Founder of the N&B Research Digest label and member of Night Prospekt, F.R.U.I.T.S., Volga, ASTMA and the Fake Cats Project among others, Alexei Borisov has been a key member of the Russian underground since the Soviet era. He is also the curator of the Noise And Fury festival of experimental […]
Monthly archives: February 2020
28 posts
Affairs Of The Heart On Cascade Lakes‘ first album, the sound has a kind of ragged heart beat to it, the opening track driven by bells and a steady rhythm, with a quavering guitar line and the sort of vocal delivery that brings to mind early Arcade Fire; the touch […]
Rocket When receiving this new album by enigmatic motorik outfit Och, I had hoped that the band had taken their name from the well-known Scottish linguistic trope. More specifically, I entertained vague hopes that they were perhaps (as I am) huge fans of the late Fulton MacKayi and, tuning in, […]
Hubro Hot on the heels of last year’s Salika, Molika, Erlend Apneseth has gathered around him another supergroup of Nordic heavyweights. Fellow Hubro artistes Stein Urheim, Anja Lauvdal, Hans Hulbækmo and Fredrik Luhr Dietrichson, along with accordionist Ida Løvli Hidle. They join together on Fragmentarium to flesh out some of […]
Habibi Funk Habibi Funk‘s Jannis Stürtz unearths a true lost classic of Lebanese folk rock on Mouasalat Ila Jacad El Ard. Lebanon, 1976: A vicious civil war, spanning fifteen years with over 120,000 casualties, is just beginning to rage. The weakened state was invaded by Syria, an occupation lasting until […]
KrysaliSound Ishmael Cormack entered the thirteenth century church of St Andrews near his rural Somerset home with a view to laying down a series of improvised sketches using tape loops and found sounds, trying to release natural but subtle polyrhythms from these unlikely sources. The overall effect, spread across the […]
Discus Martin Archer is one very busy man. As well as running the Discus label, he seems intent on putting out album after album with various different collaborators and under numerous styles. It doesn’t feel like so very long since the Anthropology Band‘s album rose like an incredible new sun […]
Celebrating a decade of promoting emerging and underground music gigs, the Chaos Theory collective takes over sprawling double venues at The Dome and Boston Music Room in Tufnell Park, north London for their Ten Years of Chaos festival for one day only on 29 February 2020. In advance of the […]
Pumpedita Avi Pfeffer is an American-based composer working from the classical tradition but using those tropes transposed into the world of electronic music. His current album A Lasting Impression consists of four sweeping and transformative pieces that are tied together by the very nature of their journey.
three:four / Meakusma A beautiful lullaby-esque soundscape, this. The soothing French vocals a paper boat floating out on a lilting tide of gentle disquiet, instrumentals that subtly blur boundaries. Something that’s especially true of “L’inexploré”’s panoramas, with an avant classical verve where the fragments of narration ease you elsewheres. Dora’s […]
Blue Tapes The church-like drone that opens Cadu Tenório‘s stint on Blue Tapes lends a feeling of solace with just a hint of accordion japes in the tones. It is a reverential and gentle opening that unfolds slowly, infinite and flat like a coastal landscape, merging with the sombre greys […]
Important / Cassauna On Arrival Vibrate, Italian post-rock magicians Larsen conjure the rhythmajick of Z’ev in a sprawling twenty-five-minute chamber rock meditation. If you were to observe the floorplan of the Temple of Amun at Karnak, Egypt’s sprawling 250-acre edifice, you might assume it was built willy-nilly over the span […]
Phoenix G As a house and techno producer, Mr G has been jamming the dancefloor for the best part of twenty years with releases on an array of labels as well as those on his own Phoenix G label. He seems to have spent most of 2019 cruising around the […]
The I-go-I-e benefit album is now available from Wave Folder. Based on environmental and other sounds recorded by Radek Rudnicki (of RPE Duo) which were then interpreted by twenty-one different electronic artists and then assembled into an album. Ichi-go-ichi-e (一期一会) means “treasuring the unique nature of a moment, each moment […]
Cardinal Fuzz (Europe) / Man Hand (North America) Haven’t heard from these guys in a while, then suddenly this pops onto the 2020 radar in ultra-limited quantities. It’s been an age, the last official Sunburned Hand Of The Man release must have been the one on Ecstatic Peace back in […]
Out Continuing in the necessary Ut re-issue programme, their second LP and the first studio album to appear on Blast First, is given the deserved re-release treatment. In Gut’s House saw them taking a few steps beyond Conviction. Although still self-produced, this time they took assistance from that doyen of […]
Phantom Limb A long-overdue retrospective of Venezuelan synthesist and ambient composer Miguel Noya is always going to be something rather special. However, as Noya has been active since the 1980s, giving a broad perspective and overview of his work will always be a difficult task. As most composers work from […]
Adaadat Yan Hart-Lemonnier‘s second release for Adaadat pretty much lives up to its title. Le Partage Des Griefs translates as ‘the sharing of grievances’ and there is something of a relentless kind of grief-stricken melancholy that infects the synthetic sounds unleashed here.
Disciples Another archival trip into His Name Is Alive‘s formative years, and a follow up to last year’s excellent All The Mirrors In The House, Return To Never is an altogether darker/noiser joy, that (as on the previous LP) spreads out as a whole, although segmented into individual tracks.
Mottomotto Kyoto’s super-pop prog virtuosi Viva Sherry are back with a delightful 10″ vinyl release on the ever-reliable Mottomotto and considering it six tracks come in at about twenty-five minutes, it is extraordinary how much ground they manage to cover in that short period of time. 2017’s Obento Music was a […]