Hubro Hot on the heels of last year’s Salika, Molika, Erlend Apneseth has gathered around him another supergroup of Nordic heavyweights. Fellow Hubro artistes Stein Urheim, Anja Lauvdal, Hans Hulbækmo and Fredrik Luhr Dietrichson, along with accordionist Ida Løvli Hidle. They join together on Fragmentarium to flesh out some of Erlend’s compositions that were initially written for the Kongsberg Jazz Festival
Album review
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Habibi Funk Habibi Funk‘s Jannis Stürtz unearths a true lost classic of Lebanese folk rock on Mouasalat Ila Jacad El Ard. Lebanon, 1976: A vicious civil war, spanning fifteen years with over 120,000 casualties, is just beginning to rage. The weakened state was invaded by Syria, an occupation lasting until 2005. Dissidents were forced to flee, leaving their homelands and residing in exile. Lebanese folk singer Issam Hajali […]
KrysaliSound Ishmael Cormack entered the thirteenth century church of St Andrews near his rural Somerset home with a view to laying down a series of improvised sketches using tape loops and found sounds, trying to release natural but subtle polyrhythms from these unlikely sources. The overall effect, spread across the six tracks contained herein, is one of a series of faint, impressionist watercolours, rendered so subtly that at […]
Discus Martin Archer is one very busy man. As well as running the Discus label, he seems intent on putting out album after album with various different collaborators and under numerous styles. It doesn’t feel like so very long since the Anthropology Band‘s album rose like an incredible new sun over my world and I have been living with it since, trying to put its two-and-a-half hours of […]
Pumpedita Avi Pfeffer is an American-based composer working from the classical tradition but using those tropes transposed into the world of electronic music. His current album A Lasting Impression consists of four sweeping and transformative pieces that are tied together by the very nature of their journey.
three:four / Meakusma A beautiful lullaby-esque soundscape, this. The soothing French vocals a paper boat floating out on a lilting tide of gentle disquiet, instrumentals that subtly blur boundaries. Something that’s especially true of “L’inexploré”’s panoramas, with an avant classical verve where the fragments of narration ease you elsewheres. Dora’s invited lots of like-minded musicians to help her sculpt this recording
Blue Tapes The church-like drone that opens Cadu Tenório‘s stint on Blue Tapes lends a feeling of solace with just a hint of accordion japes in the tones. It is a reverential and gentle opening that unfolds slowly, infinite and flat like a coastal landscape, merging with the sombre greys of sea and sky, undulations that change features in miniscule ways.
Important / Cassauna On Arrival Vibrate, Italian post-rock magicians Larsen conjure the rhythmajick of Z’ev in a sprawling twenty-five-minute chamber rock meditation. If you were to observe the floorplan of the Temple of Amun at Karnak, Egypt’s sprawling 250-acre edifice, you might assume it was built willy-nilly over the span of its nearly 2,000 year construction. After all, how could there have been a premeditated construction plan for […]
Cardinal Fuzz (Europe) / Man Hand (North America) Haven’t heard from these guys in a while, then suddenly this pops onto the 2020 radar in ultra-limited quantities. It’s been an age, the last official Sunburned Hand Of The Man release must have been the one on Ecstatic Peace back in 2010, but as always they’ve been peppering the intervening years with a steady flow of hard-to-get-your-hands-on CDrs and […]
Out Continuing in the necessary Ut re-issue programme, their second LP and the first studio album to appear on Blast First, is given the deserved re-release treatment. In Gut’s House saw them taking a few steps beyond Conviction. Although still self-produced, this time they took assistance from that doyen of the ’80s underground, Paul Kendall, who produced Loop, Thee Hypnotics and Wire,among many others. The production feels clear […]
Phantom Limb A long-overdue retrospective of Venezuelan synthesist and ambient composer Miguel Noya is always going to be something rather special. However, as Noya has been active since the 1980s, giving a broad perspective and overview of his work will always be a difficult task. As most composers work from album to album, a compilation like Canciónes Intactas — especially one that covers such a vast period — […]
Adaadat Yan Hart-Lemonnier‘s second release for Adaadat pretty much lives up to its title. Le Partage Des Griefs translates as ‘the sharing of grievances’ and there is something of a relentless kind of grief-stricken melancholy that infects the synthetic sounds unleashed here.
Disciples Another archival trip into His Name Is Alive‘s formative years, and a follow up to last year’s excellent All The Mirrors In The House, Return To Never is an altogether darker/noiser joy, that (as on the previous LP) spreads out as a whole, although segmented into individual tracks.
Mottomotto Kyoto’s super-pop prog virtuosi Viva Sherry are back with a delightful 10″ vinyl release on the ever-reliable Mottomotto and considering it six tracks come in at about twenty-five minutes, it is extraordinary how much ground they manage to cover in that short period of time. 2017’s Obento Music was a similar formula, and I can only imagine that they don’t think that the general public is able to […]
577 Records The latest release from drummer Tony Irving and sax player Massimo Magee is a forty-eight-minute blast-off of improv craziness that holds the listener by the neck and very rarely lets go. Although the sax starts warm and smoky on opener “Vitriol”, as you can imagine by the title, that subtlety doesn’t last very long and begins to scrape and scree out of the speakers, leaving a […]
Rosehill Teetering between funk-pop, electro-ambience and performance poetry, ChopChop have long been one of Brighton’s most exciting live bands. With blistering riffs that dissolve in and out of polyrhythmic chaos, an intriguing array of instruments (conch shells, bagpipes, homemade samplers) and the lit-fuse stage presence of front-man Xelís de Toro, they were never going to make a boring album. The real question was always going to be just […]
Sulatron Zone Six comprises Electric Moon members Sula Bassana and Komet Lulu and former Embryo guitarist Rainer Neeff. They were founded back in 1997 and have intermittently done gigs and released albums throughout that time. Kozmik Koon is a huge ever-growing pulsating universe of sound dedicated to space rock stalwart and all-round good guy Kozmik Ken and the late Richard van Ess, a friend of the band. It […]
KrysaliSound Italian sound sculptor and musician Andrea Laudante has been looking into the way that we perceive concrete and instrumental music, and how the two can interact in a natural way. As one part of Degoya, he has already been involved in an album release this year, but this series of ten tracks on Banat Banat Ban Jai acts as a personal journey of sorts that we can […]