We make our way towards it and spy the ancient instruments intone slowly and tremulously, and a roll of thunder embodies a warning of things yet to come. Water seeps in threatening to engulf as Maja's wordless utterances throw you somewhere completely new, just the Hardanger fiddle and bells indicating we are still within the warm reach of the campfire.
Album review
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Diverse trumpeter and flugelhorn player Charlotte Keeffe is a restless soul and one who itches for musical opportunities. For this album, she has has re-assembled the quartet that appeared on the previous album Right Here, Right Now and thrown them into the studio to see what can come from this immediate interaction.
Blue Tapes I’ve yet to see this band live; life always conspires against it, but I’m glad this tantalising snapshot from their 2022 Café OTO show has made it out there. A beautifully packaged Blue Tapes item that amplifies the primal weirdness of Staraya Derevnya‘s studio recordings, takes things to a whole new level. The transformative shivers hit early and stay throughout, each track lifting out of an […]
That stop-start mania leaps at you right off the bat. They turn on the taps and liquid craziness assails us immediately; that searing acoustic drive, the internal rhythms and prettiness of the drums and guitar together, ever entwining and ever expanding, twisted into unexpected shapes. The cheval gallop, the occasional strut of the guitar or its dizzying cyclical patterns, or even the Spanish-inflected modesty. It is all here.
For this solo album he’s clearly built on his Erasure-ing — it’s not a swerve into cumbia or zydeco, but it’s also not ‘Erasure minus vocals’. Tempos are typically on the slower end of things and melodies are perhaps more pronounced. Critically though, there isn’t a moment on the album where melody disappears entirely.
A track that finds "Blass Schlafen Rabe"’s sleeping raven caught in the tumble of some synthesised ambulance / car horn honk. A Keystone Cops comedy that sizzles in its simplicity, finds Holger a zombified poet in a driven piano gallop beset in peculiar interjections and shifting signatures that insistently flood you with plenty of pigeon-toed footwork.
It really feels like a step back in time with the opening bossa beat straight out of an enormous rhythm machine, standing in the corner of a sunken-floor living room with shag pile carpets and orange wallpaper. The comfort of the sax, the sway of the background strings, the title "Have Some Punch"; it all evokes a hip party, ladies in flowing nylon dresses sashaying around the drinks cabinet.
For Portuguese guitarist Pedro Velasco's first solo outing on guitar, he is searching deep within himself, looking at memory and solitude and how that can be interpreted in a solo guitar manner. Working simply through an eight-track and a mixer, he has produced a wealth of emotionally resonant vignettes that linger in the mind long after the sound has dissipated.
Although perhaps better known as one half of Suicide, Martin's solo career was sporadic but he was heavily invested in it, the tracks at points ranging from rock'n'roll inflected flurries through drifting desert atmospheres right through to impressionistic industrial workouts. Although often made with the cheapest of instruments, the range of ideas and textures was vast.
After Boris invited them to join them on stage for a rendition of "Akuma No Uta", a certain chemistry emerged that led to ideas for an album collaboration. Following twelve months of preparation, they went into the studio and this is the result, nine tracks of Boris’s trademark proto- and doom metal merged with Uniform’s own brand of aggressive noise.
The foursome gathered together for the inaugural Fjall release From The Rough Hill has a veritable cornucopia of instruments, with Martin Archer on a variety of reeds and electronics, Jan Todd playing three forms of harp plus the psaltery, and percussionists Fran Comyn and Richard Jackson including bells, bowls, gongs and field recordings.
Esoteric Recordings remastering of The Complete Liberty Recordings is a welcome reissue of the core canon of High Tide recordings, the two key albums — Sea Shanties and High Tide — and a third disc of demos and unreleased materials. Some of the demos have appeared before as bonus releases on earlier CD reissues.
Paradise Of Bachelors Considering who was involved in this Setting album, I was surprised and pleasantly so by the long-form drone and distant percussives that emanated from the speakers. Ironically to me, it sounded more like rising than setting, and while the offset tones generated by synth, harmonium and others hint at Germanic intervention, the jostling percussion brings it back to the bristling woodlands of wild America, folk […]
Not Applicable Drummer and composer Tim Giles has been in and out of bands and collaborations for the last twenty-five years. This is his first solo album in that time and is a labour of love that he has been concocting over the last five years, marrying his penchant for loose rhythm with more abstract glitchy electronic textures, taking in dub, minimalism and ambient flavours, but always ensuring […]
This final section of a possible trilogy also coincided with his mother's passing and her spirit looms large over the proceedings, her recorded voice appearing at points, warmly recalling past events and putting the future into some perspective. Live, Murmurists can number as many as 100; but here for ithyphall.brel.gory is not the same as you, the players either cast as orators or musicians number into the thirties with some doubling up in both roles.
Bass player and composer Vilhelm Bromander's list of groups and affiliates is as long as my arm, and due to his presence and standing in the experimental jazz scene has managed to draw quite an impressive collection of collaborators around him for his latest adventure, a spiritually minded thirteen-piece that drifts effortlessly through three very different scenarios, highlighting the joy and melancholy inherent in the chosen instruments.
The sounds here are absolutely lovely, incubate a subtle magistry from the offset as ‘They Will Come" gracefully swirls the head. A buoyant dance that holographically harpoons you to its harmonic gravity of synthy wash and plucked melody.
His hard work of re-revitalising the accordion, putting it into a more contemporary situation, has really paid off and the six pieces chosen here veer all over the place but nearly always with accordion centre stage and with good reason.