We Are Busy Bodies Library Voices member and sound artist Michael Scott Dawson has turned an unexpected bout of vertigo into the impetus for this series of stunningly minimalist vignettes that use generative synth tones to form slow moving cascades of ambient sound.
Album review
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KrysaliSound Paweł Pruski is a Polish ambient artist interested in the search for what lies between words, between moments and how to capture those elusive spaces in some sort of sound form. Over thirty-five minutes and six pieces on Between, various atmospheres are evoked, but each one feels as though the basis is a long, flat landscape, with hazy blue skies and the roll of purplish clouds far […]
Sulatron Freak Valley is always one of those festivals that I’ve wanted to attend, but have never had the opportunity to do so. If I had gone, I would have most certainly chosen one of the two years that Electric Moon played there as I would be guaranteed one trip out into the cosmos. Here we have their live set from the 2019 festival, and what an awe-inspiring […]
Discus Martin Pyne spends a lot of his time preparing music for use in a dance studio environment, so during this recent period where everybody is shut up in their own little universes, he has found his mind wandering. Images of a lonely musician adrift in an empty theatre bereft of performers abound in this latest collection of lovely stripped back pieces that utilise percussion and vibes, with […]
Fire For some extraordinary reason, it has taken thirty years for Dons Savage to follow up the seminal early work of Dead Famous People with a full length album. Fire Records tracked her down and put her in the studio where it seems the years just dropped away. Her knack for perfect melody and succinct pop bite is now aligned with the sort of precise production and baroque […]
Sub Rosa I absolutely love this type of thing. I’ve had a real appetite for everything electroacoustic ever since hearing Karlheinz Stockhausen at a formative age, and diving straight in to Agitations, the first track is a satisfying monster. “Abscission One” is an immersive aperture your mind falls right into, a mirage ride of mutating drone whose chaffing frictions visually burn, elliptically bend in a figure of eight […]
Lightning Archive Michael J Sheehy‘s first solo album in ten years is one of spectral, slow beauty; the creeping, acoustic melancholy hiding a new found zest for life that seems to put much distance between it and the more desperate and depraved output of Dream City Film Club and to a lesser extent Miraculous Mule. Here, buoyed by the recent birth of a child and the opportunity for […]
Sub Rosa The group responsible for last year’s (rather excellent) Noise Of Art CD continue their no melody, no rhythm, no harmony ethos with this release that documents the carrion buzz of thirteen alternating radio sets, vintage ones dating from between 1935 and 1961.
Marionette I listened to this this morning and the rabbits came. Bear with me. I was listening on headphones, which seems the most appropriate way to access this and the rabbits started to emerge from the hedgerows as I walked through the field to work. They couldn’t hear, unless they were the psychic rabbits we’ve heard so much about in these parts, but they understood their role in […]
Zoharum The dusty kinetics of Hotel Bravo‘s opener “Hotel Paris” slope into your ear in skipping recoils, navigated by quiet words and whispered replies, periodically broken by a taut Japanese-flavoured melodic and pattering synth-washes. An ambient lamp light falls into the fragmented flux of “When The Chimes End” its stuttering percussives taking the dusty grooves of the first track to milk a purposeful sparseness that bleeds throughout this […]
Jazzland Rymden, the post-jazz trio of Bugge Wesseltoft, Dan Berglund and Magnus Öström has released its second foray into the outer limits, hot on the heels of 2019’s Reflections And Odysseys, and it continues in a similar vein but pushes the explorations and interesting syntheses a little further abroad. As essentially a piano, bass and percussion trio, you could be forgiven for thinking that there is a limited […]
New Heavy Sounds Abyss is the second proper album from the dark witch doom duo BlackLab from Osaka in Japan, and carries on their mission to pummel any pretenders to the doom throne to death. As a duo the sound is big and live, I would imagine it would scream into your ears from the pits of the darkest beyond. Its a sound that unnerves you as much […]
Phantom Limb These Charms May Be Sung Over A Wound is the first album that Richard Skelton has released that is not through his own label, and is a continuation of his journey towards the perfection of a certain sort of elemental soundscape. Although the titles of the pieces contained here refer to Anglo-Saxon “leechdoms” or remedies, for me they are not just bound to the earth, but […]
Big Potato (Europe) / Graveface (North America) There is a sense of joy to the cheesy fairground keyboards that open up Moon Attendant‘s debut album One Last Summer. The gentle drums and sleepy vocal delivery full of secrets give this first track a sense of a bedsit Squeeze, with a window overlooking the Brighton seafront and a view of the spring tides through lace-curtained windows. That warm charm […]
99Chants Another day, another re-issue of an overlooked female composer. That might seem glib, but there’s a lot of it doing the rounds at the moment. And let’s be fair, composition is still too frequently male-heavy. Bunita Marcus is (unfortunately) known as one of those adjacent figures — a New York figure known by people in various scenes, with a raft of compositions under her belt and a […]
Kranky There is something about MJ Guider‘s sound that puts her perfectly at home on Kranky. There is a sense of drifting, of distant sounds clouded in fogs of reverb that make everything feel limitless. But there is also an intensity to the metallic rhythms that put you on guard. Sour Cherry Bell is the follow up to 2016’s Precious Systems and continues Melissa Guion‘s exploration into the […]
Fire Tobin Sprout is probably best known as part of Guided By Voices, the oh-so prolific Dayton, Ohio band. The fact that he ever found time for a solo career is testament to his desire to release something that stood apart from GBV. Although no longer a part of that band, it has been four years since the last album The Universe And Me graced the shelves. Empty […]
Temporary Residence On first hearing Sparkle Division‘s debut album To Feel Embraced, which is a dusty fusion of lounge jazz and sleepy beats, one wouldn’t immediately figure it for a William Basinski project, but he is the man at the helm — although it is as much studio assistant Preston Wendel‘s outing, as his own work was the inspiration for Basinski. He digs his sax out for a […]