When Phew starts it’s a slow hypnosis of slippery sounds, her voice recoiling a merry-go-round full of twisty vapours. This bamboo beat is introduced, whipped in rhythmic rat tails and trapped moth zither. The sounds are rich, roll into each other with stretchy squishability I totally warm to.
Yearly Archives: 2025
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Linda Oláh and Giani Caserotto have been in various separate bands for the best part of twenty years, with Linda also spending time with the French Orchestre National de Jazz. Having known one another for some time, this is their first outing together as Lovers, and with Giani's multi-instrumental and production prowess, Linda's impressive vocal range and a shared love of all things musically adventurous, this is a match made in heaven, with the album being a production in thrall to love in all its guises.
Some tracks from the cassette release Riva and their first untitled vinyl release have been compiled to show how quickly the basic idea of Kreidler fell into place. Some of the assembled tracks are tiny snippets that seem to be just an idea waiting to be fleshed out, but there is nearly always a resonant groove that runs through a lot of them; a swirl of dubby drums, a deep bass rhythm and and expansive sprawl of synths.
What an adventure this is. All The Horned Animals have taken a massive bite out of the impossible task of documenting Nigel Ayers’ (the man behind Nocturnal Emissions' enduring existence) ever-evolving soundscapes.
The last night of a short UK tour for the rejuvenated Prolapse found us making our way on a miserable evening up the Gloucester Road in Bristol to The Golden Lion pub, a proper old English corner boozer with a 200-ish capacity room at the back. There was a good vibe in the place on arrival and with three bands on the bill, a sense of expectation.
Clocking in at a mere thirty-six minutes, Love Chant certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome, which means inviting it back for repeat airings is not hard to do. Although it won’t catapult Dando back to crossover celebrity status -- which is arguably a good thing -- Love Chant is a commendable regeneration for The Lemonheads, one that hopefully won’t take quite so long to spawn a sequel.
Sax man David Bixler has been playing for the best part of thirty years, be it solo or as a part of various different collaborations. For Incognito Ergo Sum, he has teamed back up with long time foils Fabio Rojas on percussion and Dan Loomis on bass to pursue a follow up to 2020’s Inside The Grief.
Laura's familiarity with the chosen tracks means that their transition from Axis pieces to solo piano affairs for disc one is absolutely seamless, retaining the initial seed, but taking it into a whole other realm which is captured beautifully by Chris Sharkey on Matthew Bourne's Bösendorfer. The intimacy and vibrancy is almost palpable; you can feel yourself in the room as the pieces are stripped down and then re-skinned, their soul retained in the new form.
1970s suburbia may be unlikely soil in which an accomplished art thief might grow, but America’s most lackadaisical auteur Kelly Reichardt pulls on her apron and prepares a bijou little garden for him anyway, using the dichotomy of his ordinary family life and the high stakes of his profession as her fertiliser. The genre beats are familiar, but she plays them with her customarily light touch and off-kilter rhythm.
Their sound is one of communion and discovery and this latest album draws together eight originals and one cover of an old Denis Badault track, and further pushes their adventures beyond the realms of jazz and into a silvery, reverb-filled dream world where rhythm and texture are amorphous things that ebb and flow with the mood.
After conducting another targeted rummage through the BBC’s archival strongrooms, Precious Recordings takes us back through some of the life and times of Glasgow’s The Primevals -- in John Peel, Andy Kershaw and Janice Long-commissioned session configurations.
Soul Song Jerusalem-based composer and bassist Yosef Gutman continues his inspired run of collaborative albums with Shir Yedidot, a collection of chabad nigunim, which are Hasidic melodies along with a selection of his own compositions, but all inspired by the idea of melodies adorned with prayer and tears. This approach tends towards the lower key, but along with the uplift and positivity and the assembled players: regular travellers […]
That all-important hypnotic unison that each attentively drives towards until the density manifests, literally just appears and things lock into a gristled repeat full of vaporising trajectories. In this case it’s almost industrial -- a buzzing solid wasping your head with its cavorting sibilance. A miraged montage, where you’re not sure who’s doing what, all reverberating in delicious tribal splashes.
Allying Hardanger fiddle and jaws harp with the kind of beats found in electro-halling, disco-gangar and springar d'n'b is still a novel idea and one with which they are trying to show a natural progression from the sixties through to the modern day. Familiar dance staples like the Roland TB-303 and TR-909 flex their elegant muscles against instruments that have been around for hundreds of years and the outcome is a real ear -opener.
Whilst arguably having missed a few opportunities, Touch is nevertheless a roundly decent latter-day Tortoise record that reassures us that the internal alchemical artistry – even if not as effervescent as it once was – retains a distinctive potency. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait for another best part of a decade to find out if there is more left in the shared sonic tank.
The two albums work well but in different ways, and for any fan of intelligent and leftfield electronica are are rather essential. They stand up well over thirty years later and Warp's re-issues are very welcome.
Building on the dictaphone rawness of Matt Loveridge’s Atworth release as MXLX comes a devotional enrichment minus the tape hiss atmospherics, eight tracks that delve deep into the hammered soul of the piano.
The encore gives some of the release the audience have been craving, a delirious bagpipe-led trance concoction, which drifts just the other side of the line between Dionysian and line-dancing. Even the band seem a little surprised, as if this had come from somewhere they hadn’t previously been prepared to go. The King Arthur is a bit like that sometimes.