Attenuation Circuit has been releasing their limited-run experimental releases for over twenty years with no sign of running out of enthusiasm or willing contributors to broaden our aural palates. Two recent releases go a long way to showing how diverse the releases can be.
Mr Olivetti
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Joined by various guests to add colour and character to the mysterious surrealism of the story, Aksak Maboul weave a genre-defying web around the listener, guided onward only by Veronique's recounting, the thread that draws the unwitting ever deeper.
For the inaugural release on Clonmell Jazz Social, they have called upon guitarist Harry Christelis to convene a quartet of upcoming players that will do justice to a series of elegant drifting creations that hover somewhere around the border between jazz and minimalism, ever-moving but also always gently steering the listener towards soft, unexpected landscapes.
Steve's voice gives an unusual perspective, a fine enunciation always surpassed by the words. You feel him tasting them, rolling them around like brandy and then carefully allowing them out, each word ideally formed. The players, himself included, swirl a magical, churning mixture, hypnotic dereliction, groaning grey and often uncomfortable, but only because that is what the message demands.
The awkwardness is intriguing but is in no way alienating, you just need to listen again to fully understand how it pieces together and the stripped down post-jazz stylings of the album closer are just the icing on the cake, all judicious placing, a distant wail and momentum you can sink into.
There is structureless flickering with the voice as old and arid as forgotten wheat, shimmering in a heat haze, the vibrato hinting at something while the guitars howl like guiding beasts desperation ever present.
O SingAtMe Seaming To likes to collaborate and lend her unique and otherworldly voice to various projects, including Graham Massey‘s Toolshed and Paddy Steer‘s Homelife from back in the 2000s. Coming up to recent times, Dust Gatherers is her second solo album and follows on ten years from the first. Clearly, this has been a question of waiting for stars to align and the gathering of sympathetic friends […]
Discus Family Band‘s latest (and self-titled) release, their third since forming in 2015, finds them further exploring their interactions as a quartet and how personal ideas form, and then coalesce when presented to a democracy fully at ease with one another and anxious to express the diversity that jazz welcomes currently. Over the seven pieces presented here, the players take the basic idea delivered by one member and […]
Discus The three members of Shiver like nothing better than to collaborate separately and are involved in numerous projects. The trio itself has been quiet recently recording wise, but the chance to hook up with Yorkshire-based pianist Matthew Bourne at his house was too good an opportunity to turn down after the hysteria of lockdown, and the quartet used forty-eight hours to lay down , the first of […]
Efpi The Beats & Pieces Big Band has been together in one form or another since 2008 and is doing its best to breathe new life into classic big band jazz. The dancefloor filler of its time, moved the head and the heart, and was filled with a sweeping sense of life and joy. Ben Cottrell‘s collective bring that sense of wonder and momentum smoothly into the twenty-first […]
Magma / NEWS Belgian four-piece Tukan come at their interpretation of kinetic rock music as if some of them have spent a proportion of their time lost in the intense sweep of post-rave dance music. The drifting synths and Balearic keyboard motifs welded to live drums and bass make for an organic, muscular journey. There is a sense of that dance euphoria spread across most of the seven […]
Naïve LA-based Bryan Senti has already placed his debut album Manu online, a post-classical string trio treatise that places minimal Western leanings within a fresh narrative which borrows from the indigenous sounds of his Latin American roots. Finally it is receiving a vinyl release and well deserving of this honour it is, from the of the cover image to the lush black RTI pressing.
Psychic Hotline Tim Bernardes, one third of Brazilian indie-tropicalia band O Terno, chose the start of 2020 to regroup and focus once again on a solo album that took him from the touring treadmill and allowed him to concentrate once again on crafting something that was entirely his own. The sixteen tracks that make up Mil Coisas Invisiveis come straight from the heart and highlight a voice that […]
Discus The second album from Bo Meson this year finds his focus reverting to his own unstructured universe, taking the final opportunity to work with cellist Sarah Palmer before she departs these shores. That impetus finds Bo and the assembled players taking one long improvised run at the assorted material, plucked from various ruminations and ad-libbed like a music hall spectre; dramatic, arcane, sultry and .
Upset The Rhythm Shake Chain are a confusing and disturbing car crash of semi-danceable proportions. Their Snake Chain album opens with the sound of a post-punk band idly observing some horrifying local disturbance and it kind of grown battier from there.
Bureau B The mid- to late nineties was a pretty purple patch for German electronica and it coincided with a similar flurry of genre-less electronic based bands arriving from the States. The beauty of the German acts, like those that preceded them, was the lack of obvious Western tradition and unlike the bands from the seventies, a greater access to and greater complicity with the new electronic instruments. […]
Jazzland Not content with the numerous collaborative activities which he has undertaken recently, Norwegian pianist Bugge Wesseltoft and German producer Henrik Schwarz have chosen to release a second chapter in their duo format, the initial one having been released back in 2011. Their interaction of post minimal piano and electronic escapism has been given a further boost by the addition of some well-chosen collaborators.
Discus Martin Pyne‘s idea behind Ripples, that of duets between his vibraphone and David Beebee‘s Fender Rhodes, had me hooked immediately. The gauzy, shimmering haze of the vibes let loose from formal shackles and allowed to wander at will is accompanied by the sympathetic shiver of the Rhodes, and sounds like a dream made real and spread across the twelves watery vistas enclosed.