A couple of years ago, in my annual ‘Free music’ series i explored the work of US electronica artist Rob Lioy, better known as Access to Arasaka. At the time, one of the drawbacks to accessing his work was that it was mostly only available in low resolution lossy files …
Access to Arasaka
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Due to the ongoing battle against COVID-19, many of us throughout the world are currently experiencing various states of lockdown and isolation. That’s not a situation that looks like it’s going to change significantly for the foreseeable future, so today i’m beginning a new weekly series of mixtapes on 5:4 …
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NB. At the time when this article was published the Access to Arasaka back catalogue was only available in low-resolution lossy files; this situation has now changed – click here for an update. [June 2021] Apologies for the silence on 5:4 for the last couple of weeks, but i’ve been …
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The new 5:4 mixtape is a celebration of the art of the remix. However, i should stress immediately that the emphasis here is not simply on that word’s implied legacy of beats and dance-based forms of music. The scope for this particular mixtape is altogether more broad and open-minded, exploring …
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So, having listened to no fewer than 261 EPs and albums released this year, it’s time to distil that listening into the annual Best of the Year lists. As always, we’ll start with the ten most exceptional EPs.
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It’s 1 July, so here’s the new mixtape, focusing on the intense genre of drone. Drone music suffers the same kind of malaise as more generalised ambient music—immobility and drift as tacet apologias for a dearth of imagination and subtlety of ideas. But these 21 tracks offer an insight into …
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It’s time for a new mixtape, and once again it reflects my current predilections and listening habits. Film noir, and particularly its musical analogues, are much on my mind at present, so the new mixtape reflects that, drawing on 23 examples of muted monochrome. The similarities between these pieces are …
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A very HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all! 5:4 is four years old today, and as in previous years, here’s a new mixtape showcasing the music from my best albums of 2011. One track from each of them—in total, 3½ hours of eclectica to start the new year in real …
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* Please note this list has how been superseded by the one on the Best Albums of the Years page * “A list gives us the surface of something, and that leads to another list, which contains more surface, and from there, more lists, and more surface. The lists make …