Tapete In a world that seems to have gone completely crazy, it feels like the perfect time to welcome back Bobby Conn after too long away. Tapete clearly felt that the world wasn’t the same without him and on his debut album for them, and first since 2012’s Macaroni, he has wrapped himself up with his regular collaborators and boy, do those guys really bring the funk when […]
Bureau B Loving the way that Felix Kubin and Hubert Zemler instinctively dovetail here as CEL, manage to claw out something so addictive, full of dissonant directions.
Peeler Collectress have been experimenting with their twenty-first century chamber music for the bet part of twenty years. Since the release of 2014’s Mondegreen, the group no longer find themselves within the Brighton orbit, and that distance plus life’s other opportunities, has found them slightly changing the way they work. Snatching opportunities where they came, they would reconvene to thrash out the bones of the pieces here on […]
Play Loud! Play Loud! proudly presents Tapetopia, a series of vinyl releases documenting East Germany’s underground tape culture of the ’80s. The first two volumes are a window on the vibrancy of this subculture
City Slang I remember first listening to Tindersticks‘ extraordinary Marbles EP on the strength of a Melody Maker review back in 1993, and falling love with their slightly shambling but immensely textured and moving songs.
London 29 February 2020 ChopChop’s music snakes round its orator like a slippery thing, cymbals replaced by the clatter of hubcaps on toms, cutlery-jammed guitars – there’s an itchy jazzy vibe to the melodics, fuelled by a fertile imagination full of bruised shapes and punkish angles.
Disco-ordination The idea behind The Fantasy Orchestra is one of enthusiasm, inclusion and love that has drawn two groups of people together, one based in Bristol and one in Paris, with the intention of giving an orchestral update to some of the more unusual and unexpected songs in the world canon. Started by Bristolian Jesse Vernon of the much-missed Liftmen, amongst others, the orchestra has embraced amateur players […]
Subcontinental Indian pianist Aman Mahajan has been working on the pieces that make up his album Refuge since 2005. It is a musical diary of sorts, and one that reflects the personality of this idiosyncratic player. There is an inner sense to his playing that, although it nods to jazz, Indian folk and classical, very much breathes with its own life.
Founder of the N&B Research Digest label and member of Night Prospekt, F.R.U.I.T.S., Volga, ASTMA and the Fake Cats Project among others, Alexei Borisov has been a key member of the Russian underground since the Soviet era. He is also the curator of the Noise And Fury festival of experimental music at the DOM Cultural Centre in Moscow.
Affairs Of The Heart On Cascade Lakes‘ first album, the sound has a kind of ragged heart beat to it, the opening track driven by bells and a steady rhythm, with a quavering guitar line and the sort of vocal delivery that brings to mind early Arcade Fire; the touch of melancholy in the chord structure, an evocative sweep of strings sitting quietly in the background.
Rocket When receiving this new album by enigmatic motorik outfit Och, I had hoped that the band had taken their name from the well-known Scottish linguistic trope. More specifically, I entertained vague hopes that they were perhaps (as I am) huge fans of the late Fulton MacKayi and, tuning in, had become so captivated by his expostulations of “Och, Fletcher” in much-beloved Seventies prison sit-com Porridge, that they […]
Hubro Hot on the heels of last year’s Salika, Molika, Erlend Apneseth has gathered around him another supergroup of Nordic heavyweights. Fellow Hubro artistes Stein Urheim, Anja Lauvdal, Hans Hulbækmo and Fredrik Luhr Dietrichson, along with accordionist Ida Løvli Hidle. They join together on Fragmentarium to flesh out some of Erlend’s compositions that were initially written for the Kongsberg Jazz Festival
Habibi Funk Habibi Funk‘s Jannis Stürtz unearths a true lost classic of Lebanese folk rock on Mouasalat Ila Jacad El Ard. Lebanon, 1976: A vicious civil war, spanning fifteen years with over 120,000 casualties, is just beginning to rage. The weakened state was invaded by Syria, an occupation lasting until 2005. Dissidents were forced to flee, leaving their homelands and residing in exile. Lebanese folk singer Issam Hajali […]
KrysaliSound Ishmael Cormack entered the thirteenth century church of St Andrews near his rural Somerset home with a view to laying down a series of improvised sketches using tape loops and found sounds, trying to release natural but subtle polyrhythms from these unlikely sources. The overall effect, spread across the six tracks contained herein, is one of a series of faint, impressionist watercolours, rendered so subtly that at […]
Discus Martin Archer is one very busy man. As well as running the Discus label, he seems intent on putting out album after album with various different collaborators and under numerous styles. It doesn’t feel like so very long since the Anthropology Band‘s album rose like an incredible new sun over my world and I have been living with it since, trying to put its two-and-a-half hours of […]
Celebrating a decade of promoting emerging and underground music gigs, the Chaos Theory collective takes over sprawling double venues at The Dome and Boston Music Room in Tufnell Park, north London for their Ten Years of Chaos festival for one day only on 29 February 2020. In advance of the festivities, Freq asked a few of the day’s acts about chaos, festivals and how they intermingle. Zu, Chantal […]
Pumpedita Avi Pfeffer is an American-based composer working from the classical tradition but using those tropes transposed into the world of electronic music. His current album A Lasting Impression consists of four sweeping and transformative pieces that are tied together by the very nature of their journey.
three:four / Meakusma A beautiful lullaby-esque soundscape, this. The soothing French vocals a paper boat floating out on a lilting tide of gentle disquiet, instrumentals that subtly blur boundaries. Something that’s especially true of “L’inexploré”’s panoramas, with an avant classical verve where the fragments of narration ease you elsewheres. Dora’s invited lots of like-minded musicians to help her sculpt this recording