Lizard If prog is still heretical, NichelOdeon are some top league profaners. Il Gioco del Silenzio has lots to keep puritanical ‘keep it simple’ sorts foaming: plenty of sax, classical flourishes, frequent time signature changes, operatic singing in Italian… There’s also a generous helping of instrumental sections lingering too long to be realistically be chaperoning the vocals. And by God, it’s some of the most dramatic music I’ve […]
Kev Nickells
204 posts
Northern-Spy At the risk of prematurely blowing my journalistic load, this is a great record. And that’s the bottom line for any review really. It’s not, perhaps, a record that fits with Rhy Chatham’s reputation for Glenn Branca-baiting massed guitar works. Outdoor Spell is nothing like 2005’s Crimson Grail, at least in terms of instruments – trumpets, vocals, percussion for this record, rather than his better-known battery of […]
Karl/Aagoo/Nonclassical Classical music, for some, is burdened with various odd stigmas – that it’s somehow posh, academic or too expensive to watch live. In my experience none of these are true – I have the stub of an £8 ticket for a five hour Messiaen opera attended by a musically self-taught scumbag (myself) that will attest to that. And, as purse-strings constrict further day-by-day, the classical music world […]
LF Four new-ish releases here from Bristol’s micro-label LF, run by one Mr Dsic (not his real name), documenting aspects of noise and noise-ish music. A mixed bag, but that’s no bad thing – my weekly shop includes all sorts of things, from washing powder to aubergines (exotic, I know), and I don’t see why a record label should be any different. Unlike my weekly shop, however, the […]
ReR Steve Maclean’s oeuvre touches a fair few nodes on the circuitboard of ‘experimental’ music – from collaborations with insects, multiple-effected guitars to ensemble compositions and ‘academic’ work, in line with his post at Assistant Professor in Music Synthesis at Berklee College of Music. The first of our two records here, Expressions on Piano, is closer to his day-job in the academic world – a series of rhythmically […]
Triple Bath The title Soundscape Study is immediately misleading – while ostensibly sourced from the sonic ambience of dreary and audibly sodden holidays (in Scotland’s Isle of Barra and France’s Fitou respectively), this disc lacks the arid mic-fetishising of a great many soundscape pieces. Daniel Hignell has come to this work with a peculiar ear for the ambient sounds of thunderstorms and tidal crashes, holistically stitching and interlacing […]