Birmingham 30 August – 1 September 2024 Being comprehensive with festival reviews is always a nightmare, so apologies upfront for those I missed. I’d like to blame part of that on the venues being just a smidge further away from each other that I’d like, and one of them being […]
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This third album from Ghostwriter, the shapeshifting collaborative project of Mark Brend (formerly of Fariña, The Palace Of Light and Mabel Joy), has been a long time coming. With work in progress preview segments having appeared online over the last few years, whilst a suitably supportive label home was sought, Tremulant has manifestly been a labour and a love to deliver to a niche section of the world at large.
Utilising an unusual collection of instruments including a hand-made French form of hurdy-gurdy called a boîte à bourdon, each construction is unique, mixing Pierre-Antoine Despatures's double bass with the scattered guitar of Benjamin Garson and the clarinet and sax of main protagonist Clémentine Ristord.
Regular readers will be aware that Datblygu are probably one of the better bands of this world, for my money, and there's a sideline there of enjoying an amount of Welsh-language music. I'm not as up as I should be, but I do know my Llwybr Llaethogs from my Fflaps. So imagine my delight (etc) when everyone's favourite Leeds-based Welsh-language mopey goth band released their debut.
...Bureau B have taken it upon themselves to make it available again and not before time. Over eight unlikely tracks and forty intriguing minutes, Jimi takes us on a trip through his mind, paring the analogue with the synthetic in a way that was unexpected at the time, but in reality was a matter of necessity. Whatever the genesis though, what came out was strangely beguiling and due to the keenness of Tommi Gronland and Mika Vainio and their fledgling Puu label, so began a fascinating thirty year career.
...the more positive community-minded corners of social media and the increasing ease of home recording has produced a near-ceaseless flow of artists entangled in electronics, hybrid instrumental set-ups and wordless conceptual constructions over the last six or seven years.Yet, for all of this near-endless accessibility, it still requires small enterprises with big enthusiastic hearts and calm organisational heads to provide platforms for making sense of it all. One character providing such contextual curation services is the Doncaster-based Mat Handley.
Electronic / classical composer Tristan Perich has prepared the most intense vibes related album I have heard in a long time. Teaming up with Ensemble 0, they have taken three vibraphones and created a suite of glittering, polyrhythmic movements that showcase the instrument at its lightest and most fleeting; but allied to these, Tristan employs 1-bit electronics as a counter to the vibraphone sweetness.
As the Renaissance Man of the recently reinvigorated Paisely Underground scene family, Steve Wynn has enjoyed another purple patch over the last decade or so -- with a redemptive five-album reunion run for The Dream Syndicate and the first volume of his autobiography being top of the creative output list. So much so that we haven’t quite noticed the absence of a proper solo studio long-player since 2010’s Miracle 3-backed Northern Aggression.
Rafael Anton Irisarri and Benoît Pioulard don't convene too often to produce Orcas albums (this is their third in ten years), but on those occasions that they do, the time just drops away.That heat-haze waver that threads throughout the album, the soft warmth of Benoît's voice; an enunciated dreaminess that he shares with the long-lost Eric Matthews is all here as we would hope. Everything seems to shimmer as if heard through the clearest water and there is sedate sense of control that is struck with Ride-like explosions of shattered guitar splendour, showering over the lugubrious bass.
Ireland's Córas Trio tread a fine line between folk, improv and jazz; and on this, their first album, they have utilised the disparate elements of violin, guitar and percussion to create a suite of songs that with one eye on the past have their feet set firmly in the future. Their recognition of the tradition of Irish music is countered with how best to move it forward, and with such titles as "Jackie Fitzpatrick's" and "George White's", you feel that a get- together with friends down the local bar is as important an element as the songs themselves.
More than a decade since the last MxBx record and what have they learnt? Mercifully, not much. If you were blindfolded you'd probably pick this out as a Melt-Banana album even if your ears were clogged up and you were a bit hungover.
Feral Child are celebrating in style with their fiftieth release; in a really stylish glossy disco bag, Italian experimental adventurers Cloud Canyons have been given a makeover by Dom Keen's very own Studio Kosmische. Over two ten-minute tracks, Cloud Canyons share a cut from their recent album and one track just for this release with Dom to see what fresh magic he can uncover.
Their 2016 album release A Young Fist Curled Round A Cinder For A Wager was a startling journey through a hard Northern life, the ups and downs of the protagonist rendered in vivid detail by Johny and then instrumentally brought to life by Mark and James. It gave Rothko a new lease of life and certainly seems to have been mutually beneficial, with Mark undertaking duties in the touring Band Of Holy Joy.
Spiralling breath sonically sycamored; some songs feel more Cocteaus, others more Budd, with a few blurring the boundaries between each. His melancholic piano gloves that Cocteau glisten rather well. A lonely ambience full of rainy-day reflection, the malign beauty that stalks some of us more than others. The comforting echo of his Pearl collaboration with Brain Eno here somehow more skeletal in its haunting, comfortably offset by the other's opulence.
Nordic travellers Stein Urheim and Mari Brunvoll have played together on and off for some years now, their delightful vocal duet a magical salve to the current malaise.Bringing on board tricky trio Moskus to add some unscripted textures to some recently recorded songs is a recipe for genre-dodging if ever there was one. The quintet knows absolutely no boundaries and over the course of this forty-five or so minutes, they play the field as if trying to break the Guinness World Record for most diverse album.
The latest four-tracker brought to us via the conduit of Godfrey’s basement flat HQ flips back to the aforementioned sprawling C86 scene, which continues to fascinate Discogs hunter-gatherers, for the sole BBC session from Jesse Garon And The Desperadoes, a band that dispensed a handful of singles / EPs across the late-‘80s and one album in 1990.
Reconvening the Ron Caines / Martin Archer AXIS for their fifth release and third in as many years, Practical Dreamers takes their usual approach and turns it on its head, leaving Ron to add his textured saxes to soundscapes already completed by Martin and sound processor Hervé Perez. ...At the same time, Martin has released a duo album with percussionist Walt Shaw, which is a much more visceral affair.Biyartabiyu leaps straight at you, the angular percussive textures and keening sharpness of the sax almost at odds but ever inquisitive in both registers.
Skilfully smearing together layers of guitars, bass, synths, piano and drum machines, with guest input from returning long-term accomplice Dustin Dybvig, in a four-track recording set-up, Corridors is rudimental as well as otherworldly in its rendering.
...if you know Galás of the last twenty-five years or so, you probably know what to expect. All 'covers' (if that description still holds any water to what Galás actually does) with her on vocals and piano. In this case a live recording from Seattle, US in 2017.
...creatively, Jodorowsky has always embodied a near singular collision of European high art and Latin American magical (sur)realism. Despite having been born in 1929, and thus being over thirty before the Sixties even began, Jod’s unique and psychedelic approach to writing, art and film-making clicked into place during that decade like a machine-tooled piece of jigsaw, its liberated, vision-questing aesthetic perfectly in tune with the new age of Aquarius:...