San Francisco residents Thomas Dimuzio, Tom Djll and Gino Robair are three leading lights in the world of improvisation and modular synthesis. All have been active on the ever-bountiful Bay Area experimental music scene for many years, and are interviewed below about their individual contributions to the Modulisme sessions organised by Philippe Petit. Their answers reveal the many and varied approaches, options and possibilities that the form offers […]
Yearly archives: 2020
198 posts
577 Records The latest release from drummer Tony Irving and sax player Massimo Magee is a forty-eight-minute blast-off of improv craziness that holds the listener by the neck and very rarely lets go. Although the sax starts warm and smoky on opener “Vitriol”, as you can imagine by the title, that subtlety doesn’t last very long and begins to scrape and scree out of the speakers, leaving a […]
Rosehill Teetering between funk-pop, electro-ambience and performance poetry, ChopChop have long been one of Brighton’s most exciting live bands. With blistering riffs that dissolve in and out of polyrhythmic chaos, an intriguing array of instruments (conch shells, bagpipes, homemade samplers) and the lit-fuse stage presence of front-man Xelís de Toro, they were never going to make a boring album. The real question was always going to be just […]
Nonplace Having relocated to New York City, drummer Jochen Rueckert has formed a new quartet around the axes of Lage Lund on guitar, Matt Penman on bass and Mark Turner at the saxophones. Wolff Parkinson White‘s new Small Favours EP on Nonplace features guest vocals
Blue Underground Blue Underground‘s 4k restoration of Lucio Fulci‘s The House By The Cemetery is a handsome beast indeed. Cloaked in a faux-3D lenticular cover, it consists of three discs — two blu rays featuring the movie itself and a really quite ridiculous amount of extras, and a CD of Walter Rizzati‘s soundtrack. The movie itself forms the final part of what is sometimes called Fulci’s Gates Of […]
Courier The latest beautiful offering from Courier with its own hand-cut sleeve is a collaboration between old pals Nick Dawson and Stuart Bowditch, who were responsible for the genesis of the Silhouette Cameo 3 compilation that was released last year. In keeping with that album’s vibe of familiar sounds taken out of context and sent flailing into orbit, this latest improv collaboration has been stewing (no pun intended) […]
Sulatron Zone Six comprises Electric Moon members Sula Bassana and Komet Lulu and former Embryo guitarist Rainer Neeff. They were founded back in 1997 and have intermittently done gigs and released albums throughout that time. Kozmik Koon is a huge ever-growing pulsating universe of sound dedicated to space rock stalwart and all-round good guy Kozmik Ken and the late Richard van Ess, a friend of the band. It […]
KrysaliSound Italian sound sculptor and musician Andrea Laudante has been looking into the way that we perceive concrete and instrumental music, and how the two can interact in a natural way. As one part of Degoya, he has already been involved in an album release this year, but this series of ten tracks on Banat Banat Ban Jai acts as a personal journey of sorts that we can […]
Unbound Barely a biography, but… to say this book is a labour of love would be misleading; love is typically überflüssig. This is a labour of precision. And when I say it’s unsentimental, I don’t mean it’s lacking in affection; rather this is a sober, reasoned, and concise exegesis on Jaki Liebezeit‘s work. For good reason, the theme of überflüssig haunts much of it.
Modularfield Hot on the heels of the recent Panic Girl Cake On Jupiter LP, Wrocław-based An On Bast arrives with Modularfield‘s next instalment in their excursion into modern electronica. However, where the Panic Girl record hinted at home comforts on a distant shore, Anna Suda‘s Coherent Excitations is a meditative, yet dance-inflected body with a sense of mystery and travel at its core.
Hubro Stein Urheim has been recording for the best part of ten years now and this is his sixth album for Hubro, but you can’t even try and pigeonhole it just by the label. Clearly, Stein has an ear for anything good over the history of music and distils all this down to his own special recipes.
4AD The moment that twisted discord gives way to the first tune “Way The World Is”, the Pale Saints‘ The Comforts Of Madness album has you hanging on a massive wave of daggering sound. That piranha(ing) energy slamming around you, Ian Masters‘ dreamy voice thistled by melodic splashes and restless propellants, his vocals bleeding existential bluntness buttered in flaming ascents and cross-cut dynamics. As first tracks go it’s […]
Thrill Jockey It has been for over twenty years that Markus Popp has been releasing material through Thrill Jockey and still his desire to keep advancing electronic-based music keeps him ahead of the pack. He has been recording and releasing music now for nearly thirty years as Oval and also as part of Microstoria, but each new instalment finds him upping his game.
Sulatron / Pancromatic So where do I begin? This is a six-CD retrospective boxset of some of Sula Bassana’s music since 2006 containing nearly thirty tracks and beautiful presented in three gatefold sleeves, all in a hard box — this truly is a thing of wonder and a must-have for all Sula / Electric Moon fans as they are limited to 500 copies (a vinyl version is to […]
Øra Fonogram Sax player Signe Emmeluth has had a busy time of it over the last eighteen months with the release of the first Emmeluth’s Amoeba album, playing as part of Skarbø Skulekorps and guesting on the last Broen album. On top of all that, the second Amoeba album Chimaera is here and a real blast of intuitive and innovative improvisation it is.
Doug Lynner started out as a keyboard and guitar player in psychedelic rock bands in California in the 1960s. Doug also teaches music composition and is known internationally for his modular synthesis performances and online tutorials. He was editor and publisher of Synapse magazine and currently helms the Neat Net Noise label. Doug improvises as Bloop Quack with R Duck on processed guitar, and the duo hosted a weekly live […]
Blue Tapes Blue Tapes‘ head honcho has thumbed his nose at what others may deem suitable for release and has chosen two highlights of his own personal canon to delight the listeners, and lure them remorselessly into the happy family of the label. A lovely and striking package on C45, the cassette is divided between two quite different sets, whose common ground is the sleepy warmth of a […]
Krysalisound The latest release from Krysalisound is the debut from Paolo Iannantuoni, trading as Nāda Mushin. A doyen of the Italian ambient scene, Paolo uses these meditative soundscapes as a means of exploring the dichotomy between movement and stasis; his guitar, electronics and field recordings conjuring up dreamlike states and the metaphysical act of travelling without moving.