Editions Mego Thighpaulsandra‘s voice is all over this one, words full of shady vampirics and sliding context, your imagination stitching the suggestion as they suck in the scenery around them. He’s a great story-teller too (I reckon he has a lucrative future in audiobooks for sure), fleshy and descriptive, the narratives noir-flowering a certain flamboyance
Album review
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Thrill Jockey Elena Setién doesn’t rush into releasing albums. This is her third in six years and her first for Thrill Jockey, who really seem to be expanding their palette at the moment, and so Basque-born but Danish resident Elena brings a kind of remote, subtle beauty to the fold. The songs contained within Another Kind Of Revolution‘ describe her love for everyday life and what nature has […]
New Heavy Sounds Hey kids, let’s talk about nominative determinism! You know, that thing where someone’s name informs what they do, like having a dentist called Dr Tooth or a Tory councillor called Mr Gaping-Anus. It’s fun! Thing is, it tends to work the other way round with bands, because traditionally they actually CHOOSE their names rather than being christened at birth.
Odin Scandinavian jazz quintet Atomic have been pushing the jazz boundaries since 2001, but on this latest album, their second since moving from Jazzland to Odin, they have chosen to reinterpret some unusual tracks from other writers and from other eras, dipping from the outer reaches of jazz to pop to pieces by Edgar Varese and Olivier Messiaen. It is a varied palette that gives the quintet ample opportunity
Consouling Sounds This recent collaboration between Belgian double bassist and drone composer Innerwoud with soprano Astrid Stockman comes drifting out of the speakers like mist floating across a long forgotten battlefield. There is a humanity here, fused with a kind of melancholy that envelops the listener in a web of distant memories.
Karlrecords Well, this one wrong-footed me, to be sure. The début album of Iranian composer and musician Saba Alizadeh, I had anticipated something of a showcase for Monsieur Alizadeh’s virtuoso stylings on his chosen instrument, the kamancheh, which he has been playing since the age of ten. Related to the redoubtable rebab, the compelling kamancheh is a form of long-necked four-string fiddle, played with a variable tension bow.
Thrill Jockey I have to say, this might be the most psychotic thing that Thrill Jockey have ever released in a twenty-five-year, nigh on 500 release career. In a nutshell, Japan’s Endon sound like an electronic-infested sludgy rock band standing around a pit while their vocalist is burnt alive, and recording the results. It is chaotic and more than a little harrowing, as vocalist Taichi Nagura visits the […]
Svart The band name is (possibly) a play on their instruments rather than their trade — it’s a trio of Finnish men playing on a bunch of junk instruments — a repurposed laundry rack, a wash tub bass, that sort of thing. It’s mixed by Einstürzende Neubauten‘s Alexander Hacke who, as you’re probably aware, knows a thing or two about ekeing elegance from repurposed industrial shrapnel.
Glacial Movements Eugenio Vatta is a Rome-based electronic musician who has been releasing stuff sporadically for quite some time. He has chosen his pseudonym of Frame to release his semi-ambient minimalist treatise on travel. Taken as a series of ten pieces, each named after a planet in our solar system with the ultimate being the arrival at an unknown point
Conspiracy International Sonically, Cosey Fanni Tutti‘s Tutti LP surfs in there with smeary cornet across tight electronic zip-wires. The canvas is full of Torvill and Dean ice slides and squishy purcussive skids, ingredients that send your brain in prism(ing)multiples.
Mas-Kina Recordings If you buy one grind album this year… I mean, I’ll be honest, I don’t really follow grind besides occasionally listening to a record or a playlist here and there. So this is fairly likely to be fairly close to the top of my best of grind releases. But I digress. Things that are great about “extreme” metal: it’s preposterous; it is fast; it involves shouting […]
Consouling Sounds Massimo Pupillo and Stefano Pillia are both doyens of the Italian underground scene and are serial collaborators. Here they merge their distinctive sounds with the aid of some female vocal assistance to produce an album of wonderful tones that, thanks to some exquisite production, just seems to seep from the speakers into the room and surround the listener in a gentle cocoon.
Beggars Arkive What a blast from the past: Bowery Electric. For a few years at the end of the 1990s, their second LP Beat was one of the albums that was trying to turn music on its head, suffusing so many different styles into a languid hybrid that held something for everybody. In 2000, they pushed the envelope a little further and drawing primarily on trip-hop for the beats, the duo […]
The Leaf Label After all these years, Julia Kent clearly understands the innate melancholy of the cello and how the listener’s impression of the instrument’s nature still resonates with us today. Her obvious love for the cello and its place in the musical firmament shines through in everything she does, and somehow manages to imbue each project with its own character.
Kosmodrone Unfolding like a landscape seen and heard through thick fog before sunrise, Lech Nienartowicz‘s Wzdłuż Pasma emerges fuzzy and uncertain, never quite able to be pinned down and as hard to define as the shapes of the digitally smudged and smeared found objects and images that adorn the cover.
Thrill Jockey Marc Richter has been rather busy as over the last twelve years or so, what with Black To Comm as well as various side projects and commissions for film and theatre, not forgetting helming the Dekorder label. Seven Horses For Seven Kings is Black to Comm’s first album in five years and also the first for Thrill Jockey. Spread over thirteen tracks and at an hour’s length, it […]
RCA / Sony The people on the bus with me when I first listened to Bring Me The Horizon‘s latest album certainly got to enjoy an array of various facial expressions and reactions. I walked into Amo without too many expectations, or so I tried to tell myself.
Magnetron Pavel Fedoseev, erstwhile drummer for Russian psychsters Gnoomes, somehow manages to find the time whilst playing and touring with that band to record solo material as Kikok. Hidden away out of trouble’s reach in his hometown of Perm — which is a twenty-two-hour train journey from Moscow