Billow Observatory : III: Chroma/Contour

It’s always a wondrous thing to step into a Billow Observatory record. The electronic duo of Jonas Munk(Causa Sui) and Jason Kolb(Auburn Lull) don’t make your typical ambient electronic. Theirs is more this crystalline sound that feels like stepping into uncharted territory, or stumbling into the fortress of solitude. They build immaculate walls of drone, […]

Hunter Complex : Open Sea

Lars Meijer’s Hunter Complex is a one man music project that locks into a very specific time in synth-based electronic music. He centers on the late 70s and early 80s, a time where heavy hitters like Froese, Roedelius, and Hammer were taking their heady electronic trips and honing them into tighter, more pop-based sounds. In-particular, […]

Burning Tapes : Black Lake Soundtrack

Album art by Denis Cardan Black Lake is the name of an upcoming horror film by filmmaker K/XI. The film is written, directed, and stars K as protagonist Aarya. The synopsis goes like this: Aarya, a young woman, looking for inspiration and to pursue her passion for Expressionist painting, leaves her family in the city to house-sit, in […]

Thomas Ragsdale : The Pentagram

Thomas Ragsdale seems to be in a constant state of movement. He’s not one to drop an album and savor that feeling of satisfaction and accomplisment, as for an artist like Ragsdale that taste turns bitter if he’s not onto the next thing right away. In 2018 alone Ragsdale dropped four releases; two EPs and […]

El Paraiso Records Readies Reissue of ‘Chicago Odense Ensemble’

With a new year comes a new you…and new records. But January is what I call the slow season. Winter hits, things come to a bit of a crawl on the new release front. You’re still a bit woozy from everything that came the year before(and all those year-end lists that crazy people obsessively write.) […]

Jeff Tweedy : WARM

Jeff Tweedy comes across as the sage dude quietly sitting at a table in some nondescript cafe, reading a tattered copy of George Saunders’ CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and drinking a vitamin water. Baggy jacket, frumpy hat covering a head of wild hair, and a beard you want to tell him to please shave. Even […]

Writing and Mood Swings

For the most part I keep the writing on Complex Distractions focused on those things in art and commerce that move me. Records, books, films, art, and all those other things that fall under the category of “waste of time” in most public school systems anymore. That’s the stuff that drove me to start writing […]

Ffion : Odyssey

There’s a precise electronic pulse that runs throughout the whole of Ffion’s debut EP Odyssey. The music feels vintage, as if you pulled it from some analog time capsule buried among other ruins from 1972. The music created on Odyssey was brought to life using an ARP Odyssey analog keyboard, hence the name and the […]

Alone In The Woods

My first exposure to electronic duo Alone In The Woods was their excellent track “I Never Came Up For Air” off of Burning Witches Records’ RSD 2018 compilation Communion. From that track I knew there was something quite remarkable at play. The band, which consists of Jon Dobyns and Lon Bologna, are production wizards. They […]

Kanaan : Windborne

There’s a certain kind of band that just seems to be connected on the molecular level. A band so in tune with the vibes that their jams are like on a telepathic plane. Without talking they shift tempos or keys without a second thought, knowing that’s what the other is thinking. One such band is […]