City Slang I had a real love for Calexico back when they first started. There was something about Joey Burns and John Convertino disappearing into a shack in Arizona somewhere and reproducing the sound of their environment in such a charming and understated way. That dusty, warm sound, the sensation of lounging underneath […]
Mr Olivetti
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Riot Season Familia de Lobos is a six-piece from Buenos Aires formed in 2016 and their first album, released as a limited LP on Riot Season, is a fantastic mix of warm 1970s-inflected desert guitar music and more traditional Latin American sounds.
Drag City After four years away, No Age return with a follow up to 2013’s An Object, released on Sub Pop. They seem to have left that spiritual home, headed for the more experimental environs of Drag City and have now released Snares Like A Haircut.
Bureau B Releasing records on and off since 1993, Jo Zimmerman has found another new home on the eternal home for musical explorers Bureau B. His first Schlammpeitziger album since 2014’s What’s Fruit? finds him in less of a disco place, with the beats a little slower — but the vibe […]
Upset The Rhythm The good people at Upset the Rhythm have very wisely taken the opportunity, on the strength of their return to play live dates, to reissue the first album Normil Hawaiians recorded and released back in 1982; and what an absolute gem of post-post-punk pioneering spirit it truly […]
Consouling Sounds After years of collaborations and different labels, Jozef van Wissem‘s second album for Consouling Sounds finds him and his lute once more alone without outside assistance to deter him from this unique vision. Nobody Living Can Ever Make Me Turn Back is a glorious journey into time and […]
Atmosphere Autunna Et Sa Rose is a multimedia project that has been running for the best part of twenty years and is the brainchild of Saverio Tesolato. His desire to weave together various strands of art into a cohesive whole has taken him in many directions over the years, and […]
Upset The Rhythm If you went ahead and read the lovely interview with Robert, published in this august journal, you will have already learnt a few intriguing things about this unique talent, one of which is that Sotelo is a pseudonym. A pseudonym under which it has been possible for […]
Versatile Zombie Zombie‘s fifth long player celebrates their tenth anniversary of recording for the Versatile label. Although the last album proper was 2012’s Rituels D’un Nouveau Monde, they have spent the intervening years scoring two movies and a contemporary circus show. I think that these extra-curricular activities have fed nicely […]
Ampbase Recordings The wonderful Amp have now been ploughing their particular furrow for the last twenty-five years or so. Having been birthed from the same fertile Bristol scene as Third Eye Foundation, Flying Saucer Attack, Movietone and Crescent, the band that finally coalesced around the duo of Karine Charff and […]
Out For me, Ut were the unsung heroes of that Noise New York scene and to see their essential work being re-issued can only be a good thing. Crawling from the same scene that spawned Swans, Sonic Youth, James Chance and Richard Hell, what made the band special was not that […]
Svart Finland’s instrumental hypno fourpiece Siinai are back with a standalone follow-up to 2014’s musing on consumerism Supermarket, and what a satisfying burst of cyclical, looping repetition it is.
Imaginator After many years beavering away with King Missile, Bradford Reed‘s personal experiments feeding percussion through modular synths and playing around with the results has paid dividends on the release of the album Conduit by Ω▽ (pronounced Ohmslice), a band formed for this purpose.
Important For the second collaborative release between the wonderfully wonky minimalist composer and toy lover Charlemagne Palestine and our very own Grumbling Fur Time Machine Orchestra, they have chosen to spread a 2016 live show at the Copenhagen Jazzhouse across three sides of beautiful aqua vinyl housed in a suitably […]
Bristol 30 October 2017 Motion in Bristol was home to two giants of the alternative music scene on the day before Halloween this year. The weather was clement, the venue opened on time and the mighty Godspeed You! Black Emperor had brought along friends and fellow sonic travellers Bardo Pond, […]
Tona Serenad Swedish composer Matti Bye has been producing music for twenty-five years now, much of which has been piano based. His early years spent improvising to moving pictures has brought an interesting aesthetic to his approaching his own music and this, his tenth LP, is a mysterious and ethereal […]
Bureau B The three man guerilla riot that is Camera have taken new directions, but following in their wake is Licht by Franz Bargmann and Timm Brockmann, both ex-members of the band, but both with a work ethic that means less than a year after the release of Camera’s Phantom Of Liberty (on which LP […]
Turquoise Coal Alan Holmes, one half of Spectralate and doyen of the Welsh alternative scene — which includes being part of the wonderful Ectogram — has been beavering away on those fringes for the best part of thirty years under a wide variety of different names and in different styles.
(self-released) Meriheini Luoto is an improvisational violinist and a recent graduate of the Sibelius Academy. Her love of the forest and how sound can interact with that most glorious and mysterious of environments led her to produce this binaurally recorded, five-part piece which nods to Nordic folk music as well as a looser, […]
Constellation I remember the first time I heard Godspeed You! Black Emperor; having my mind blown by the sheer enormity of the scale of that first album, the bleak drama and the frazzled audacity of it. With the second album, this ragged bunch of Canadians reached the apogee of what […]