Buried Treasure Delaware Road supremo and all around electronic whiz Alan Gubby has been producing pieces under the pseudonym of Zyklus for the best part of forty years, which is an incredible feat, let alone all the other pseudonyms and collaborations. ‘ Stimulacra compiles twenty-three tracks from Zyklus’s oeuvre dating from 1983 to 2006, some of them perfect incidental snippets at under a minute and others looming far […]
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Zam Zam / La République des Granges / Permafrost / Murailles Music From the Tesla crackle of the intro to that extending shadow of organ creeping on throughout, the weird melodics here on Rien Virgule‘s La Consolation Des Violettes feed a widening crescent of expectation. A rich invitation that stirs up a Giallo sensibility, akin to Goblin, but with more lurk in the suspense department. That repetitive and […]
Timeless Editions There’s a lot to unpack. Visually, The Universe Is A Haunted House is a beautifully presented book, too big for comfort, like an ancient Bible, waiting for its lectern. Images tumble out and over each other – like Peter Greenaway’s books, Pillow and Prospero. It overwhelms at every turn, each giant page ceding new sight and deepening the spirals. Further down. Furthur. You won’t find out […]
(self-released) I was intrigued to learn of ambient jazz duo Nelson Patton‘s deep involvement with the genre defying artist / singer Lonnie Holley and there is some obvious bleed between his brand of impressionistic, dreamlike song-writing and the slightly woozy, eyes half-closed atmospheres of Universal Process, their latest album. Although only just released, the pieces were written and recorded a couple of years ago, pre-pandemic, so it carries […]
Two albums linked by a label (Discus) and a player (Matthew Bourne ) and possibly joined by being somewhere in the fallout of jazz that’s not quite jazz. Neither sounding particularly alike, and that’s as it should be. Mzylkypop – Kiedy Wilki Zawyja? There are other words that precede it but, as is right and just, the first proper word on Mzylkypop‘s Kiedy Wilki Zawyja? is “Kurwa”. Which […]
Yew As a child, I had an image of how the future was going to look and I have to confess that forty-odd years later, I am pretty disappointed. Everything seems to be smaller, more compact, less shiny and interesting and space is almost ignored. The sounds on Losing Circles that Thomas Dimuzio and partner in sound, Double Leopards‘ Marcia Bassett, conjure up are exactly how I imagined […]
Sub Pop I think this didn’t leave the CD player for a good ten listens when it came through. I wouldn’t say I was one of those Low fans. I was mostly indifferent for the last twenty years or so. But Double Negative really was a massive shot in the arm. Either for me or the band, who knows. This feels massively like a companion piece to Double […]
Odin The grouping together of Hans Hulbækmo, Hanna Paulsberg, Marius Hirth Klovning and Bárður Reinert Poulsen was always going to be a dynamic affair, but by giving themselves only two days in Propellor Studios to try and recapture the essence of their live outing in February 2021, the spontaneous results could have gone any way. Thankfully, this self-imposed pressure has drawn an album out of them rich in […]
Bedroom Community As often happens with these things, Rakhi Singh was a new name on me and then her Manchester Collective popped up for this year’s proms, putting in a rare performance of establishment-baiting Julius Eastman. Having checked out some of her other work, she’s clearly comfortable sitting with the establishment classical world — and there’s a cracking rendition of Bach‘s Chaconne for solo violin you should check out […]
Carton / Coax Visual artist and sound sculptor Jean Francois Riffaud has taken his RIFO alter ego on a guitar odyssey hanging primarily on tonal repetition and hypnotic rhythmic interaction. Running through five inter-related pieces that spur one another on like an enthusiastic relay team, the guitar on Betel is treated with anything but reverence and at times is barely recognisable. The utterly basic hypnotic rhythm that prepares us […]
Geist im Kino It is hard to believe just how prolific Rutger Zuydervelt is as Machinefabriek, and how he finds the time to put together something as thoughtful and involved as the soundtracks created here for choreographer Yin Yue‘s dance pieces. There are two separate commissions here, both inhabiting a world of air and space, drifting from movement to stasis, gathering momentum and then watching and waiting as […]
Room 40 For his latest epic, composer Lawrence English has eschewed anything human-made and has chosen to weave a series of pieces from sounds recorded over a period spent in the Amazon. Rather then putting down a recorder and allowing it to capture whatever happens and unleash that, he instead selected from fifty hours of material to create standalone pieces that maybe highlight a certain creature, or a […]
El Studio 444 and REBOOT Q: What do you get when you cross a twee pop No Wave band, a post-industrial noise outfit, and some Universal Indians, what do you get? A: Nowhere close to anything you’d expect, whatever that might be. “Is that supposed to be some sorta joke?” you may be asking yrself. No, more like a truism, a reminder that the subtle, magical art of […]
Thrill Jockey William Tyler‘s folky Americana has graced releases by Lambchop and Silver Jews as well as his increasingly assured solo releases. Marisa Anderson treads similar ground on her own records, although the recent collaboration with drummer Jim White did lead down some exciting improv avenues. The eight tracks presented on Lost Futures rely on the interplay of Marisa and William’s differing approaches to the guitar, William often […]
Cleopatra Nouvelle Vague‘s Marc Collin adopts a fly-on-the-wall approach with Le Choc du Futur to transport you back in time to a synthetic studio in 1978, peeling back the years to remind us why electronic music truly matters. It’s difficult, if not perhaps impossible, to truly maintain a perspective on the past, especially in regards to technology. Technology that is now commonplace, like holographic projectors or virtual reality, […]
(self-released) Mr Diagonal‘s latest album is a curious thing, coming on like the strange musical of a landlocked dreamer forever yearning for the tropical shores of the Pacific. On the cover, he sits clutching a six-string ukulele, straw hat and cut-offs, but appears to be in a launderette or somewhere equally mundane, with a faraway look in his eye and a bottle of rum by his side.
Thrill Jockey Cécile Schott seems to have taken the opportunity on this latest Thrill Jockey album to go fully retro electronic with the likes of the Yamaha Reface, Roland Space Echo and Moog Grandmother being given the chance to glimmer in the dusty twilight that abounds on The Tunnel And The Clearing. Spread across seven tracks and encompassing the kind of plunky Latin rhythms that are so redolent […]
Finders Keepers The second of Steven Stapleton’s personal picks from his Nurse With Wound list collects together a host of lesser-known German contenders and proceeds to chuck you off the eclectic deep end from the offset. The album opens with a healthy dose of Wolfgang Dauner, whose “Output” is a crumbled stiltskin of a track that sonically scrambles