Arjuna Music Dark Star Safari is a collaboration between four doyens of the Scandinavian music scene bringing together Samuel Rohrer, Eyvind Aarset, Jan Bang and Erik Honoré. Their self-titled LP finds four kindred spirits looking for a way to push music into even newer directions, trying to find a new language amongst the remains of everything that has gone before.
Mr Olivetti
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Upset the Rhythm Hash Redactor hail from Memphis, Tennessee, but you wouldn’t really know it from the bass-heavy post-punk groove that they throw out on their first album. Made up of Alec McIntyre from Ex-Cult and Charlotte Watson and Meredith Lones from NOTS with George Williford on second guitar, the album is structured but sleazy at the same time
Foolproof Projects Andy Pyne and Lisa Jayne have reconvened as Map 71 to unleash a download EP of new material from Foolproof Projects. After time spent squirrelled away in their bunker (I imagine), the bouncing repetition and simple insistence of opener “Ex-Socialite Needs A New Invention” is faintly reminiscent of some of Factory Floor‘s rhythmic experiments, but here Andy uses squalls of synthetic sound to try and put […]
Phantom Limb JR Bohannon is a Brooklyn-based solo guitar player who first recorded this mini-album back in 2017 for cassette label Ausca. Phantom Limb liked it enough and saw enough in its diverse energy to warrant a reissue. JR originally hails from Louisville in Kentucky, and some of that city’s heritage has leaked into the sound of the songs, along with the usual likes of Robbie Basho and […]
Out In the next part of Ut‘s re-issue campaign, their first album Conviction is up for the treatment and deservedly so. As mentioned before, for me they were unsung heroes and the purity of their democracy was something that a lot of other bands could have learned from. The fact that Nina Canal, Sally Young and Jacqi Ham all wrote and all sang is an unusual thing in […]
Discus Martin Archer‘s Discus label certainly knows how to throw a curveball. After the motorik groove of Das Rad and the subtle freedom of Beck Hunters, their next release is the chilly post-folk artistry of Frostlake. Jan Todd has taken four years to record the follow up to 2015’s White Moon, Black Moon and once again has bassist Terry Todd adding his warm groove to some of the tracks […]
Houndstooth Renowned synthesist Abul Mogard‘s latest release and first for Houndstooth is a selection of reworkings which take in some interesting artists from today’s outer fringes.
Rocket Gum Takes Tooth have waited five years to follow up their second album Mirrors Fold, but it would appear to have been well worth the wait. The wildness of the live spectacle is not so apparent when listening to this album, but the amount of ideas and angles that the duo has on drum and electronic sound-making is phenomenal.
Hubro Øyvind Torvund‘s latest opus on Hubro is a sweeping gesture laying open his love for the kind of crazy exotica that the likes of Martin Denny and Les Baxter wowed the unsuspecting public of the 1950s. It is not about copying what came before, though, as there are some curious modernist elements that attempt to update that classic lush and string-laden sound.
Thrill Jockey Matmos‘s latest is a really impressive feat, considering every sound that you hear on the album was generated by something plastic. As a comment on the current surfeit of plastic items that we have on the globe, it packs a potent social message; and what’s more, considering the possibilities, it is a really good listen.
Fiasco Recordings Art Trip And The Static Sound‘s 2018 album A Week Of Kindness is being refreshed in the public’s consciousness by the release of the “Iron Lung” single. This particular track shines a light on their more repetitive Spacemen 3 leanings, with a rough and grungey circular guitar motif. The drummer is the key here, not allowing anything to escape from the black hole of sound.
Sparrow Hawk Cowboy Flying Saucer‘s second album dispenses a series of lead hollerer BK13‘s slightly surreal and repetitive vignettes over an at times contorted and at times spacious scrum of musical hubbub. His appearance at a Travel Lodge wedding that transformed into some kind of hallucinatory extended dream-state is brought to life in a way that I wasn’t expecting.
Rocmusic I was more than a little excited to discover R.O.C were returning after quite some time away and this album does not disappoint. Somehow, ROC manage to exist outside of the music industry and any trends and vagaries that may afflict it. Although it has been twelve years since their last LP, when the music starts it could have been yesterday that the previous albums were released.
Omnibus Press Damo Suzuki will be seventy years old next year and has spent the best part of half of those traversing the globe with two distinct iterations of his musical caravan; first the Damo Suzuki Band / Network and latterly the ever-evolving global musical cast that are his Sound Carriers. Interspersed in those years were twenty-six spent working full time for a Japanese company that manufactured measuring […]
Blue Tapes The latest release from The Blue Tapes House Band has only one disappointing element; the cassette isn’t blue, but white. I don’t know what is going on here and it is fair to say I have no idea what the House Band are trying to do, except drive the listeners crazy. For nearly an hour, pure white noise rolls out
Rune Grammofon Maja SK Ratkje‘s latest album for Rune Grammofon is a really intriguing piece. Written for the Norwegian National Ballet‘s interpretation of Knut Hamsen‘s breakthrough novel Hunger, it is entirely centred around a modified pump organ. The device was something that she played every night live on stage with the ballet, and that is an incredible feat when you read the spec: “…a modified, wiggly and out […]
Archaeological Notoriously diverse sound artist Andrew Liles first met ex-Mayhem vocalist Sven Kristiansen (AKA Maniac) at the 2008 Roadburn Festival and was later invited to join the latter’s group Sehnsucht. A desire to continue performing together saw the pair reconvene at various points up to this current point, when they decided to lay down this remarkably subtle yet faintly disturbing album. I say subtle, because when you consider […]
Courier Back in 2014, sound artist Stuart Bowditch produced a series of pieces for an exhibition that was taking place in the old Co-operative Bank in Colchester. Created solely using sounds discovered in the thirty rooms of the old edifice, it was installed as a loop playing on an in-car DVD