Bleakness And Beauty In North Wales ... evokes the solitude and temporality of life in a series of beautifully rendered yet distant pieces. Travelling all the way to North Wales to enable this musical experience is part of his journey and it feeds into the chilly grandeur of the seven drone-based selections.
Album review
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The Etienne Manchon Trio has been pushing its progressive take on jazz since 2018. This is their third album with the settled line-up of Etienne on piano and synths, Clement Daldosso on bass and Théo Moutou on percussion. On Weird Life, they take this opportunity to fully exploit their delightful interplay on ten Etienne originals and a run through Wayne Shorter's "Iris". Although they are nominally a jazz trio, a lot of other influences filter their way into the sound and it makes for an album that never settles, as it constantly searches for some fresh way of musically describing their relationship.
With 2025 already feeling somewhat weighed down with algorithmically-enhanced gloom, we’re undoubtedly going to need some sheer aural abandonment to get through the remaining pre-spring period… and indeed beyond. Enter then two new releases following divergent trajectories, aligned towards taking us away from it all.
Saxophonist James Mainwaring has teamed up with bassist Dave Kane and drummer Emil Karlsen, and as The Exu they have laid down twelve short shots in the arm that find the trio raking through their record collections and coming up with a suite that defies logic and sees them chasing whichever muse might briefly appear.
Instrumentation is almost entirely based on traditional folk instrumentation of the early mediæval period, some of which has been recreated based solely on visual and textual descriptions. Think of it as a kind of proto-folk combined with experimental archaeology. The vocals are almost entirely sung in Old Norse, but thankfully a translation of the lyrics is included. Birna is their sixth full album release.
JP Hasson's Hasco Enjoyments is a curious affair; an evocative desert-minded one-man operation that draws on friends and fellow travellers to flesh out his solitary vignettes. JP's main instruments are baritone guitar, synth and Wurlitzer, and their sparse, measured sound seems at odds with some of the titles; opener "It's OK To Put Ketchup On A Hot Dog, If That's What You Like To Eat" is a pastoral guitar strum accompanied by fluttering flute.
Hornorkesteret have been around more than a quarter of a century. What they do is to make instruments out of reindeer antlers and moose skulls. They are mostly bowed string instruments, though drums feature also (no word on what the skins are made out of on my press release). That description is flat and dry and gives no idea of what an awesome sound they make.
Split into six sections, Recording Rites starts as a progressive, surreptitious unfurling, the instruments gradually awakening into a half-light of squeals, brushes and percussive hints. You can sense the players swapping glances, offering opportunities, little tasters of what is to come.
Once again there is an impromptu group consisting of Yonathan Avishai on piano, Itay Sher on guitar and Yoed Nir on cello to colour in the compositions, but it is the interplay between Peter and Yosef that makes the album such an intriguing listen. Peter has clearly done a lot of travelling (he is an American who lived in Denmark but is now based in Ireland), but easily merges into new environments which makes this album a surprisingly comfortable fit for him.
I’ll admit that before this album crossed my desk I hadn’t heard of Bridget Hayden before, but I’m always willing to take a listen to anything new on the folk scene, particularly as that scene is currently experiencing something of a purple patch. Having said that, anyone who has heard of Bridget before will know that she is usually more associated with lo-fi noisy drones, reverb-heavy blues and feverish waves of doom-laden sound, so this album of traditional folk appears to be going off on something of a tangent.
For her latest adventure, the title pretty much says it all, dialling down the wilder proclivities for something more subdued; an album that allows the four players, Elin on saxes, Tobias Wiklund on cornet and trumpet, David Stackenäs on guitar and Mats Dimming on bass, plenty of low-key interaction that embraces the listener, warming the fireplace for a battened-down experience.
Whirring the hinge between this world and elsewhere, Téléplasmiste's Of Nature And Electricity’s’ compass points are plentiful -- exploratory. Gently coaxing themselves into the uncharted, a softly rounded trip into the infinite.
Capturing the atmospheric flavour of an ancient Cornish burial site, Slomo’s fifth album is a mid-winter’s dream, ditching the well-trodden refuge of dark ambience in favour of something less menacing, more nuanced.
For those feeling forswunk and seeking to switch-off over the mid-winter break, then musical products conceived by artists in hermetic bubbles seem suitably worthy of some eleventh-hour examination, at the end of a very hectic 2024. As the three below albums attest…
Such is the sheer abundance of output from the music world in recent times -- which feels particularly acute this year -- it can be quite hard not to miss key things, even from reliable sources. Yet, thankfully, two distinctly dissimilar albums from the trusty homestead of Gard Du Nord Records have been extracted from the review pile just in time for Freq coverage in 2024. Both remind us that the label’s quietly radical diversity remains a compelling force running in the background of the record-releasing business.
When it dropped in 1996, Zoon received a very mixed reception. It landed at a weird time, when the goth / industrial rock alliance had been forged but was still a somewhat uneasy one. On first hearing, I and many others were disappointed that what we were getting wasn’t more Fields Of The Nephilim, but what initially sounded like a softer, more introspective Ministry -- and really, what’s the point of a softer, more introspective Ministry?
Considering each of the six members plays at least two instruments, this is a surprisingly light affair; the bass sways and the guitar licks are textural delights and the slow, steady drums allow everything to slowly unfold. Vocals are dreamy in a Spacemen 3 kind of way; but sort of buried, as if frazzled by the bright lights.
This debut from French trio eat-girls is a bountiful beast as the dark-noted dirge-tastic drag of the opener ("On a Crooked Swing") testifies. The male / female coin-flip of vocals slinking over the tightly hooked half-lit gloom. The mournful and whispery Malaria-like creep of "Unison" snaking all seductive in the ear, that nocturnal prowl of guitar lobe mauling as lyrics overspill, tip noisily to retract beautifully back on this lush lullabied afterglow.