Curling Legs Following on from this pair’s recent collaboration on John Derek Bishop‘s last Tortusa album, here they venture further into the outer reaches of sound construction with Svein Rikard Mathisen‘s deconstructed guitar reacting with or gently cajoling the found sounds and electronics that John draws upon. The ten song titles can be read as one poem, part of a longer effort that Svein wrote over lockdown, and […]
Album review
2396 posts
Warp Thankfully for fans of Broadcast, their cups runneth over with three simultaneous releases of hard-to-find goodness. Warp are giving official releases to a compilation of BBC Sessions, as well as two smaller but in some respects far more fascinating insights into what made the group tick when pursuing their more outré musical experiments. As much as it is great to hear nascent versions of tracks like “The […]
Hubro This latest release from Hardanger fiddle player Nils Økland has been six years in the making as it was originally prepared for the Vossajazz 2016 event. The interim period has found him compiling just the right selection of players to do the pieces commissioned for that event justice. His chosen instrument always evokes images of the wild Nordic landscape, with the spare arrangements allowing the listener to […]
Rune Grammofon It has been a couple of years since Master Oogway‘s last outing and we all know how the intervening period has been for musicians. Instead of entering the studio, they have chosen to release a live recording made with flautist Henriette Eilertsen at Oslo’s jazz hotspot Kafé Hærverk; this performance, chosen from a series that they performed toward the end of 2020, primarily showcases the writing […]
Metropolis The storyteller returns, sardonically sniping at the last two years, its imagery vultured from the four-walled mirrors of the pandemic and the continuing sorry state of things. 2019’s Angel In The Detail was certainly a high point and this is definitely a continuation of that success, as the poppy enclave of “This Is The Museum” swims in a divine sing-along-ability, its musical backdrop prodding and poking a […]
Jazzland With Johan Lindvall‘s latest trio recording, the players expand upon the ground covered in 2019’s No City, No Tree, No Lake, but take Johan’s agitated precision in slightly darker and rather dreamier directions. The pieces on this album were all written by Johan around the piano, but the interplay between the three hints at the importance of each element. At points, piano, bass and drums are pecking […]
Discus For Mark Holub‘s latest album and his first for Discus, he has expanded on his usual collaborative numbers and put together his first group as bandleader since starting Led Bib twenty years ago. Here, the accent is more on his songwriting rather than the more collaborative efforts of Led Bib, but allows the chosen players to lend colour and texture to his compositions, all of which are […]
Play Loud! The Buchla 100 series is a modular synthesizer designed by Don Buchla in the 1960s. The instrument was championed by Suzanne Ciani, whose name, among many others, became synonymous with the instrument and what looked like a complex way you had to programme it.
Not Applicable Sam Britton‘s continuing experiments as Isambard Khroustaliov find him wandering further into a hinterland in which the way we experience sound as entertainment is taken out of a musical context and more into an aural tapestry or home listening sculpture. Using solely electronic means, familiar sounds and fragments of previously recognisable music are manipulated and distorted using AI and various synthesisers warped to such an extent […]
Hubro Benedicte Maurseth‘s love of her native landscape and the feeling of connectedness to her local Hardangervidda National Park informs a great deal of this latest album. Forming a trio with eminent compatriots Mats Eilertsen and Håkon Stene, Benedicte goes about evoking the correlations between music and hiking, or more accurately the Norwegian term vandring, which I guess translates closely to wandering.
Dais Closely following the success of Coil‘s first volume of Musick To Play In the Dark came this second helping, a thematic continuum that surfed further out there, saw the group collapsing back with the departure of Drew McDowall to a trinity of players, a fact which made for a tighter, more personally focused beast, on a collection where hindsight haunts your every listen.
Bureau B Both Etienne Jaumet and Fabrizio Rat are trained pianists, but they have done their level best to obfuscate that fact under layers of progressive experimentation that finds Etienne concentrating on modular synthscapes while Fabrizio treats the piano in a far more percussive manner than we might be used to, distending the strings as he hammers the keys.
Crammed Discs Crammed‘s reissue programme for their Made To Measure series continues unabated with the extraordinary collaboration between Iranian vocalist Sussan Deyhim and New York sound artist Richard Horowitz. Originally released in 1986, this album merged Sussan’s ululating vocal explorations with Richard’s fearless electronic textures and took the listener on a journey that somehow combined the chilled sand-blown wonder of the Sistan Desert with the gritty of New […]
Mute / BMG Suicide are an odd band. Considered legendary influencers today, at the time (at least, according to the excellent No Dogs In Space podcast series on them) both reviled and adored — people hated the music, but loved Alan Vega and Martin Rev, so kept giving them gigs. Some people got it, though, perhaps most notably Bruce Springsteen, whose album Nebraska bears all the bloodstains of […]
Discus Discus regular Nick Robinson has been experimenting with guitar looping for over twenty years and his experimental trio Das Rad finds opportunities to interweave them with Martin Archer and Steve Dinsdale. Here though on a rare solo outing, it is all about the guitar in all its incredibly varied manifestations.
Happy Robots Having been fortunate to catch Rodney Cromwell, the nom de plume of regular Happy Robots recording artiste Adam Cresswell, supporting Pram some years ago, I was looking forward to hearing his latest release and was not disappointed. This is his second album and continues his crusade, using ’80s synth sounds to reproduce his own soft, dreamlike world.
Blue Tapes Those prolific Ashtray Navigations have more lo-fi on your hi-fi – a ten-track odyssey that leaves your brain a fizzin’. The diode-soaked bag-piping of the first takes no prisoners, brings back that glittery glutton of “Bird’s Beak”, oozy with a plunge-pool of sticky sauce celebratories. Meditatives you tune into, adjust your antennas towards and the slippery eels of “The Tactic” make it far easier to disgust.
Constellation The cover image of the debut album by Montréal producer Kee Avil is certainly a disconcerting one. She sits at a desk in a sterile room with a paper mask of her own face over her actual face. It gives the sense of a twist of reality which runs through the ten tracks on Crease, merging abstract experimentation with sinuous rhythm and her own insinuating vocals.