Blue Tapes Those prolific Ashtray Navigations have more lo-fi on your hi-fi – a ten-track odyssey that leaves your brain a fizzin’. The diode-soaked bag-piping of the first takes no prisoners, brings back that glittery glutton of “Bird’s Beak”, oozy with a plunge-pool of sticky sauce celebratories. Meditatives you tune into, adjust your antennas towards and the slippery eels of “The Tactic” make it far easier to disgust.
album review
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Constellation The cover image of the debut album by Montréal producer Kee Avil is certainly a disconcerting one. She sits at a desk in a sterile room with a paper mask of her own face over her actual face. It gives the sense of a twist of reality which runs through the ten tracks on Crease, merging abstract experimentation with sinuous rhythm and her own insinuating vocals.
Redenetic Daryl Robinson’s Mōshonsensu creation is all about the construction of elaborate soundworlds that whisk the listener away from the everyday and place them amid unknown machinery and mysterious animals, strange sounds emanating from abandoned structures, sand-borne decay and the solitude of the vast prairie.
Elevator Lady First of all, Brian Molko is still, twenty-some years after I ever first saw him, one of the most physically perfect humans I have ever seen. Does this matter in the scheme of things? Well, when you consider his strange voice, almost too nasal and sometimes too non-singeresque, the repetitive-on-purpose lyrics and the way he just eclipses everything else to do with his own profession, it […]
Discus This current project of the classically trained duo of pianist and poet Robert Mitchell and cellist Shirley Smart came about after conversations back in 2014. Their desire to merge the structure of classical with the freedom of improv led to this collaboration, in which Robert also wished to address his family’s history and their relationship to the Windrush scandal in a way that is accessible yet emotive.
Purple Trap Keiji Haino has rarely been one to avoid portentous titles and boy howdy has he stayed on-brand with My Lord Music I Most Humbly Beg Your Indulgence In The Hope That You Will Do Me The Honour Of Permitting This Seed Called Keiji Haino To Be Planted Within You. Away from Fushitsusha, Haino has a reputation for playing an extensive range of instruments — Shruti boxes, […]
Discus Martin Archer from Discus mentions that there are very few solo bass albums being released these days; but thankfully Michael Bardon, erstwhile member of Shatner’s Bassoon, has chosen to correct that. Over ten wildly varied pieces on The Gift Of Silence, he pushes both the bass and cello and our understanding of what sounds can be wrenched from them to their limits.
Jazzland Since starting Jazzland twenty-five years ago, Bugge Wesseltoft has dipped in and out of collaborations and various artist projects with regularity, finding different modes of expression depending on the players involved. Here, shorn of any outside involvement apart from assistance from Håkon Kornstad on a couple of pieces, we find Bugge at the piano allowing his mind to wander, seeing where this freedom and time to ponder […]
Basin Rock The first solo album from erstwhile Phantom Band guitarist Duncan Marquiss treads a lovely line between the craggy, lonesome vistas of the highlands and the sweeping, metronomic pulse of middle Europe. Spread over seven long tracks, Wires Turned Sideways In Time moves between spare fingerpicked acoustic melancholy and heartbeat-riven synthscapes, managing to tie the two together in a warm bed of panoramic mystery.
Cooking Vinyl Back in the distant ’80s, Loop’s heavy sound was a breath of fresh air. A hazy comfort blanket surfing a scissored sustain that a few years later and three albums in simply imploded, its nucleus split straight down the middle and slung-shot out into various new distractions. As if success had become a catalyst for change, Robert Hampson ditched his guitar for the seriously cerebral electronics […]
Discus The latest release from pastoral improv troupe Orfeo 5 is tinged with a certain melancholy due to the passing of vocalist Ali Rigg. Main man Keith Jafrate, having chosen to review some pieces with which Ali had been involved back in 2007/2008, contacted Shaun Blezard and the sad circumstances came to light. These five older pieces were to be part of the collection of current work and […]
Rednetic This latest release by FMS-80 on the ever-intriguing Rednetic label spins through series of dizzying, pastoral soundscapes bobbing on a sea of loops that scatter like sunlight on turbulent waves. A riot of bells on opener “Beidaihe Loop” holds incredible vibrancy, the mantra-like simplicity of the rippling loops moving through “Esplanade View” like a static vista of a fresh day, that panorama across a sunlit harbour in […]
Trace It is always a pleasure to learn of new Rothko material and this return is even more welcome considering it has been over two years since the Refuge For Abandoned Souls album. This first post-lockdown release thankfully contains none of the confusion and despair that has dogged some performers in this liminal period and it feels, as ever, as if Mark Beazley is operating outside the usual […]
Upset The Rhythm Japan’s Nicfit have been together since 2009, but this is their first full-length release besides a cassette comp of obscure singles. Upset The Rhythm have picked it up and it suits their oeuvre well with its cool, distant female vocals, post-punk, bass-heavy vibe and scrawling hypnotic guitar work. Whether they have taken their name from The Untouchables‘ one-minute punk flamethrower or from the better-known Sonic […]
Karlrecords Of course we’re all knee deep in re-issues of unheard electroacoustic works at this point in history, but Iannis Xenakis is something special-er than merely one of the bods who had a go at electronic means to produce music. A lot of composers went through periods of giving it a go and ultimately not finding their voice in it — while I’d personally say György Ligeti was […]
Spoonhunt Freewheeling improviser and collaborative double bass player Dominic Lash has an incredibly varied approach, not just to his instrument but to the way he structures the numerous outfits in which he plays. Recent releases on his own Spoonhunt label give a little indication as to his multifarious activities, and clearly to the warmth and keenness he engenders in his fellow players.
Erototox Decodings On the shirt tails of Zappi Diermaier’s recent solo project Monobeat Original comes this exciting take on faust. A primal purr that, I suspect, seeped into the series of rough mixes that Zappi, along with Schneider TM’s Dirk Dresselhaus and FaUSt’s Elke Drapatz produced, then sent out to the a host of Berlin-based collaborators to re-furnish.
Discus This is only James Mainwaring‘s second album under his own name which, considering the number of collaborations he has been part of, is kind of a surprise. To realise this suite of pieces that look with a despairing eye to humanity’s misuse of the planet as well as the myriad of microscopic miracles that are constantly occurring beneath our feet, he has assembled a sympathetic sextet that […]