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 […]
Album review
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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.
Redenetic Daryl Robinson’s Mōshonsensu creation is all about the construction of elaborate soundworlds that whisk the listener away from the everyday and place them amid unknown machinery and mysterious animals, strange sounds emanating from abandoned structures, sand-borne decay and the solitude of the vast prairie.
Elevator Lady First of all, Brian Molko is still, twenty-some years after I ever first saw him, one of the most physically perfect humans I have ever seen. Does this matter in the scheme of things? Well, when you consider his strange voice, almost too nasal and sometimes too non-singeresque, the repetitive-on-purpose lyrics and the way he just eclipses everything else to do with his own profession, it […]
Discus This current project of the classically trained duo of pianist and poet Robert Mitchell and cellist Shirley Smart came about after conversations back in 2014. Their desire to merge the structure of classical with the freedom of improv led to this collaboration, in which Robert also wished to address his family’s history and their relationship to the Windrush scandal in a way that is accessible yet emotive.
Purple Trap Keiji Haino has rarely been one to avoid portentous titles and boy howdy has he stayed on-brand with My Lord Music I Most Humbly Beg Your Indulgence In The Hope That You Will Do Me The Honour Of Permitting This Seed Called Keiji Haino To Be Planted Within You. Away from Fushitsusha, Haino has a reputation for playing an extensive range of instruments — Shruti boxes, […]
Discus Martin Archer from Discus mentions that there are very few solo bass albums being released these days; but thankfully Michael Bardon, erstwhile member of Shatner’s Bassoon, has chosen to correct that. Over ten wildly varied pieces on The Gift Of Silence, he pushes both the bass and cello and our understanding of what sounds can be wrenched from them to their limits.
Jazzland Since starting Jazzland twenty-five years ago, Bugge Wesseltoft has dipped in and out of collaborations and various artist projects with regularity, finding different modes of expression depending on the players involved. Here, shorn of any outside involvement apart from assistance from Håkon Kornstad on a couple of pieces, we find Bugge at the piano allowing his mind to wander, seeing where this freedom and time to ponder […]
Basin Rock The first solo album from erstwhile Phantom Band guitarist Duncan Marquiss treads a lovely line between the craggy, lonesome vistas of the highlands and the sweeping, metronomic pulse of middle Europe. Spread over seven long tracks, Wires Turned Sideways In Time moves between spare fingerpicked acoustic melancholy and heartbeat-riven synthscapes, managing to tie the two together in a warm bed of panoramic mystery.
Cooking Vinyl Back in the distant ’80s, Loop’s heavy sound was a breath of fresh air. A hazy comfort blanket surfing a scissored sustain that a few years later and three albums in simply imploded, its nucleus split straight down the middle and slung-shot out into various new distractions. As if success had become a catalyst for change, Robert Hampson ditched his guitar for the seriously cerebral electronics […]