Zam Zam What an arresting cover, the naked singer holding up the ace of hearts and the inevitable ace of spades, “the most powerful cards in the deck”, as weathered metaphors for the prismed verve contained therein, compass points for the emotional minefield of first love, first heartbreak and the limbo between.
Album review
2424 posts
Buried Treasure For Revbjelde‘s long-awaited follow-up to 2020’s Hooha Hubub, Buried Treasure supremo and long-term Zyklus member Alan Gubby has been joined once again by Tim Hill on saxes and Peter Hope on vocals, as well as various other one-track guests. Having listened to and enjoyed the recent Zyklus compilation, it is no surprise that the variety of styles utilised over these twelve pieces is pretty impressive and […]
limitedNOISE For the latest issue of his Climbing In Circles series, drummer Will Glaser has brought in long-time collaborator Matthew Herd on sax and piano and trumpeter Alex Bonney, here stretching his electronic legs. Coming into the studio and using the opportunity to improvise as well as see how the studio can perform as a fourth element has led the trio down some interesting alleyways, with each of […]
One Little Independent Not content with having issued his LÜP album back in 2021, soundscape artist and musical machinery constructor Lomond Campbell has chosen to release a cassette of those loops that were utilised on the album. Spread over ninety minutes, these brief snippets give the impression one might have of watching a collage artist at work in the studio, cutting up the separate ingredients without really knowing […]
Discus After a three-year hiatus, Guy Segers is re-acquainting us with his mysterious part-improv, part-structured vehicle, the Eclectic Maybe Band. Once again, there is a deep well of respected musicians from whom he elicits some diverse and intuitive outings and which he then painstakingly stitches together in the studio to produce dramatic pieces of adventurous bearing, veering all over the map and taking in jazz, funk, minimalism and […]
Discus Ron Caines and Martin Archer reconvene here for their third Axis album, two years on from Dream Feathers and with a cast of collaborators that includes familiar faces and some new to the adventure, but all willing to lend their personal stamp to Ron’s suite of undulating shoreline visions. Spilt into three distinct suites, that sweet sax sound of his is ever present throughout Port Of Saints, […]
Crammed Discs This was quite a feat that Crammed Discs undertook to bring together Konono No1, Kasai Allstars, Deerhoof, Juana Molina, Wildbirds and Peacedrums and one of Skeletons to make an international supergroup melding that wild and evocative Kinshasa sound with some of the more esoteric of western alternative musical ideas.
HomAleph As much as I still enjoy the ‘”ded ded ded” years and esoteric tsunamis of yore, the warm melancholia of this latest offering is melting firmly in there, clawing a cottoned reflective that’s the perfect late night accompaniment to some moonlit Bordeaux. The butterflying bleed of the opening “If A City…”, a sombre sway pinned in stilted piano. Sparse keys striding between David Tibet’s words which weave […]
KrysaliSound Apparently there are only forty copies of the latest KrysaliSound collaboration between regular colluder Wil Bolton and label head Francis Gri, which seems crazy considering the soothing quality of the sounds contained therein and the current need for them as the world lurches from one crisis to another.
Wedge I saw one of Tinariwen’s earliest London shows. It was an exotic mixture of West African sounds and almost Jimi Hendrix guitar motifs blended together to cast a spell over the audience that sat there that night. So here I am, twenty years later, discussing some of the bands earliest recordings and reacquainting myself with that dizzying memory from all that time ago. These recordings are now […]
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 […]
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.