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 […]
Monthly archives: March 2022
12 posts
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Bristol 10 March 2022 The acoustic charms of Stroud-based Maja Lena are first up, a songbird sweetness of voice attached to a fingerpicking deftness, that ’60s Yamaha neck dwarfing her fingers, her vocals skipping like wind-blown grass to gentle tonal shifts, then leaping unexpectedly in joyous abandon. The slumbering reflections […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]