For this solo album he’s clearly built on his Erasure-ing — it’s not a swerve into cumbia or zydeco, but it’s also not ‘Erasure minus vocals’. Tempos are typically on the slower end of things and melodies are perhaps more pronounced. Critically though, there isn’t a moment on the album where melody disappears entirely.
Album review
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A track that finds "Blass Schlafen Rabe"’s sleeping raven caught in the tumble of some synthesised ambulance / car horn honk. A Keystone Cops comedy that sizzles in its simplicity, finds Holger a zombified poet in a driven piano gallop beset in peculiar interjections and shifting signatures that insistently flood you with plenty of pigeon-toed footwork.
It really feels like a step back in time with the opening bossa beat straight out of an enormous rhythm machine, standing in the corner of a sunken-floor living room with shag pile carpets and orange wallpaper. The comfort of the sax, the sway of the background strings, the title "Have Some Punch"; it all evokes a hip party, ladies in flowing nylon dresses sashaying around the drinks cabinet.
For Portuguese guitarist Pedro Velasco's first solo outing on guitar, he is searching deep within himself, looking at memory and solitude and how that can be interpreted in a solo guitar manner. Working simply through an eight-track and a mixer, he has produced a wealth of emotionally resonant vignettes that linger in the mind long after the sound has dissipated.
Although perhaps better known as one half of Suicide, Martin's solo career was sporadic but he was heavily invested in it, the tracks at points ranging from rock'n'roll inflected flurries through drifting desert atmospheres right through to impressionistic industrial workouts. Although often made with the cheapest of instruments, the range of ideas and textures was vast.
After Boris invited them to join them on stage for a rendition of "Akuma No Uta", a certain chemistry emerged that led to ideas for an album collaboration. Following twelve months of preparation, they went into the studio and this is the result, nine tracks of Boris’s trademark proto- and doom metal merged with Uniform’s own brand of aggressive noise.
The foursome gathered together for the inaugural Fjall release From The Rough Hill has a veritable cornucopia of instruments, with Martin Archer on a variety of reeds and electronics, Jan Todd playing three forms of harp plus the psaltery, and percussionists Fran Comyn and Richard Jackson including bells, bowls, gongs and field recordings.
Esoteric Recordings remastering of The Complete Liberty Recordings is a welcome reissue of the core canon of High Tide recordings, the two key albums — Sea Shanties and High Tide — and a third disc of demos and unreleased materials. Some of the demos have appeared before as bonus releases on earlier CD reissues.
Paradise Of Bachelors Considering who was involved in this Setting album, I was surprised and pleasantly so by the long-form drone and distant percussives that emanated from the speakers. Ironically to me, it sounded more like rising than setting, and while the offset tones generated by synth, harmonium and others […]
Not Applicable Drummer and composer Tim Giles has been in and out of bands and collaborations for the last twenty-five years. This is his first solo album in that time and is a labour of love that he has been concocting over the last five years, marrying his penchant for […]
This final section of a possible trilogy also coincided with his mother's passing and her spirit looms large over the proceedings, her recorded voice appearing at points, warmly recalling past events and putting the future into some perspective. Live, Murmurists can number as many as 100; but here for ithyphall.brel.gory is not the same as you, the players either cast as orators or musicians number into the thirties with some doubling up in both roles.
Bass player and composer Vilhelm Bromander's list of groups and affiliates is as long as my arm, and due to his presence and standing in the experimental jazz scene has managed to draw quite an impressive collection of collaborators around him for his latest adventure, a spiritually minded thirteen-piece that drifts effortlessly through three very different scenarios, highlighting the joy and melancholy inherent in the chosen instruments.
The sounds here are absolutely lovely, incubate a subtle magistry from the offset as ‘They Will Come" gracefully swirls the head. A buoyant dance that holographically harpoons you to its harmonic gravity of synthy wash and plucked melody.
His hard work of re-revitalising the accordion, putting it into a more contemporary situation, has really paid off and the six pieces chosen here veer all over the place but nearly always with accordion centre stage and with good reason.
Fifty-nine years after their first album and seventeen years after their last self-written one, they're back with new material, crunchy riffs and a whole lot of attitude. As a Hackney resident myself, I gotta love the title, though I do think they missed a trick by calling it Hackney Diamonds instead of Exile On Mare Street.
Agitated California’s psych trio Carlton Melton have been distilling the best parts of the Hawkwind and Spacemen 3 for the best part of fifteen years and producing a sound that is inimitable. Expanding to a four-piece for their second album of 2023, but still pursuing an instrumental nirvana, Turn To […]
John Zorn, in 2023, is a tricky one to pin down. His catalogue is positively seam-splitting and well varied. While there's plenty of artists with similar-sized outputs, there's not many with as many genres, let alone as many genres done well. He's as capable of sombre renderings of traditional Jewish music in Masada as he is the American Football-by-composition of Cobra, the ruthlessly savage Painkiller or the who's who of experimental music collaborators.
This commercial swerve was quite a revelation at the time (for me at least) and I was kinda thankful the brooding angles of the next ‘Ordeal’ dirtied things back up again. Those screechy distortions that bat-wing into the melody are great, so is the solid kick of those drums.
The line-up of players gathered together here must be the largest so far, with thirty listed, including three very different vocalists and three very different drummers. As ever, the one thing tying the disparate pieces together besides the questing sense of adventure is Guy's inimitable elastic bass.
Unearthing buried treasure is what this label’s all about, dipping into the hauntological hangover of years gone by, to resurrect or recreate their own interpretations. An ethos that seeps into this recent compilation, a tenth anniversary celebration that features a whole host of new, remixed, rare and unreleased material, giving the curious a decent taste of what floats their boat.