Relaxing trip hop flirting with IDM. Limited cassette version (still) available (?).
Kreislauf is boutique electronica netlabel specialising in cold and steely sounds, similar to its older cousin Kahvi Records. Check out release Kreislauf Extrea 020 to check whether you can still grab the physical tape edition, in case you like the sound, or crave a print of this gorgeous cover art, or want to listen to all 12 tracks with real tape wobble artefacts. But back to the music:
Continue reading “Niteffect [2019] – The Wage Of Forgetting”
The Silent Ballet is a past review blog and compilation project. Since 2012, activity has ceased and its founder has since moved on to write for Fragile ǀǀ ¿Extinct?, which now posts occasional reviews and an annual list of 100 tracks/50 albums (very worth checking out).
This entry in the compilation series (16 in total) marks the point when its scope widened from a pure post-rock to a more general experimental musical direction. As with all Ballets, production quality is high to stellar.
Continue reading “Various Artists – [2007] The Silent Ballet, Volume III: Unfolding a Broken Heart”Vintage electronica goodness. Early good stuff from Kahvi.
It’s just a single track, but one of Kahvi’s finest classic releases very back in time…
… see, this release is so old, it was released under version 1 of Creative Commons’ Attribution (CC BY 1.0), long before version 2 were to be launched in 2004.
Why am I not talking about this release? Because you will listen to it in full (only 4:25) now:
Continue reading “Kenny Beltrey – [2000] Hydrate”Exceptionally virtuous psychadelic jazz rock frenzy. Like Mr. Bungle’s slightly more experimental cousin.
Wow, what a ride this is. At times, I scratch my head wondering “what the heck did they want with this?”. But mostly, virtuosic saxophone, galloping guitar, furious drums make you want their 13 minute long track to last even longer. Similar to progressive or post rock, all tracks start slow, to then slowly ramp up to a loud finale. If you can forgive occasional weirdness, please follow me to exhibit no. 1:
Continue reading “dUASsEMIcOLCHEIAS iNVERTIDAS – [2011] SADITREVNi SAIEHCLOcIMEsSAUd”Simple and effective melodic trance. Digital Diamonds keeps up to its promise.
Long rides, dark evenings behind the keyboard long for meditative, long form music. Netlabel Digital Diamonds specialises in this type of electronic music. This is their 64th release (but not my first review). With only 3 tracks, but over 20 minutes playtime this gives you plenty of time (and me the joy of presenting you two thirds of it all below):
Continue reading “Osiris4 – [2019] Black Diamonds EP”Soothing ambient glitch hop. Skilfully crafted sound textures that excite your ears and calm your mind.
Welcome back to the present (releases of 2019, that is)! This week’s review does not come from my well-fed queue, but instead has been freshly caught. Artist Aevio mixes organic field recordings and synthetic music. The result is not strictly ambient, but calm enough for casual listening.
Continue reading “Aevio – [2019] Bioluminescence”Extremely experimental theatre / sound art / pop music album by a Dutch theatre outfit.
I spun the time wheel heavily for this review, looking how far back the netlabel era would carry me. 1996 is the first year for which noticed output on the Internet Archive, my fishing grounds. Look what colourful specimen I caught us here! It features everything from synth rock over quirky, genre-defying instrumentals to pure spoken word tracks. Probably not your usual musical diet.
Continue reading “Banabila, Grem, Cramer – [1996] Lieber Gorilla : Visionen”Exceptional chiptune compilation for Platine Festival in Cologne. Great contributions from well-known artists.
If you want to saviour a varied selection of different classic 8-bit as well as modern interpretations of the genre, look no further. From classic pure console sounds to blends of chip and studio music you can feel served. I can fully recommend each of the 10 tracks, yet will only showcase you the habitual two here:
Continue reading “Various Artists – [2011] BACKUP11”
This is an update to my 2015 post on horizontally aligning text in beamer columns with surrounding text. In this article, I am going to add the request to also justify alignment of all text. At the same time, I am simplifying the solution from last time:
Continue reading “How to align and justify text in beamer columns with surrounding text”
When I want to save the current state of a pandas DataFrame for “manual consumption”, I often write df.to_excel('foo.xlsx') within my IPython session or Jupyter Notebook. However, the default style does not look pretty and often needs manual adjustments (e.g. column widths) to be usable.
If you want to create custom reports from pandas, you therefore might want to to this styling programmatically. Package openpyxl does this job nicely. Here is a motivational example that shows you the basic ways of its API. First, have some random data:
Continue reading “How to create a nicely formatted Excel table from a pandas DataFrame using openpyxl”