News

Too Far Out: 10 Albums The Wire Magazine Can't Listen To

1:51 p.m. · December 10, 2008 · by Patrick Burns

It seems that some albums are too avant garde even for the esoterica-obsessed writers at The Wire Magazine. A post on the magazine's Mire blog lists 10 records which caused "Office Dissonance"--that is, music so inaccessible or extreme that it had to be taken out of the stereo at the magazine's headquarters. While some are too ambient ("best tuned into late at night, in the dark"), others are too busy ("it seems to warp the fabric of time, and it refuses to slip away politely into the background"). In the case of Liedgut, an album by Atom on the Raster-Norton label, the music resembles a mobile phone ringtone, which makes it "impossible to work without subconsciously wondering if an important call is about to arrive." [The Daily Swarm]