Music For Nations Despite being fronted by ex-Gorgoroth drummer Einar Selvik and having in the past featured Gaahl on vocals, Wardruna are very much not a metal band. Oh sure, metalheads love them, and they did a bunch of stuff with Enslaved, but they are not a metal band. Because they don’t play metal. But… hold on and hear me out… entirely?
Album review
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The interest that Brave Words generated, even here on the other side of the world, found them courted by bigger labels and for their second, the recently reissued Submarine Bells, they found themselves on London derivative, Slash.
Phantom Limb / Dekorder / and forty-two others worldwide Senyawa apparently move in circles that include your Stephen O’Malleys and your Damo Suzukis and your Oren Ambarchis. But let’s not hold that against them. They’re an Indonesian duo that use… well, it’s not clear what of these sounds is orthodoxly “instrument” and what’s sound / processed noise / loops. Synths, junk percussion and vocals seem to be the […]
Courier On another of Courier‘s delightful cassette releases, we find Cousin Sharky trading in “sub-dimensional bass street electronics”. Although this goes part way to describing the sound contained therin, there is something at times distant and ancient about some of the wide variety of moods and textures on offer on Re-Evaluation Of The Macro-Cellular Communication System.
Zoharum And so, Phurpa are back. Like Russian Cenobites stepping slowly from the shadows and wreathed in a thick fug of juniper smoke, they are here once more to bathe us in their power and resonate our chakras in sympathy with the universal vibration. For those not already familiar with Phurpa’s low-end majesty, they are a “roving monastic choir” from Moscow, led by the enigmatic Alexey Tegin and […]
Discus Serial collaborators Tony Oxley and Cecil Taylor had this 2002 show recorded, and Discus have released it as a showcase for the kind of joyful power of which the duo was capable of. That it is the overriding sensation that comes from Being Astral And All Registers: joy; at times an utterly maniacal joy but joy nevertheless.
Hummus Swiss fourpiece Convulsif certainly understand the power of tension. On Extinct, their third album, the opener “Buried Between One” had me checking the CD player to make sure it was s till working, such was the space between the resonant bass notes. When you leave it to play and you are being lulled, all of a sudden the bass clarinet kicks in like a swarm in your […]
Disciples The beginnings of a thing are rarely seen, beyond its creator and co-conspirators, an initial spark so easily buried in the bushfire it nourishes; so it’s something of a privilege to soak up the plenitude of ideas that would give His Name Is Alive their distinctive play of light and shade. These recent archival finds have certainly been an eye-opener to the creative force that underpins the […]
Dais I’m not going to use the C word, because it’s been a long time since they ceased to be and we all have to stop thinking in those tired patterns, even me, who can’t. Agalma is a minor triumph all of it’s own, finding pathways through music that spins off and around what could broadly be called New Age and finds its own corners. This time around, […]
Courier Sound Courier Sound main-man Stuart Bowditch has chosen to wade into the “how far can we push twenty-three tracks in twenty-three minutes?” debate with his own retort to Alien and Eumig. Trading as USRNM, Stuart’s twenty-three minutes are wildly diverse and also stray furthest from the format of twenty-three one minute pieces.
Kranky This is a welcome repress for loscil‘s 2011 album coast/range/arc//. Inspired by the geography of the Cascadian Mountains, it was originally released on the aptly named Glacial Pace and was very much at home there, but the sort of slow motion grandeur in which the album revels definitely fits in with the Kranky aesthetic. The dramatic artwork showing ice capped mountain ranges and vast lakes is very […]
Eastgate / Cupdisc In the past couple of years or so, Tangerine Dream, featuring Thorsten Quaeschning, Ulrich Schnauss and Hoshiko Yamane, have released five improvised albums dedicated to TD founder Edgar Froese. These have been primarily live recordings made in 2018 during the band’s tour and have had more in common soundwise with the classic 1970s era of Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann. These sessions have had […]
Discus The Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere‘s fifth outing finds it expanded to an eight-piece and the bulk of the new album’s material being improvised over two days at the end of 2019. Those initial sessions and the subsequent solitary fettling and studio production over 2020 have resulted in an extraordinary odyssey of sound that encompasses structureless, textural drift and gliding, plus all points in between.
Courier Sound The insert that comes with the latest beautifully presented cassette from Courier Sound (both the cassette and outer cover are plum coloured) describes the sounds contained therein as “trying to capture and reimagine the healing process through repetition and sonic imperfection”. The manner in which this is attempted is to unfold a series of slowly revolving drone-based soundscapes that seem to hover out of the speakers, undulating […]
Planet Mµ I got sort of lost at dubstep, or maybe 2step, or ponycore, or chiptune, or skelefunk, or, um, footwork… I never properly learned to differentiate jungle from drum’n’bass, or to understand the point in which that became drill or drizzle or whatever the Hell it became. The continuum became the ‘nuum and everyone blamed each other for continuing, for not innovating, for not finding the right […]
Hubro Back in 2006, improv trio Huntsville were plying their trade at a Quebec music festival where they came across Wilco and over a period of time developed a mutual appreciation society. After appearing with them on stage a couple of times over they years, 2010 found the three travellers in the Wilco’s Chicago loft with Glenn Kotche and Nels Cline to see what might come of a […]
Interchill The latest release from esoteric multi instrumentalists Evan Fraser and Vir McCoy takes the listener on a series of journeys through distant lands, the likes of which we are unlikely to experience ion the usual melee of music making. Playing such extraordinary instruments as the jimbush, the sintir, the djeli-ngoni and the guimbri, amongst others, the images that they evoke are of dusty, unspoiled vistas and spiritual […]
Rocket I liked Pharaoh Overlord’s last release, but this newbie is on a whole different level. They’ve turned down that motorik dial a touch, to let in a banquet of euphoric synth work wrapped in a barrage of skewed disco flavours. A groovesome cocktail easily demonstrated by “Path Eternal’”s Giorgio Moroder romp