Blue Tapes Henry Plotnick‘s excursion on Blue Tapes from 2014 (when he was thirteen) is a meditative collection of pieces that are about slow build, decay and regeneration. Over the course of an hour and six tracks, Henry shows his abilities with a wide variety of instruments and atmospheres that makes for an intensely satisfying, if at times bewildering, collection.
Album review
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Kscope “All art is solitary and the studio is a torture area” – Alexander Liberman. There is a certain type of melancholia about Giancarlo Erra’s Ends that has its roots in a very British and American form of ambient music. It is that rare thing that manages to capture the beauty and the sadness of a place, and Ends also offers the sense of memory and moments past […]
Truant For Kinbrae‘s second album, the brothers Truscott have chosen to weave an aural tapestry of the River Tay. It serves as a kind of love letter and story as to the impact the river has had on their lives, and their interactions with the surrounding landscape. Newly started label Truant has issued this on lovely 12″ vinyl with dramatic photographs on the inner sleeve
Back2Forward The long-awaited début album by London’s Flesh Tetris, Wrong Kind Of Adults, is finally here. And Flesh Tetris is really quite a name, isn’t it? Echoes of Cronenbergian erotica funnelled through retro videogaming, an ambience which translates directly to their music.
Upset The Rhythm Hot on the heels of the Drecksound LP, the third NOTS LP finds Hash Redactor‘s rhythm section Charlotte Watson and Meredith Lones reconvening with singer / guitarist /keyboardist Natalie Hoffmann for another high-intensity post-punk charge, smashing what came before out of the way.
Aurora Borealis Gold Are The Ashes Of The Restorer evokes an eldritch combination of screaming wind-tunnel black metal and epicly bombastic post-post-rock of the Explosions In The Sky variety. Given Mories De Jong‘s penchant for all things bleakly symphonic and immensely mordant-sounding, that seems like a fair starting point for beginning to describe just how much of a rinsing-out Golden Ashes give the listeners’ collective brainpan here.
Discus For Discus‘s eightieth release, Martin Archer has decided to go solo again, while also attempting to reproduce some of the sounds of his hornweb sax quartet that was active between 1983 and 1993. Not only that, it appears also as a kind of love letter to those saxophonists that have influenced him over the years of his playing, from the likes of Paul Desmond and Lester Young […]
KrysaliSound The latest release from Tropic Of Coldness is their first for KrysaliSound and builds on the slow motion soundscapes of 2018’s Framed Waves. Spread over four gently undulating pieces, Maps Of Reason unfolds at a pace that is beyond leisurely, and serves to lull the listener with its subtle washes and natural movement.
Thrill Jockey For Dommengang‘s third album for Thrill Jockey, it sounds as though they threw all their stuff into the back of the car and blew their LA home in favour of a wild ride into the desert, forsaking the concrete gleam for some dusty widescreen excesses. The scree of feedback that opens the album is a welcome reminder of their rock roots, but also that they are […]
Thrill Jockey The bringing together of two serial collaborating drummers can only be a good thing, and when they have the pedigree of Oneida‘s Kid Millions and Uniform‘s Greg Fox, we must be in for a treat. Greg plays drums on Biting Through, but he also concentrates on creating a synthesized backdrop for each of the six drum-crazy tracks appearing on the album.
Farmadelica Silver Relics are a duo from New York who ply a kind of synth- and rhythm-orientated take in classic American rock song-writing. Consisting of songwriter Alex Sepassi on guitar and synths, amongst other things, and Justin Alvis on drums, they formulate a sound that is redolent of the sort of film imagery that anyone could recognise from the last thirty years; those enormous storm drains that run […]
Interchill It’s incredible to think that Suns Of Arqa have been making music for forty years now. I first came across them at the start of the 1990s when they were being lumped in with other ambient dance artists such as The Orb, Future Sound of London and Banco de Gaia as that scene exploded in 1991. So here is Heart Of The Suns, a thirteen-track celebration
Rosélie Records Child ballerina turned singer-songwriter Bethia Beadman was transplanted from the West Country to the flat lands of Lincoln, and from there plies her trade, releasing albums of emotional and sweeping drama, the latest of which even includes Mike Mills of REM fame on keyboards, guitar and vocals. Having spent time as a member of Hole‘s touring band and part of Circulus, as well as writing and […]
Wave Folder The list of equipment that Radek Rudnicki uses on the latest RPE Duo album is full of things of which I have never heard: a Buchla System 200, Eurorack modular, Octatrack and Bugbrand PT Delay, amongst quite a few others. His partner in musical nirvana, Matt Postle, meanwhile makes do with trumpet, piano, Korg and melodica. Between them, though, they weave quite a tapestry of textural […]
Touch What a gem of electro-acousticness David Knight and Stephen Thrower have created for their second UnicaZürn release on the Touch label. The weeviling warmth of the orchestration on the first track is erased by a Steve Reichian slip, snipping signatures ripped through with corkscrewing curls, tapering manatees full of planetary perfume
Disco Gecko Lower case soundscape composers Toby Marks and Andrew Heath recently found themselves in a fresh part of the UK, looking after a friend’s house and decided to travel north, south, east and west from that point, making recordings and taking aural snapshots of the areas in which they found themselves. Owing to the way in which they both work, the field recordings that they collected form […]
Arjuna Music Dark Star Safari is a collaboration between four doyens of the Scandinavian music scene bringing together Samuel Rohrer, Eyvind Aarset, Jan Bang and Erik Honoré. Their self-titled LP finds four kindred spirits looking for a way to push music into even newer directions, trying to find a new language amongst the remains of everything that has gone before.
House Of Mythology David Tibet’s been a busy man, undertaking lots of extra curricular activity to rich rewards by collaborating with the likes of Zu and Youth, now he’s dancing on the cuneiformed candy of Mesopotamia with the likes of Andrew Liles and an unknown commodity of the Shaitan-Boy — who may just be a figment of both their fevered imaginings.