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 […]
Album review
2424 posts
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.
Attenuation Circuit has been releasing their limited-run experimental releases for over twenty years with no sign of running out of enthusiasm or willing contributors to broaden our aural palates. Two recent releases go a long way to showing how diverse the releases can be.
A dreamy concoction penned in acoustic and electric guitar with some dazzling piano touchpoints, Mars Is A Ten's tracks seem to beam with an off-the-cuff straight to tape immediacy / intimacy that nestles in there; remains with you.
Joined by various guests to add colour and character to the mysterious surrealism of the story, Aksak Maboul weave a genre-defying web around the listener, guided onward only by Veronique's recounting, the thread that draws the unwitting ever deeper.
The album features two mammoth slabs of psychedelic rock, with the tracks by each band clocking in at over twenty minutes each.
For the inaugural release on Clonmell Jazz Social, they have called upon guitarist Harry Christelis to convene a quartet of upcoming players that will do justice to a series of elegant drifting creations that hover somewhere around the border between jazz and minimalism, ever-moving but also always gently steering the listener towards soft, unexpected landscapes.
All their separate concerns coming together to create something new, each throwing fragments in the pot, searching for cohesion. Finding that all-important communal bite, Stratagems picks up from their last collaboration Facilitators, sees this enthusiasm bearing fresh fruit.
However, we knew that the music was inside his soul; he wouldn’t remain idle for long and would soon be strapping on the guitars and firing up the synthesisers to create new music and take us on further trips out there beyond infinity.
Steve's voice gives an unusual perspective, a fine enunciation always surpassed by the words. You feel him tasting them, rolling them around like brandy and then carefully allowing them out, each word ideally formed. The players, himself included, swirl a magical, churning mixture, hypnotic dereliction, groaning grey and often uncomfortable, but only because that is what the message demands.