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
Blue Tapes The church-like drone that opens Cadu Tenório‘s stint on Blue Tapes lends a feeling of solace with just a hint of accordion japes in the tones. It is a reverential and gentle opening that unfolds slowly, infinite and flat like a coastal landscape, merging with the sombre greys of sea and sky, undulations that change features in miniscule ways.
Important / Cassauna On Arrival Vibrate, Italian post-rock magicians Larsen conjure the rhythmajick of Z’ev in a sprawling twenty-five-minute chamber rock meditation. If you were to observe the floorplan of the Temple of Amun at Karnak, Egypt’s sprawling 250-acre edifice, you might assume it was built willy-nilly over the span of its nearly 2,000 year construction. After all, how could there have been a premeditated construction plan for […]
Phoenix G As a house and techno producer, Mr G has been jamming the dancefloor for the best part of twenty years with releases on an array of labels as well as those on his own Phoenix G label. He seems to have spent most of 2019 cruising around the world on a strange and love-filled trip, the culmination of which is this set of six tracks that […]
The I-go-I-e benefit album is now available from Wave Folder. Based on environmental and other sounds recorded by Radek Rudnicki (of RPE Duo) which were then interpreted by twenty-one different electronic artists and then assembled into an album. Ichi-go-ichi-e (一期一会) means “treasuring the unique nature of a moment, each moment being different, distinctive, a once-in-a-lifetime experience”.
Cardinal Fuzz (Europe) / Man Hand (North America) Haven’t heard from these guys in a while, then suddenly this pops onto the 2020 radar in ultra-limited quantities. It’s been an age, the last official Sunburned Hand Of The Man release must have been the one on Ecstatic Peace back in 2010, but as always they’ve been peppering the intervening years with a steady flow of hard-to-get-your-hands-on CDrs and […]
Out Continuing in the necessary Ut re-issue programme, their second LP and the first studio album to appear on Blast First, is given the deserved re-release treatment. In Gut’s House saw them taking a few steps beyond Conviction. Although still self-produced, this time they took assistance from that doyen of the ’80s underground, Paul Kendall, who produced Loop, Thee Hypnotics and Wire,among many others. The production feels clear […]
Phantom Limb A long-overdue retrospective of Venezuelan synthesist and ambient composer Miguel Noya is always going to be something rather special. However, as Noya has been active since the 1980s, giving a broad perspective and overview of his work will always be a difficult task. As most composers work from album to album, a compilation like Canciónes Intactas — especially one that covers such a vast period — […]
Adaadat Yan Hart-Lemonnier‘s second release for Adaadat pretty much lives up to its title. Le Partage Des Griefs translates as ‘the sharing of grievances’ and there is something of a relentless kind of grief-stricken melancholy that infects the synthetic sounds unleashed here.
Disciples Another archival trip into His Name Is Alive‘s formative years, and a follow up to last year’s excellent All The Mirrors In The House, Return To Never is an altogether darker/noiser joy, that (as on the previous LP) spreads out as a whole, although segmented into individual tracks.
Mottomotto Kyoto’s super-pop prog virtuosi Viva Sherry are back with a delightful 10″ vinyl release on the ever-reliable Mottomotto and considering it six tracks come in at about twenty-five minutes, it is extraordinary how much ground they manage to cover in that short period of time. 2017’s Obento Music was a similar formula, and I can only imagine that they don’t think that the general public is able to […]
San Francisco residents Thomas Dimuzio, Tom Djll and Gino Robair are three leading lights in the world of improvisation and modular synthesis. All have been active on the ever-bountiful Bay Area experimental music scene for many years, and are interviewed below about their individual contributions to the Modulisme sessions organised by Philippe Petit. Their answers reveal the many and varied approaches, options and possibilities that the form offers […]
577 Records The latest release from drummer Tony Irving and sax player Massimo Magee is a forty-eight-minute blast-off of improv craziness that holds the listener by the neck and very rarely lets go. Although the sax starts warm and smoky on opener “Vitriol”, as you can imagine by the title, that subtlety doesn’t last very long and begins to scrape and scree out of the speakers, leaving a […]
Rosehill Teetering between funk-pop, electro-ambience and performance poetry, ChopChop have long been one of Brighton’s most exciting live bands. With blistering riffs that dissolve in and out of polyrhythmic chaos, an intriguing array of instruments (conch shells, bagpipes, homemade samplers) and the lit-fuse stage presence of front-man Xelís de Toro, they were never going to make a boring album. The real question was always going to be just […]
Nonplace Having relocated to New York City, drummer Jochen Rueckert has formed a new quartet around the axes of Lage Lund on guitar, Matt Penman on bass and Mark Turner at the saxophones. Wolff Parkinson White‘s new Small Favours EP on Nonplace features guest vocals
Blue Underground Blue Underground‘s 4k restoration of Lucio Fulci‘s The House By The Cemetery is a handsome beast indeed. Cloaked in a faux-3D lenticular cover, it consists of three discs — two blu rays featuring the movie itself and a really quite ridiculous amount of extras, and a CD of Walter Rizzati‘s soundtrack. The movie itself forms the final part of what is sometimes called Fulci’s Gates Of […]
Courier The latest beautiful offering from Courier with its own hand-cut sleeve is a collaboration between old pals Nick Dawson and Stuart Bowditch, who were responsible for the genesis of the Silhouette Cameo 3 compilation that was released last year. In keeping with that album’s vibe of familiar sounds taken out of context and sent flailing into orbit, this latest improv collaboration has been stewing (no pun intended) […]
Sulatron Zone Six comprises Electric Moon members Sula Bassana and Komet Lulu and former Embryo guitarist Rainer Neeff. They were founded back in 1997 and have intermittently done gigs and released albums throughout that time. Kozmik Koon is a huge ever-growing pulsating universe of sound dedicated to space rock stalwart and all-round good guy Kozmik Ken and the late Richard van Ess, a friend of the band. It […]