Constellation The latest release from Efrim Menuck finds quite a dramatic change to the sound we have come to expect from him. Teaming up with Growing‘s Kevin Doria has seen a move away from the kind of grandiose string arrangements of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and A Silver Mt Zion, and more of an embrace of the kind of slow moving, subtly evolving guitar soundscapes for which Growing […]
Saustex It’s a band you know, but not for being this band. And their press thingy doesn’t mention that previous band. So I’m not going to either.
Svart By the looks of the duo on the back of the cover and the long list of electronic machines that Timo Kaukolampi plays listed on the inside, with Tomi Leppänen having just drums and a Juno, I figured maybe K-X-P were some sort of twenty-first century take on Silver Apples. I was not too far off the mark, but the vocals that appear on IV are buried […]
Blue Tapes Henry Plotnick‘s excursion on Blue Tapes from 2014 (when he was thirteen) is a meditative collection of pieces that are about slow build, decay and regeneration. Over the course of an hour and six tracks, Henry shows his abilities with a wide variety of instruments and atmospheres that makes for an intensely satisfying, if at times bewildering, collection.
Kscope “All art is solitary and the studio is a torture area” – Alexander Liberman. There is a certain type of melancholia about Giancarlo Erra’s Ends that has its roots in a very British and American form of ambient music. It is that rare thing that manages to capture the beauty and the sadness of a place, and Ends also offers the sense of memory and moments past […]
Truant For Kinbrae‘s second album, the brothers Truscott have chosen to weave an aural tapestry of the River Tay. It serves as a kind of love letter and story as to the impact the river has had on their lives, and their interactions with the surrounding landscape. Newly started label Truant has issued this on lovely 12″ vinyl with dramatic photographs on the inner sleeve
Back2Forward The long-awaited début album by London’s Flesh Tetris, Wrong Kind Of Adults, is finally here. And Flesh Tetris is really quite a name, isn’t it? Echoes of Cronenbergian erotica funnelled through retro videogaming, an ambience which translates directly to their music.
Upset The Rhythm Hot on the heels of the Drecksound LP, the third NOTS LP finds Hash Redactor‘s rhythm section Charlotte Watson and Meredith Lones reconvening with singer / guitarist /keyboardist Natalie Hoffmann for another high-intensity post-punk charge, smashing what came before out of the way.
Aurora Borealis Gold Are The Ashes Of The Restorer evokes an eldritch combination of screaming wind-tunnel black metal and epicly bombastic post-post-rock of the Explosions In The Sky variety. Given Mories De Jong‘s penchant for all things bleakly symphonic and immensely mordant-sounding, that seems like a fair starting point for beginning to describe just how much of a rinsing-out Golden Ashes give the listeners’ collective brainpan here.
Discus For Discus‘s eightieth release, Martin Archer has decided to go solo again, while also attempting to reproduce some of the sounds of his hornweb sax quartet that was active between 1983 and 1993. Not only that, it appears also as a kind of love letter to those saxophonists that have influenced him over the years of his playing, from the likes of Paul Desmond and Lester Young […]
London 3-5 May 2019 Friday: Gary The May bank holiday is normally a time for the revival of pagan customs in Britain. These can be found from local village morris dancers to the crowning of the May Queen in Glastonbury. For a few days, Britain takes on the stance of people being an extra in The Wicker Man while also drowning their innards in vast quantities of booze.
KrysaliSound The latest release from Tropic Of Coldness is their first for KrysaliSound and builds on the slow motion soundscapes of 2018’s Framed Waves. Spread over four gently undulating pieces, Maps Of Reason unfolds at a pace that is beyond leisurely, and serves to lull the listener with its subtle washes and natural movement.
Thrill Jockey For Dommengang‘s third album for Thrill Jockey, it sounds as though they threw all their stuff into the back of the car and blew their LA home in favour of a wild ride into the desert, forsaking the concrete gleam for some dusty widescreen excesses. The scree of feedback that opens the album is a welcome reminder of their rock roots, but also that they are […]
Thrill Jockey The bringing together of two serial collaborating drummers can only be a good thing, and when they have the pedigree of Oneida‘s Kid Millions and Uniform‘s Greg Fox, we must be in for a treat. Greg plays drums on Biting Through, but he also concentrates on creating a synthesized backdrop for each of the six drum-crazy tracks appearing on the album.
Farmadelica Silver Relics are a duo from New York who ply a kind of synth- and rhythm-orientated take in classic American rock song-writing. Consisting of songwriter Alex Sepassi on guitar and synths, amongst other things, and Justin Alvis on drums, they formulate a sound that is redolent of the sort of film imagery that anyone could recognise from the last thirty years; those enormous storm drains that run […]
Interchill It’s incredible to think that Suns Of Arqa have been making music for forty years now. I first came across them at the start of the 1990s when they were being lumped in with other ambient dance artists such as The Orb, Future Sound of London and Banco de Gaia as that scene exploded in 1991. So here is Heart Of The Suns, a thirteen-track celebration
Rosélie Records Child ballerina turned singer-songwriter Bethia Beadman was transplanted from the West Country to the flat lands of Lincoln, and from there plies her trade, releasing albums of emotional and sweeping drama, the latest of which even includes Mike Mills of REM fame on keyboards, guitar and vocals. Having spent time as a member of Hole‘s touring band and part of Circulus, as well as writing and […]
Courier Sound Suffolk micro-label Courier Sound have released another of their beautifully presented cassettes. Coming in a lime green hand-made box and lime green cassette, with Quality Street wrappers and lovely little card inserts, it looks a treat, but it totally belies the aural contents. The fact that the wrappers are salvaged from “several years of reluctant Christmas obligation” should warn the listener