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:...
...the LIVE energy this duo are giving off here is insanely satisfying, pushing a mirage of over-driven echoes into the red. A devotional daggered addictive that whirls around shrill and crowing, wounded in the rewind dry whirr of a tape player. The cicada rub of maracas accenting them strumming lacerations, those stippling busts of air-raid siren, all abruptly cut off shortly after the nineteen-minute mark.
Drag City The Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, paraphrasing Aristotle (or maybe Aquinas), suggested that “the whole is something else than the sum of its parts” and here we are: two artists that I’ve followed and respected, both of them arch innovators with collaboration in their bones, joining their heads together in a new beast and it’s set me into a flutter in several ways.
Pearling a Pokemon itch, Xylitol opals an enviable optimistic. The maligned clubland default of drum'n'bass given a serious facelift as those needling hi-hatted hares of "Jelena" leap into some heavenly lifts and whispery ambient glows, something Kate Bunnyhausen expertly showcased at her recent Acid Horse outing.
I kept imagining that what I was hearing is what might happen if somebody kidnapped the B52s, got the band drunk and started slowly torturing them. It is not so much post-punk as post-apocalyptic, with rhythm crawling from flaming wreckage, a spiral of unsteady guitar body-slamming the bass and drums as the voices taunt and tease.
Sharp and guttural -- the vocals beam, the more romantically inclined tracks literally glowing. Kim’s slow-roasted delivery unwrapping in your ears… the vibrating brilliance of "Off You" caught in a gentle hula-skirted lilac; the spiralling quaffs of "Do You Love Me Now", the nocturnal burn of the only track from Mountain Battles they played, "Night Of Joy", a gentle melancholic wonder that clung warmly to you.
The concept of a “desert sound,” if such a term truly exists, is more about a state of mind than a specific genre. It embodies a sense of vastness, solitude, and sounds stretched to the limits of the infinite. While I wouldn’t say the desert sound has always been a direct influence, the themes it represents have certainly resonated with me throughout my music.
The first thing you notice is the sweet tone of the sax but the rhythm section, if you can call it that, of guitar and drums is irrepressible. The cheeky, supple lines picked out by the guitar support the sax well, but it is all subject to moments of doubt. Playful electronics fizz around the main instruments and all these differing facets take it in turns to propel.