth your three minutes.
How to Destroy Angels: An Omen EP (Columbia, 11/13/12)
Images of cell mitosis, swarming bees, and something that could be either a crosswalk or an orgy of organisms — the video for How to Destroy Angels’ “The Loop Closes” has the intensity of a visual countdown to the apocalypse, viewed through the dispassionate eye of city surveillance.
This content appears in the iPad-exclusive ALARM 39. Download it for free and subscribe to our new print edition.
Meshuggah: Koloss (Nuclear Blast, 3/27/12)
“Do Not Look Down”
The average brain of an adult human has 100 to 500 trillion synapses. Each new electric impulse, each wrinkle that develops in our minds, leads to our understanding of the world around us. How this is done is still a mystery, and our experience of music is at the forefront of this complex puzzle. Somewhere between vibrations in the air hitting our eardrums and memory, we each confront and interpret the sounds of our surroundings and perceive the phenomenon of music — that which is made of rhythm, pitch, timbre, and dynamics.
This content appears in the iPad-exclusive ALARM 39. Download it for free and subscribe to our new print edition.
Doug Stanhope: Before Turning the Gun on Himself… (Roadrunner, 3/6/12)
Few comedians are as inspired by sociologist James Loewen as by abortion jokes. But Doug Stanhope, in case you haven’t noticed, isn’t your everyday comic. Yes, most of a set might be devoted to Japanese nether regions, odorous urine, and ripping on Dr. Drew. Underneath the sophomoric exterior, however, is an educated everyman: someone as taken with the hacktivist group Anonymous as with football-jersey aesthetics.
Following the release of his second album for the Roadrunner Comedy imprint, titled Before Turning the Gun on Himself…, we caught up with Stanhope during a massive UK tour — including a stop in Wolverhampton, ranked fifth on Lonely Planet’s “Cities You Really Hate.”
Tyondai Braxton is not one to let the grass grow under his feet. The former Battles loop guru / singer has worked with Philip Glass, performed his 2009 record Central Market with orchestras worldwide, and has written commission pieces for artists including Kronos Quartet and Bang on a Can All-Stars.
Now Braxton is taking over the Guggenheim. His new piece, Hive, which is part art installation / part music performance, will have its world premiere on March 21 in New York.
As part of its Hydra Health Rehabilitation Project, Hydra Head Records has debuted an awesome, very limited T-shirt and print from artist Andrew Cox.