You can harness it to make music in many ways, from just observing it do its thing and occasionally tuning something, to rapid playing with knobs and switches as musical performance. Also, from a compositional point of view, the concentration on one source or one process at a time and the interaction between sources and processes within a network can be used as a template for structure and inspires articulation.
Monthly archives: October 2023
17 posts
This final section of a possible trilogy also coincided with his mother's passing and her spirit looms large over the proceedings, her recorded voice appearing at points, warmly recalling past events and putting the future into some perspective. Live, Murmurists can number as many as 100; but here for ithyphall.brel.gory is not the same as you, the players either cast as orators or musicians number into the thirties with some doubling up in both roles.
Bass player and composer Vilhelm Bromander's list of groups and affiliates is as long as my arm, and due to his presence and standing in the experimental jazz scene has managed to draw quite an impressive collection of collaborators around him for his latest adventure, a spiritually minded thirteen-piece that drifts effortlessly through three very different scenarios, highlighting the joy and melancholy inherent in the chosen instruments.
The sounds here are absolutely lovely, incubate a subtle magistry from the offset as ‘They Will Come" gracefully swirls the head. A buoyant dance that holographically harpoons you to its harmonic gravity of synthy wash and plucked melody.
A police car’s blue lights flows through the venues windows from outside. A random moment that dances the back wall to Phew's sleek slivers. Blurring fragments that compass a faint fœtal heart’s beat that’s reverbed to boom outwards, as subtle injections of Japanese leak on through pinched-in reversed glints.
His hard work of re-revitalising the accordion, putting it into a more contemporary situation, has really paid off and the six pieces chosen here veer all over the place but nearly always with accordion centre stage and with good reason.
Now, a lot of dance music leaves me a bit nonplussed, but Buried Treasure always seem to deliver, and by midnight, label honcho Alan Gubby smashed it straight into the fun zone with some roster rainbows.
Fifty-nine years after their first album and seventeen years after their last self-written one, they're back with new material, crunchy riffs and a whole lot of attitude. As a Hackney resident myself, I gotta love the title, though I do think they missed a trick by calling it Hackney Diamonds instead of Exile On Mare Street.
Agitated California’s psych trio Carlton Melton have been distilling the best parts of the Hawkwind and Spacemen 3 for the best part of fifteen years and producing a sound that is inimitable. Expanding to a four-piece for their second album of 2023, but still pursuing an instrumental nirvana, Turn To […]
John Zorn, in 2023, is a tricky one to pin down. His catalogue is positively seam-splitting and well varied. While there's plenty of artists with similar-sized outputs, there's not many with as many genres, let alone as many genres done well. He's as capable of sombre renderings of traditional Jewish music in Masada as he is the American Football-by-composition of Cobra, the ruthlessly savage Painkiller or the who's who of experimental music collaborators.
This commercial swerve was quite a revelation at the time (for me at least) and I was kinda thankful the brooding angles of the next ‘Ordeal’ dirtied things back up again. Those screechy distortions that bat-wing into the melody are great, so is the solid kick of those drums.
The line-up of players gathered together here must be the largest so far, with thirty listed, including three very different vocalists and three very different drummers. As ever, the one thing tying the disparate pieces together besides the questing sense of adventure is Guy's inimitable elastic bass.
Modern opera is thriving at the moment with new pieces being commissioned regularly and finding homes in small theatres, such as The Arcola next to Café OTO in Dalston and various other venues. Small production companies have been springing up for a few years now, bringing not only reworking of the classics but also brand new operas that are a mixture of the instantly recognisable in structure and also more challenging work that keeps modern opera vibrant.
Unearthing buried treasure is what this label’s all about, dipping into the hauntological hangover of years gone by, to resurrect or recreate their own interpretations. An ethos that seeps into this recent compilation, a tenth anniversary celebration that features a whole host of new, remixed, rare and unreleased material, giving the curious a decent taste of what floats their boat.
Its rolling rhythm courtesy of Steffen Schmidt on the drums means the track almost cruises into being like a giant craft entering the Earth’s atmosphere after a long trawl through hyperspace. Echoed guitar from Sebastian Vath calls out across the solar system, as if trying to send a message to its home world. Max Leicht’s bass and synthesizer flesh out the sound, helping it springboard beyond Kuiper Belt objects to the farthest reaches of our solar system.
Experimental Irish duo Ex-Isles fuse warmly delivered and enigmatic prose poetry with wandering pastoral piano arrangements that draw you into their subtle, politically and personally motivated universe.
And of course we've got Andrew Eldritch, and while his voice may not be what it was, the stage presence is still there in fucking spades. I mean, back in their heyday he hugged the mic stand and didn't really do a great deal. These days he's a much more active presence, stalking and prowling the stage like a meth-head feline.