There's nothing nice or fun here, but the sheer apocalyptic rage is exhilarating. Remember how dirty Whitehouse felt the first time you heard them and didn't realise how much fun they were having?
Album review
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...allowing the octet to straddle the borders of swinging, classic jazz with a freer, more progressive approach, shading in the areas between and generally having a fine old time if the smiles on the album photograph are anything to go by.
That wonderful louche coolness that epitomised the last Terry album is still here in droves on their fourth longplayer, but you have the feeling that there is a little anger and frustration in the mix. The album pointedly mentions that it was recorded on unceded Aboriginal land and they seem to be drawing the listener's attention to elements of Australia's shady past.
This is the sixth album for the Brighton-based band of Lisa Jayne and Andy Pyne, and is a collection of tracks they have been piecing together between 2021-2022 and features nine songs.
Clearly, although the interconnectedness of the players is as rich as before, they have chosen to take things in a more contemplative and languid manner, letting the music to reflect back on the listener, raising the beaded curtain and allowing them to peer through into their uniquely glazed realm.
ÉlianeRadigue started her career way back in the 1950s, studying as part of the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC) in Paris, helmed by those frolicsome twin Pierres, Schaeffer and Henry, from whom she received a firm grounding in electroacoustic music and musique concrète. Gradually, however, Radigue’s interest in electronic music began to take her away from this orbit, and off onto a trajectory of her own, one which she has been following now for some five or six decades.
Computer Students have uncovered the only album produced by Boston-based Lynx, a turn of the millennium instrumental quartet whose silverfish flourishes and head-spinning interplay shared some elements with the likes of Don Caballero and Polvo from the Touch & Go camp and Sonna and Rumah Sakit from the Temporary Residence family...
...for his first release on the Glacial Movements label, it sounds as though he has uncovered a cocooned world, with electronic sounds thrumming and reverberating, half-heard through gauze, oblique movements that hint at places unknown...
Thanotosis Produktion I was intrigued to discover that, as well as performing in various small ensembles over a twenty-five year career, Tomas Hallonsten has offered his skills to such diverse acts as Fire! Orchestra and The Concretes. I can’t think of two more disparate acts and neither group really sheds any obvious light on the pieces compiled in Monolog, his first solo offering. He has a welcome home […]
Soul Song The pairing of bassist Yosef Gutman Levitt and guitarist Tal Yahalom is an intriguing one, both wishing to bring greater attention to those melodies of the Hasidim that might otherwise escape the attention of the average gentile listener. This is their second album together and here, they turn their considerable skills to nigunim — traditional wordless Jewish melodies — that were transcribed and recorded by Eli Rivkin […]
...here with All Hands_Make Light, he finally teams up with old friend and erstwhile Broken Social Scene vocalist Ariel Engle for a series of dawn-related gestures that hint at the drifting work with Kevin Doria, but allies that vibe with a kind of astral sea shanty atmosphere that finds the listener drifting with the pair through uncharted melodies and unexpected depths.
Discus This is the sixth Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere release in ten or so years, and the distant adventures on which they embark are always welcome. Still an eight-piece, Theta Six finds the ensemble distilling their ideas into shorter pieces, although where some of them end and some of them start is not always so obvious. But the essence of spatial exploration and yearning for ways to […]
They were recorded live at the NRK Studio and in places you can hear the appreciative audience. The list of personnel for Kork amounts to forty or so and that is players alone; so you would imagine that their sheer numbers would overwhelm the trio, but thankfully there is an incredible subtlety as well as variation to their additions which enhance and, if anything, draw fresh thoughts from Rymden.
The fact that this long gestation has neither disrupted the flow nor knocked them off course says a lot about the trio’s interaction, their ability to lock together and ride a groove to its inevitable conclusion; because for all the talk of consciously unfashionable, this music still rocks and maintains a momentum that surfs right through the album.
There is a dreamy quality to his sax playing on Balans and the opening track feels like an introduction to an inner world. Synth tones drift in a similar romantic Angelo Badalamenti vein. There is distance to the piano; but all is welcoming, even the soft flutter of the percussion. There is intimacy here, close-up sounds evolving just for you, a soft air of someone with something special to show.
It’s hard to believe both these albums — which first appeared as unearthed archive material as part of Faust‘s epic 1971-1974 boxed set in 2021 — stem from the early seventies; they feel so startlingly modern, totally out of touch (in the best way possible) with the music of the time.
Although you could locate R.Dyer’s musical world in the eerie folktronica of their contemporaries, I'm most reminded of Pram, post-rock’s contrary Brummie blatter-fiends. The kitchen-sink orchestrations, the macro-micro focus, the sense of a universe both galactic and mundane, not to mention the theremins, clarinets, microtonal slippage, and musical saws.
The synth and organ sounds vary greatly across the tracks and at some points sound like children's cartoon effects, while in other there is an almost sepulchral grandeur. The drums tend to shimmer in the background, gently propelling but never overstepping and the first side is over in no time; four tracks in ten minutes or so.