...for his first release on the Glacial Movements label, it sounds as though he has uncovered a cocooned world, with electronic sounds thrumming and reverberating, half-heard through gauze, oblique movements that hint at places unknown...
Mr Olivetti
901 posts
Thanotosis Produktion I was intrigued to discover that, as well as performing in various small ensembles over a twenty-five year career, Tomas Hallonsten has offered his skills to such diverse acts as Fire! Orchestra and The Concretes. I can’t think of two more disparate acts and neither group really sheds any obvious light on the pieces compiled in Monolog, his first solo offering. He has a welcome home […]
Soul Song The pairing of bassist Yosef Gutman Levitt and guitarist Tal Yahalom is an intriguing one, both wishing to bring greater attention to those melodies of the Hasidim that might otherwise escape the attention of the average gentile listener. This is their second album together and here, they turn their considerable skills to nigunim — traditional wordless Jewish melodies — that were transcribed and recorded by Eli Rivkin […]
...here with All Hands_Make Light, he finally teams up with old friend and erstwhile Broken Social Scene vocalist Ariel Engle for a series of dawn-related gestures that hint at the drifting work with Kevin Doria, but allies that vibe with a kind of astral sea shanty atmosphere that finds the listener drifting with the pair through uncharted melodies and unexpected depths.
Discus This is the sixth Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere release in ten or so years, and the distant adventures on which they embark are always welcome. Still an eight-piece, Theta Six finds the ensemble distilling their ideas into shorter pieces, although where some of them end and some of them start is not always so obvious. But the essence of spatial exploration and yearning for ways to […]
They were recorded live at the NRK Studio and in places you can hear the appreciative audience. The list of personnel for Kork amounts to forty or so and that is players alone; so you would imagine that their sheer numbers would overwhelm the trio, but thankfully there is an incredible subtlety as well as variation to their additions which enhance and, if anything, draw fresh thoughts from Rymden.
The fact that this long gestation has neither disrupted the flow nor knocked them off course says a lot about the trio’s interaction, their ability to lock together and ride a groove to its inevitable conclusion; because for all the talk of consciously unfashionable, this music still rocks and maintains a momentum that surfs right through the album.
There is a dreamy quality to his sax playing on Balans and the opening track feels like an introduction to an inner world. Synth tones drift in a similar romantic Angelo Badalamenti vein. There is distance to the piano; but all is welcoming, even the soft flutter of the percussion. There is intimacy here, close-up sounds evolving just for you, a soft air of someone with something special to show.
The synth and organ sounds vary greatly across the tracks and at some points sound like children's cartoon effects, while in other there is an almost sepulchral grandeur. The drums tend to shimmer in the background, gently propelling but never overstepping and the first side is over in no time; four tracks in ten minutes or so.
Attenuation Circuit has been releasing their limited-run experimental releases for over twenty years with no sign of running out of enthusiasm or willing contributors to broaden our aural palates. Two recent releases go a long way to showing how diverse the releases can be.
Joined by various guests to add colour and character to the mysterious surrealism of the story, Aksak Maboul weave a genre-defying web around the listener, guided onward only by Veronique's recounting, the thread that draws the unwitting ever deeper.
For the inaugural release on Clonmell Jazz Social, they have called upon guitarist Harry Christelis to convene a quartet of upcoming players that will do justice to a series of elegant drifting creations that hover somewhere around the border between jazz and minimalism, ever-moving but also always gently steering the listener towards soft, unexpected landscapes.
Steve's voice gives an unusual perspective, a fine enunciation always surpassed by the words. You feel him tasting them, rolling them around like brandy and then carefully allowing them out, each word ideally formed. The players, himself included, swirl a magical, churning mixture, hypnotic dereliction, groaning grey and often uncomfortable, but only because that is what the message demands.
The awkwardness is intriguing but is in no way alienating, you just need to listen again to fully understand how it pieces together and the stripped down post-jazz stylings of the album closer are just the icing on the cake, all judicious placing, a distant wail and momentum you can sink into.
There is structureless flickering with the voice as old and arid as forgotten wheat, shimmering in a heat haze, the vibrato hinting at something while the guitars howl like guiding beasts desperation ever present.
O SingAtMe Seaming To likes to collaborate and lend her unique and otherworldly voice to various projects, including Graham Massey‘s Toolshed and Paddy Steer‘s Homelife from back in the 2000s. Coming up to recent times, Dust Gatherers is her second solo album and follows on ten years from the first. Clearly, this has been a question of waiting for stars to align and the gathering of sympathetic friends […]
Discus Family Band‘s latest (and self-titled) release, their third since forming in 2015, finds them further exploring their interactions as a quartet and how personal ideas form, and then coalesce when presented to a democracy fully at ease with one another and anxious to express the diversity that jazz welcomes currently. Over the seven pieces presented here, the players take the basic idea delivered by one member and […]
Discus The three members of Shiver like nothing better than to collaborate separately and are involved in numerous projects. The trio itself has been quiet recently recording wise, but the chance to hook up with Yorkshire-based pianist Matthew Bourne at his house was too good an opportunity to turn down after the hysteria of lockdown, and the quartet used forty-eight hours to lay down , the first of […]