Zoharum The dusty kinetics of Hotel Bravo‘s opener “Hotel Paris” slope into your ear in skipping recoils, navigated by quiet words and whispered replies, periodically broken by a taut Japanese-flavoured melodic and pattering synth-washes. An ambient lamp light falls into the fragmented flux of “When The Chimes End” its stuttering percussives taking the dusty grooves of the first track to milk a purposeful sparseness that bleeds throughout this […]
reviews
3644 posts
Jazzland Rymden, the post-jazz trio of Bugge Wesseltoft, Dan Berglund and Magnus Öström has released its second foray into the outer limits, hot on the heels of 2019’s Reflections And Odysseys, and it continues in a similar vein but pushes the explorations and interesting syntheses a little further abroad. As essentially a piano, bass and percussion trio, you could be forgiven for thinking that there is a limited […]
New Heavy Sounds Abyss is the second proper album from the dark witch doom duo BlackLab from Osaka in Japan, and carries on their mission to pummel any pretenders to the doom throne to death. As a duo the sound is big and live, I would imagine it would scream into your ears from the pits of the darkest beyond. Its a sound that unnerves you as much […]
Phantom Limb These Charms May Be Sung Over A Wound is the first album that Richard Skelton has released that is not through his own label, and is a continuation of his journey towards the perfection of a certain sort of elemental soundscape. Although the titles of the pieces contained here refer to Anglo-Saxon “leechdoms” or remedies, for me they are not just bound to the earth, but […]
Big Potato (Europe) / Graveface (North America) There is a sense of joy to the cheesy fairground keyboards that open up Moon Attendant‘s debut album One Last Summer. The gentle drums and sleepy vocal delivery full of secrets give this first track a sense of a bedsit Squeeze, with a window overlooking the Brighton seafront and a view of the spring tides through lace-curtained windows. That warm charm […]
99Chants Another day, another re-issue of an overlooked female composer. That might seem glib, but there’s a lot of it doing the rounds at the moment. And let’s be fair, composition is still too frequently male-heavy. Bunita Marcus is (unfortunately) known as one of those adjacent figures — a New York figure known by people in various scenes, with a raft of compositions under her belt and a […]
Kranky There is something about MJ Guider‘s sound that puts her perfectly at home on Kranky. There is a sense of drifting, of distant sounds clouded in fogs of reverb that make everything feel limitless. But there is also an intensity to the metallic rhythms that put you on guard. Sour Cherry Bell is the follow up to 2016’s Precious Systems and continues Melissa Guion‘s exploration into the […]
Fire Tobin Sprout is probably best known as part of Guided By Voices, the oh-so prolific Dayton, Ohio band. The fact that he ever found time for a solo career is testament to his desire to release something that stood apart from GBV. Although no longer a part of that band, it has been four years since the last album The Universe And Me graced the shelves. Empty […]
Upset The Rhythm Well this came as a total surprise; after a steady flow of Normil Hawaiians re-issues from Upset The Rhythm over the last few years, the band now present two newly recorded tantalising glimpses into their sonic future.
Temporary Residence On first hearing Sparkle Division‘s debut album To Feel Embraced, which is a dusty fusion of lounge jazz and sleepy beats, one wouldn’t immediately figure it for a William Basinski project, but he is the man at the helm — although it is as much studio assistant Preston Wendel‘s outing, as his own work was the inspiration for Basinski. He digs his sax out for a […]
Play Loud! So here we are in London’s salubrious East End, in a period between the wars and reflecting a very different area to the one we know now. Except kind of not — London’s always been a mix of people, so no great surprise that ’20s London had Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews rubbing shoulders with white working class Londoners, singing songs about Copenhagen or the Netherlands. This […]
Staraya Derevnya (CD) / Raash (cassette) / Steep Gloss Russian – Israeli – UK collective Staraya Derevnya dish up a refreshingly eclectic aesthetic where anything and everything has musical potential. A free-form exploration that’s open ended and primal which reaches into the unpredictable to pluck out some smouldering gold.
Kranky This is the second album for Julie Carpenter‘s Less Bells pseudonym and furthers her explorations pairing drifting electronics with choral vocals and the application of tension. There is a whimsical feel to the electronic wash that opens the album and cymbals glow with a kind of spectral sheen, but there is a sort of tension to the sounds due to an inertia that prevents the track from […]
Deutsche Grammophon The brothers Eno‘s Mixing Colours album was released at the start of the global pandemic of Covid-19, when most countries were in a state of lockdown. From reactions I read online, its soothing tones certainly helped many people through that difficult time, as it transported them to somewhere else away from the confinement of their living rooms and gave them a semblance of peace through a […]
Fire It is hard to believe that Kristin Hersh and David Narcizo have been playing together now for over thirty-five years. 1985 was the year of that extraordinary debut that reset the expectations of female rock bands, and it has been thirty-five years of that visceral rollercoaster that is Kristin’s psyche: the automatic writing, those songs as an expression of a connection to humanity that seemed at times to […]
Berlin sound explorer and futurologist André Uhl‘s second album is due out next month, and the hypnotic video for its third single release “Amnesia” premiers below. Relax And Implode is described elliptically
Beats In Space / RVNG Intl It has taken seven years for the Dukes Of Chutney to follow up 2013’s Domino with a full-length album. In that time on their long, strange trip, they seem to have infused sounds from numerous countries into a personal patchwork that plays like a series of mysterious and alluring postcards, drawing you out of your cosy living room and requesting that you join […]
Disciples I’d like to imagine there’s some Freudian primary school where aspersions are cast heartily on people’s unconsciousness, though one wonders the effects of Oedipalising on ‘your mum’ jokes. Phew describes this album as “an unconscious sound sketch” and, for all the half-finished-ness that might imply, she’s got a thoroughly glittering musical psyche and intuition.