Room40 Described by Lawrence English as a record of “protest against the immediate threat of abhorrent possible futures”, Cruel Optimism finds him focussing on power relations in the new era of extreme fragmentation which draws ever-nearer.
Album review
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SOFA Music Kim Myhr and Lasse Marhaug have never worked together before, but they are both well established in the Norwegian experimental music scene: Marhaug as the uncrowned voice of noise, with hundreds of releases and projects under his belt, and Myhr is acclaimed in Norway as a composer and jazz guitarist of the explorative kind.
Raging Planet Sweet Nico are an ethereal and dreamlike duo from Portugal who have been together for a couple of years and concoct a sad, intimate and at times delerious style of aching dreampop.
12K In pursuit of an “acoustic” truth, Taylor Deupree has ditched his usual hi-tech shenanigans for a more hands-on, cut’n’splice approach, a back to basics attitude that has created a rewarding series of skeletals. A pearlescent cascade, the accompanying photographic book attempts to pin down and complement the stripped-backed intimacy on offer here.
Riot Season With no less a space cadet than Makoto Kawabata at the production controls, it’s no surprise that Hibushibire engender fabulous furry freak riffs of a sort that Acid Mothers Temple can be heard blasting into space at any given psychedelic happening.
Thrill Jockey Doug McCombs must be the busiest man in Chicago. Not content with the amorphous beast that is Tortoise, playing bass with Eleventh Dream Day, releasing the Pullman records and undertaking various collaborations, particularly that with David Daniell, he also has what could be considered his own project, Brokeback.
Rocket Julie’s Haircut has been turning any preconceptions about the idea of Italian music on their heads for the best part of twenty years. I remember catching them with Sonic Boom in Bristol some ten years or so ago, and the record they released together at the time expanded minimal psychedelic guitar repetition in two different directions.
Bureau B Amaury Cambuzat started Ulan Bator twenty-four years ago and after eleven albums and numerous collaborations with the likes of Faust and Michael Gira, their twelfth LP finds the band stripped down to Amaury, augmented by two Italian players on bass and drums/sax.
On-U Sound / Tectonic One of the delights of Pinch and Sherwood‘s 2015 début LP together, Late Night Endless, was the way in which the pair remixed, re-purposed and relocated choice elements from On-U Sound‘s extensive back catalogue into a freshly updated variation on a reggae-heavy dubstep theme.
Bar/None Forty years after forming, it is nice to welcome back The Feelies with their sixth studio album in all that time and the second since they reconvened in 2008. The band, which still contains founding members Bill Million and Glenn Mercer (who are still writing together), have not really changed their formula too much since 1978.
Silver Mountain Media Group / London London Hot on the heels of Tecuciztecatl‘s rock operatics comes this new offering from Michigan’s finest, His Name is Alive. Another guitar-fuelled fandango, this time burning up on all that particle physics hysteria of a few years back when we all thought we’d be sucked into a dark matter vortex as science glimpses the momentarily flash of the God Particle.
Crammed Discs Imagine sitting in a bar and engaging with a tan, weathered stranger who starts showing you photographs of places you are never likely to visit; some vibrant, some serene, a group of faces here, a glorious sunset, buildings, oceans.
Temporary Residence Coalescing at the smoothed-out jazz hinterlands of dub, post-rock and psychedelic spaciousness, Grails‘ latest opus – the first for six years – finds their instrumental horizons expanded as far as their minds had ever been hitherto, drifting far out
Bureau B Conrad Schnitzler, early member of both Tangerine Dream and Kluster, must have found both of those oppressive bands too formulaic and stifling. By 1975, he had struck out on his own, producing music for films that had yet to be released or even made.
Mottomotto Right from the electro-slapped rub of the opener to the insistent burn of guitar that seals the deal, this baby kicks winter grumpiness out into the far reaches like its predecessor Innard Listeningestion did. Its glinty beams and squelchy piranhas are the perfect panacea to the prevailing gloom, smoothed in plenty of harmonic warmth.
Sulatron /Deep Distance “It was an evening in summer upon the placid temperate planet Mars. Up and down green wine canals, boats as delicate as bronze flowers drifted. In the long and endless dwellings that curved like tranquil snakes across the hills, lovers lay idly whispering in cool night beds” – Ray Bradbury, The Silver Locusts
Gizeh Back in 1931, FW Murnau, director of the Expressionist classics Nosferatu and Faust amongst others was directing a docu-drama in the South Sea Islands about forbidden love between two young islanders. After filming and just before the preview, he died in a vehicle accident and the film, although winning an Oscar, was lost to the sands of time.
Accretions The Argonauts are a four-piece underground supergroup of sorts, surfing out of Japan with this high octane album of instrumental jams that shows all the players, guitar, bass, drums and keyboards to be in excellent form.