I'm not sure I know of a more elegant way to describe the 3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins EP other than that it sucks, but Eddie 'Flashin' Foulkes' Black Technosoul restored a little bit of my faith in Tresor - it's also the rare album I review here that gets better towards the middle and end - the tracks with repetitive vocal samples get a little tedious unless the sample is rendered unintelligible and then it's ~magickal~

Salil Chowdhury's Do Bigha Zamin isn't quite ~magickal~, but the title music sure is; the flaw is that, at five tracks, it just feels insubstantial, but what's there is good.

Once more, Merzbow's Tauromachine starts off amazing, but it gets tiring pretty soon after, with some of synth noises towards the end of "Soft Water Rhinoceros" reminding me of the sounds that that one Command & Conquer game would make every time one of those weird rolling blobs would get near yr tiberium, or whatever.

in the woods - HEart of the ages - the best way I can describe that it's sort of a "hey you got your space ambient in my symphonic prog!" deal and then a "hey you got your wimpy melodic black metal in our space prog!" and then, finally, "hey you got your moderately respectable actual black metal in our synthprogmetal gunk!" and nobody wants to eat it after that. the first track I can see myself being absolutely enraptured by if my aesthetics were recalibrated slight. there's a lot of whispering and talking here, as much as there is screaming. the actual black metal bits remind me a touch of Sacramentum's Far Away from the Sun but not nearly enough to me, y'know, good.

I think I'm going to give a new name to an old trend: the Concert by the Sea effect - when an artist has an amazingly consistent discography and tons of great albums yet their most famous record (often by far) sucks. It's the opposite of the Trout Mask Replica effect. It's named after the Erroll Garner album because I fucking love everything I've heard from Erroll Garner (Afternoon of an Elf, Errol Garner, Body & Soul and now Contrasts, though that one a smidgen less) except his unquestionably most famous, Concert by the Sea. Funny how that goes.

The Kin-Bantou album highlights the perils of getting all of any genre from randomly selected downloads from blogs that mostly post albums bought, again, almost randomly from various part of the world, even if the genre is as rich as vintage filmi or 70s Congolese music: I'm not going to say that there's much true chaff, and this album is good, but the wheat often varies in quality and sometimes you just keep getting albums that are merely "pretty dang good" when you're really itching for something orgasmic. Oh well.

I wonder why Pakeezah is so famous on RYM, at least compared to so many other filmi works of similar vintage and quality - it's quite good, indeed, but I always get curious when a Bollywood soundtrack has more than, like, four ratings. And there's a Parween Sultana song! My copy is obviously a shitty vinyl rip, but that adds to the charm as much as it distracts: it's still definitely, uh, interesting to hear a blown-out Lata Mangeshkar, lulz.
 
Chapter 157: Blue 22 is a fairly average screwtape on the whole, with some major highlights: Z-Ro's hypnotic "Freestyle," Screw turning "Hard Knock Life" into a surreal meditation on "take the bass out" and especially the 15-minute pulsating, luminous electro monolith that is his take on Whodini's "Friends."   

S. D. Burman's Devdas is so good that a.) I listened to the two-track version with clips from the film thrown in and didn't even wince at the Hindi dialogue and b.) I listened to the whole thing again, sans dialogue, broken into tracks!