Virgin After 2019’s monumental In Search Of Hades boxed set covering Tangerine Dream’s ’70s output, it’s fantastic that Virgin decided to finish the story by releasing the bands ’80s records on the label. This period is sometimes seen as a regroup and reform period for the band. During the 1970s, their popularity had grown so much that they could put on large stage shows using lasers (actually the […]
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Thrill Jockey Conceptual pranksters Matmos invited ninety-nine musical souls to do what thou wilt, with the blank canvas of the cover of the resulting The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises In Group Form an inkling of the freedom involved. Complete freedom? Well, not quite – the Matmos boys introduces a tiny condition in there to spice things up — any rhythmic rumpus created needed to bend to a 99 […]
Ankst In my head, Datblygu are putting out records at a rate of knots, but it’s been five years since Porwr Trallod, so what do I know. Time gets slower over forty-odd years, maybe. For the uninitiated, Datblygu are something of a legend in Welsh-language music, and not enough of a legend in British music. By a lot of estimations they’re something like the originators of singing in […]
Thrill Jockey There is always an air of mystery surrounding the releases of Marc Richter‘s Black To Comm, and his latest album opens with the most disorientating stumble through memoirs and memories, faded and distressed. His ability to lead the listener gently around the ravages of a stricken mind is never greater than on Ooctye Oil and Stolen Androgens.
One Little Independent Henrik Lindstand‘s latest album centres entirely around the sweet tonality of his piano playing. There is a remoteness and a kind of solitude on Nordhem that is reflected in the kind of videos he chooses to release for each piece.
Warp I get this as a single stream, which might be protective or perhaps artistically purposeful. If this is intended as a single stream assault on the history of Oneohtrix Point Never, then it’s a jagged, mischievous stream, characterised by one-stop assaults, Windows loading sounds, disrupted sweeps and strings.
On-U Sound / Evergreen Recordings Denise Sherwood, daughter on On-U hero Adrian, has been simmering the tracks that appear on her debut album for the last seventeen years. Unsurprisingly, considering her pedigree and the family history, there are appearances here from the likes of Mark Stewart, members of Tackhead, as well as Filip Tavares; but thankfully, it never takes on the kind of overwhelming power of Tackhead. Instead, […]
Broken Folk For the follow up to their well regarded debut album, This Is Broken Folk, Lunatraktors have looked far and near for a set of traditional songs to bolster this EP, a little taster for the second album due for release in 2021. The first thing that you really notice on playing the EP is the extraordinary voice of Clair le Couteur.
We Are Busy Bodies Library Voices member and sound artist Michael Scott Dawson has turned an unexpected bout of vertigo into the impetus for this series of stunningly minimalist vignettes that use generative synth tones to form slow moving cascades of ambient sound.
KrysaliSound Paweł Pruski is a Polish ambient artist interested in the search for what lies between words, between moments and how to capture those elusive spaces in some sort of sound form. Over thirty-five minutes and six pieces on Between, various atmospheres are evoked, but each one feels as though the basis is a long, flat landscape, with hazy blue skies and the roll of purplish clouds far […]
Sulatron Freak Valley is always one of those festivals that I’ve wanted to attend, but have never had the opportunity to do so. If I had gone, I would have most certainly chosen one of the two years that Electric Moon played there as I would be guaranteed one trip out into the cosmos. Here we have their live set from the 2019 festival, and what an awe-inspiring […]
Discus Martin Pyne spends a lot of his time preparing music for use in a dance studio environment, so during this recent period where everybody is shut up in their own little universes, he has found his mind wandering. Images of a lonely musician adrift in an empty theatre bereft of performers abound in this latest collection of lovely stripped back pieces that utilise percussion and vibes, with […]
Faustus As on Daona‘s startling debut album The Secret Assembly, this duo love to weird you out, inject you with a swaying unease and mess with your expectations. The vaporous vampires and ghostly cinematics that glue up the action on Nightside Of Eden are like midnight’s children creeping the architecture a glint in their eyes that’s nothing to do with the moon.
Fire For some extraordinary reason, it has taken thirty years for Dons Savage to follow up the seminal early work of Dead Famous People with a full length album. Fire Records tracked her down and put her in the studio where it seems the years just dropped away. Her knack for perfect melody and succinct pop bite is now aligned with the sort of precise production and baroque […]
Sub Rosa I absolutely love this type of thing. I’ve had a real appetite for everything electroacoustic ever since hearing Karlheinz Stockhausen at a formative age, and diving straight in to Agitations, the first track is a satisfying monster. “Abscission One” is an immersive aperture your mind falls right into, a mirage ride of mutating drone whose chaffing frictions visually burn, elliptically bend in a figure of eight […]
Lightning Archive Michael J Sheehy‘s first solo album in ten years is one of spectral, slow beauty; the creeping, acoustic melancholy hiding a new found zest for life that seems to put much distance between it and the more desperate and depraved output of Dream City Film Club and to a lesser extent Miraculous Mule. Here, buoyed by the recent birth of a child and the opportunity for […]
Sub Rosa The group responsible for last year’s (rather excellent) Noise Of Art CD continue their no melody, no rhythm, no harmony ethos with this release that documents the carrion buzz of thirteen alternating radio sets, vintage ones dating from between 1935 and 1961.
Marionette I listened to this this morning and the rabbits came. Bear with me. I was listening on headphones, which seems the most appropriate way to access this and the rabbits started to emerge from the hedgerows as I walked through the field to work. They couldn’t hear, unless they were the psychic rabbits we’ve heard so much about in these parts, but they understood their role in […]