Davenport-based producer K1ng Supr3m3 breaks out the crates and gathers together a network of dusty samples and fluid drum patterns for ジャンプドライブ (Japanese Katakana for “Jump Drive,” which might lead us to believe that these tracks were sourced from a particularly packed flash USB stick).

Avant-garde composer, multi-instrumentalist, and soft-music pioneer Harold Budd passed away earlier this month at the age of 84. Though considered a major forerunner of styles of music that would come to be named “ambient” and “New Age” in their various forms, Budd rejected these terms outright. From his viewpoint, his music floated in its own stratum, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20th-century minimalism or neoclassical composition.

Sometimes the world coughs up a few Christmas-themed gems for the freaks out there – the ones looking for a not-so-Silent Night among the thorns of the wreath, the ones for whom the heralding angels have no fanfares. Let’s take a look at some Christmas tunes fit for those who can’t stand the institution of Christmas music.

2020 Pop Roundup

It feels gauche to compile a year-end list of music in 2020, a year in which the daily conditions of the music industry suffered a pandemic-borne cataclysm and the future of live music was subsumed into a haze of drive-in concerts and illicit plague raves. Time dilation made sure that this year felt like five years in one, and any music released before March must, by necessity, slot into some other temporal category entirely.

Belarusian synthwave unit Molchat Doma has taken a series of interesting turns in their ascent to their current status as the reigning kings of their would-be niche strain of dour, '80s-inflected goth-pop.

The Bettendorf-based project Pulsing makes some sort of case for the continued relevance of Game Boy tones transplanted into other musical contexts – in this case, a strain of electronic weirdness that falls somewhere between dungeon synth and sludge metal.

Another month, another spellbinding long-form ambient album issued from Rock Island composer Terry Skaggs, also known under the lower-case moniker dead lizard grin.

Another champion in the annals of terrible band names, Bettendorf’s Cuck Dirt seems to be an offshoot of the noise project Voiddweller, whose recordings have recently been reviewed in the Reader. While Voiddweller seems to land closer to the overblown noise-rap chaos of groups such as Death Grips or Clipping., Cuck Dirt throws all caution to the wind and goes full unhinged, manifesting as a collage of momentary news media vocal samples, electronic drums, piercing feedback, and something like home-recorded black metal.

Landing somewhere between a chaotic burst of metal brutality and a free-for-all noise collage album, Fakeality fills its running time with incidental patches of field recordings, random snippets of dialogue, bursts of in-the-red guitar shred, and overdriven drum-machine beat-downs.

The Quad Cities' mainstay psych-rock/improv/freak goth crew Giallows dropped a live album in October that documents a show they played in July 2019 at Moline venue Factory of Fear. Despite its origin as a live recording, the band’s decision to release it as a stand-alone album seems justified in light of the relatively high production value and solid mixing job – far from a one-microphone room recording.

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