With the end of 2011 ever so close it is time to reveal Auxiliary Magazine’s Top 20 Albums of 2011. This list isn’t ranked because it is a group of favorites from all our contributors. Please check out all the albums (minus Displacer and IAMX for now) in one convenient spot, our Spotify Top 20 Albums Playlist.
ApparatDevil’s Walk
Emotionally rich, intimate, and personal, this quiet journey reflects its Berlin and Mexican settings making the bleak sound sunny. Minimal instrumentation from a variety of instruments ground the quiet and engaging words.
CovenantModern Ruin
Covenant returned with a new member and a killer single, “Lightbringer”, to lead off a powerful album. Finding new depth to their musical style they have a new and improved level of sound that should sustain them through another decade.
Crystal StiltsIn Love with Oblivion
Dark neo-psychedelic music that sounds like Joy Division in an argument with Phil Spector.
DisplacerNight Gallery
The enjoyment of this album is its ability to entrance the listener and let their imagination go wild.
Ghost & WriterShipwrecks
Each song here is a well told story captivating the listener every time, plus the music is top notch synthpop.
God ModuleSéance
A perfect blend of creepy electro-industrial and pop elements, these songs get stuck in your head for days.
HaujobbNew World March
With the end of the world coming in 2012, we’ll be playing this album as it all goes down.
IAMXVolitile Times
This album was like a fine wine, the longer it sat around our music players the better it got. Who knows a few more years and this could be the album of the decade.
John Maus We Just Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves
Sounds like a long-lost cassette recording of an obscure, extremely lo-fi synthpop band from 1983.
Krystal SystemNuclear
This heavy electro industrial album coming from the French underground emits enough powerful energy to fuel millions of people.
M83Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
Exploring both sides of M83 with its mixture of dreamy ambient songs and powerful dream pop, the epic double album is appropriately an exploration of dreams in both their essence and emotion.
Necro FacilityWintermute
Industrial with a dose of pop worked wonders on this album. Necro Facility went from a follower to a leader with this album.
Nicolas JarrSpace is Only Noise
Experimental electronic that defies categories, each song creating its own strange living space.
ohGrunDeveloped
Nivek Ogre and Mark Walk made a highly addictive album, arguably some of the best music either have been associated with.
SelebritiesDelusions
A perfect example of how to pull influences from 70s postpunk, 80s synthpop, and new wave yet still sound current and fresh.
Skinny PuppyhanDover
Listen deep and this album comes to life. The originality and attention to details makes this puppy amazing!
Slug GutsHowlin Gang
Angst-ridden, old school, badass goth/postpunk with basement vocals a la The Birthday Party.
SONOIORed
No stranger to the music world, Alessandro Cortini’s solo project SONOIO’s latest album, Red, is an excellent modern alternative rock/electronic-industrial album.
Sons & DaughtersMirror Mirror
What if The White Stripes and The Kills had been more influenced by The Cure and Gang of 4?
Tim HeckerRavedeath 1972 Hypnotic ambient electronic that weaves noise and beauty into one seamless whole.
It sounds promising that one of the largest industrial/EBM/electro/noise music festivals in North America (held in Montreal, Canada) will be happening again for a 5th year, most likely in May the weekend of Canada’s Victoria Day holiday. Enjoy some photos from this year’s event and keep hopeful and your ears open that 2012 will be a go.
Montreal QC, May 19th to 23rd - The North American festival not to miss. Auxiliary Magazine will be at Kinetik Festival again this year! Kinetik is a five-day music festival for electro, industrial, EBM, and noise. Performing this year… Front 242, VNV Nation, Front Line Assembly, Suicide Commando, Covenant, mind.in.a.box, Funker Vogt, God Module, Die Krupps, Aesthetic Perfection, iVardensphere, and more! We’ll have a vendor/promo table so stop by, say hello, pick up some gear, check out the magazine, and buy a print copy!
After a four-year studio hiatus, EBM staple Covenant is back with their new album Modern Ruin, and this time they have brought Daniel Myer, the mastermind behind Haujobb, among many other electronic acts, along for the ride. We had the opportunity to talk about the state of this predominant EBM group with band member Joakim Montelius, and together with Myer and frontman Eskil Simonsson, it is clear that there are more new and different chapters to be written to their story.
interview by Aaron Andrews and DJ ArcaTek
Can you tell us a little about the new album Modern Ruin? Are there certain themes, ideas, or techniques that have been important to its creation?
Joakim Montelius : Like every full-length album, Modern Ruin is a collection of ideas and reactions. So there is no overall message. It’s a selection of songs that we think represent what we felt over the last four years. The title itself refers to the loss of some of the ideals that Modernism was about: the idea that we can make a difference, our ingenuity and our power of will can help us build a better world, that positive feeling and the ideological eagerness to dedicate a lot of work and energy to such a project. Somehow it got lost and grew into cynicism and confusion and our new technology, our knowledge, even our art became tools to maintain the old paranoia and selfishness that Modernism was supposed to oppose. So, to me, that’s the ‘modern ruin’.
How long was the process of making Modern Ruin? There were push back dates on this album; was it due to record company issues or was it you going back into the studio to perfect the Covenant product?
JM : There were many reasons for the long delay. We toured a lot after Skyshaper, we made a DVD of the tour, then we moved our studio twice, we were busy with personal matters, our record label went bust, we lost our founding member Clas Nachmanson and Daniel Myer took his place, Eskil got married and divorced, I got a daughter… Let’s just say that for us these last four years were anything but quiet but it made the process of recording the album slower. We worked on it on and off for the last couple of years, wrote songs and shuffled demos back and forth, but the work in earnest only started last year. It’s hard to say exactly how long it took since it was so split up and fragmented. A somewhat realistic estimate would be perhaps four to five months in total. Something like that.
The February/March 2011 issue is the fourteenth issue of Auxiliary, a magazine dedicated to alternative fashion, music, and lifestyle. This issue features interviews with Pete Crane of Shiv-r, Covenant, Alice in Videoland, and Freezepop, a designer spotlight on Hey Sailor! Hats, and Audrey Kitching in Toxic Vision as our PinUp. The issue also contains a fashion editorial featuring sensual lingerie and fashions, a beauty editorial entangled in neckwear, a Valentine’s Day inspired style feature, an article on The Edwardian Ball, and our new advice column by Arden Leigh. It features photography by Luke Copping, Brent Leideritz, Stephanie Bell, Charlie Bones, and Ama Lea to name a few, and fashion by Betsey Johnson, Purrfect Pineapples, Logan Neitzel, Betty Monroe, Veruca Cyn, Prototypist, Starkers Corsets, Ego Assassin, Mother of London, Dungaree Dolly, and much much more.
Auxiliary Magazine will be at Kinetik Festival again this year! And this time we’ll have a vendor table! This will be the third Kinetik, an electro/industrial/noise/hardcore festival in Montreal, Canada. It will be May 12th through May 16th with many performing including… Leaether Strip, 16 Volt, Chemlab, Gothsicles, Combichrist, Decoded Feedback, FGFC 820, Hocico, Nachtmahr, Memmaker, Rotersand, Melotron, Faderhead, Covenant, and more! Kinetik is one of the most notable festivals in North America, not to be missed. And be sure to stop by our table and say hi!
