Rune Grammofon It has been a couple of years since Master Oogway‘s last outing and we all know how the intervening period has been for musicians. Instead of entering the studio, they have chosen to release a live recording made with flautist Henriette Eilertsen at Oslo’s jazz hotspot Kafé Hærverk; this performance, chosen from a series that they performed toward the end of 2020, primarily showcases the writing […]
Mr Olivetti
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Buried Treasure For Buried Treasure‘s eighth anniversary, head honcho and all around good guy Alan Gubby has corralled a veritable feast of artists and fellow travellers to lay down some tracks in celebration of what must be one of the most eclectic rosters around. Octocorallia is a veritable smorgasbord of sound that moves from slow burn ambience to more dancefloor-friendly energy grabbers while meandering through overlooked and , […]
Jazzland With Johan Lindvall‘s latest trio recording, the players expand upon the ground covered in 2019’s No City, No Tree, No Lake, but take Johan’s agitated precision in slightly darker and rather dreamier directions. The pieces on this album were all written by Johan around the piano, but the interplay between the three hints at the importance of each element. At points, piano, bass and drums are pecking […]
Bristol 30 April 2022 There is a definite aura of devotion around The Trinity this evening. The old church is hosting a band that boasts a devoted following, some attendees having trekked around after them since their first appearance in the UK back in 1994. While undertaking their world tour, Low have chosen to invite friends and young firebrands Divide And Dissolve as support, which is a homecoming […]
Discus For Mark Holub‘s latest album and his first for Discus, he has expanded on his usual collaborative numbers and put together his first group as bandleader since starting Led Bib twenty years ago. Here, the accent is more on his songwriting rather than the more collaborative efforts of Led Bib, but allows the chosen players to lend colour and texture to his compositions, all of which are […]
Not Applicable Sam Britton‘s continuing experiments as Isambard Khroustaliov find him wandering further into a hinterland in which the way we experience sound as entertainment is taken out of a musical context and more into an aural tapestry or home listening sculpture. Using solely electronic means, familiar sounds and fragments of previously recognisable music are manipulated and distorted using AI and various synthesisers warped to such an extent […]
Hubro Benedicte Maurseth‘s love of her native landscape and the feeling of connectedness to her local Hardangervidda National Park informs a great deal of this latest album. Forming a trio with eminent compatriots Mats Eilertsen and Håkon Stene, Benedicte goes about evoking the correlations between music and hiking, or more accurately the Norwegian term vandring, which I guess translates closely to wandering.
Bureau B Both Etienne Jaumet and Fabrizio Rat are trained pianists, but they have done their level best to obfuscate that fact under layers of progressive experimentation that finds Etienne concentrating on modular synthscapes while Fabrizio treats the piano in a far more percussive manner than we might be used to, distending the strings as he hammers the keys.
Crammed Discs Crammed‘s reissue programme for their Made To Measure series continues unabated with the extraordinary collaboration between Iranian vocalist Sussan Deyhim and New York sound artist Richard Horowitz. Originally released in 1986, this album merged Sussan’s ululating vocal explorations with Richard’s fearless electronic textures and took the listener on a journey that somehow combined the chilled sand-blown wonder of the Sistan Desert with the gritty of New […]
Discus Discus regular Nick Robinson has been experimenting with guitar looping for over twenty years and his experimental trio Das Rad finds opportunities to interweave them with Martin Archer and Steve Dinsdale. Here though on a rare solo outing, it is all about the guitar in all its incredibly varied manifestations.
Happy Robots Having been fortunate to catch Rodney Cromwell, the nom de plume of regular Happy Robots recording artiste Adam Cresswell, supporting Pram some years ago, I was looking forward to hearing his latest release and was not disappointed. This is his second album and continues his crusade, using ’80s synth sounds to reproduce his own soft, dreamlike world.
Constellation The cover image of the debut album by Montréal producer Kee Avil is certainly a disconcerting one. She sits at a desk in a sterile room with a paper mask of her own face over her actual face. It gives the sense of a twist of reality which runs through the ten tracks on Crease, merging abstract experimentation with sinuous rhythm and her own insinuating vocals.
Redenetic Daryl Robinson’s Mōshonsensu creation is all about the construction of elaborate soundworlds that whisk the listener away from the everyday and place them amid unknown machinery and mysterious animals, strange sounds emanating from abandoned structures, sand-borne decay and the solitude of the vast prairie.
Discus This current project of the classically trained duo of pianist and poet Robert Mitchell and cellist Shirley Smart came about after conversations back in 2014. Their desire to merge the structure of classical with the freedom of improv led to this collaboration, in which Robert also wished to address his family’s history and their relationship to the Windrush scandal in a way that is accessible yet emotive.
Discus Martin Archer from Discus mentions that there are very few solo bass albums being released these days; but thankfully Michael Bardon, erstwhile member of Shatner’s Bassoon, has chosen to correct that. Over ten wildly varied pieces on The Gift Of Silence, he pushes both the bass and cello and our understanding of what sounds can be wrenched from them to their limits.
Jazzland Since starting Jazzland twenty-five years ago, Bugge Wesseltoft has dipped in and out of collaborations and various artist projects with regularity, finding different modes of expression depending on the players involved. Here, shorn of any outside involvement apart from assistance from Håkon Kornstad on a couple of pieces, we find Bugge at the piano allowing his mind to wander, seeing where this freedom and time to ponder […]
Basin Rock The first solo album from erstwhile Phantom Band guitarist Duncan Marquiss treads a lovely line between the craggy, lonesome vistas of the highlands and the sweeping, metronomic pulse of middle Europe. Spread over seven long tracks, Wires Turned Sideways In Time moves between spare fingerpicked acoustic melancholy and heartbeat-riven synthscapes, managing to tie the two together in a warm bed of panoramic mystery.
Discus The latest release from pastoral improv troupe Orfeo 5 is tinged with a certain melancholy due to the passing of vocalist Ali Rigg. Main man Keith Jafrate, having chosen to review some pieces with which Ali had been involved back in 2007/2008, contacted Shaun Blezard and the sad circumstances came to light. These five older pieces were to be part of the collection of current work and […]