Beggars Arkive What a blast from the past: Bowery Electric. For a few years at the end of the 1990s, their second LP Beat was one of the albums that was trying to turn music on its head, suffusing so many different styles into a languid hybrid that held something for everybody. In 2000, they pushed the envelope a little further and drawing primarily on trip-hop for the beats, the duo […]
Mr Olivetti
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The Leaf Label After all these years, Julia Kent clearly understands the innate melancholy of the cello and how the listener’s impression of the instrument’s nature still resonates with us today. Her obvious love for the cello and its place in the musical firmament shines through in everything she does, and somehow manages to imbue each project with its own character.
Thrill Jockey Marc Richter has been rather busy as over the last twelve years or so, what with Black To Comm as well as various side projects and commissions for film and theatre, not forgetting helming the Dekorder label. Seven Horses For Seven Kings is Black to Comm’s first album in five years and also the first for Thrill Jockey. Spread over thirteen tracks and at an hour’s length, it […]
Magnetron Pavel Fedoseev, erstwhile drummer for Russian psychsters Gnoomes, somehow manages to find the time whilst playing and touring with that band to record solo material as Kikok. Hidden away out of trouble’s reach in his hometown of Perm — which is a twenty-two-hour train journey from Moscow
Richard Knox established Gizeh Records in Leeds at the dawn of the new century, and the label has grown organically from strength to strength since then, building a reputation for bringing adventurously expansive music to the world. Mr Olivetti spoke to him about the origins of the label, the art of collaboration, and how he keeps Gizeh and his musical project A-Sun Amissa going in uncertain times. What came first, […]
Thrill Jockey Sarah Louise is a guitar player from North Carolina who, over the course of a short but busy career, is doing her best to make you believe that she is using anything but a guitar to fabricate these vibrant, nature-influenced modern folk pieces.
Odin The Trondheim Jazz Orchestra is a many-headed beast that has been going since the early 2000s and changes personnel from one album to the next to keep their approach fresh for each collaboration. The orchestra draws from a collective pool of players, and it would seem that one particular member takes the reins for each release. This time around it is bassist Ole Morten Vågan, whose compositions […]
Grönland Two years after Radio Wave Surfer was released, Holger Czukay found himself in the studio again with a revolving cast taking in Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit, Sheldon Ancel and Jah Wobble, as well as vocal interjections from U-She and Romie Singh. It seems fair to assume that the album was recorded not long before it was released, putting it some five or six years
Modularfield The latest release from Cologne’s Modularfield label is an EP from electronic artist Jochen Mader, here trading as Skyence. It is one of the label’s infrequent vinyl releases and the 12″ format perfectly suits the atmospheric artwork of a shadowy fencer mid-lunge. The cold, blue colours and the stillness of the image evoke the dusty and romantic, yet antiquated world of the fencing room.
New Heavy Sounds Transmaniacon have been rather quiet since 2014’s hard rocking The Darkening Plain, but their return to the fray is quite an impressive collaboration. They have taken one of fantasy/horror novelist’s Ian Miller‘s post-apocalyptic street creations Suzie Pellet and constructed a cranked-up guitar fest of a concept album around the tale of her life and the lengths to which she has to strive to survive.
Rare Noise The line-up for the self-titled Anguish album is quite a treat and certainly an unexpected one. Just listing the ingredients; two parts Dälek, two parts Fire! Orchestra and Hans Joachim Irmler from Faust would cause a thrill of delight from most alternative music enthusiasts. Recorded over the course of just three days at Irmler’s studio, the result is a dystopian study in paranoia and a creeping […]
Odin We often have a particular image of northern European jazz, particularly that from Norway and Sweden, as being just a little clinical. I can see why people would want to discover something new and put some distance between them and what is seen as the old guard of jazz, but the Hanna Paulsberg Concept manages to keep a foot in both camps, pushing the body of jazz […]
Grönland Holger Czukay is a name with which any self-respecting music fan will be only too familiar. With a career that started in 1960 with the introduction of the Holger Schuring Quintet, through time spent as a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, on through the years spent honing Can into the extraordinary machine that it became and then the best part of a forty-year solo career which was the epitome of inclusion with […]
Brutture Moderne The mysterious GDG Modern Trio is a band about which I knew nothing and the album that arrived with its Soviet-influenced modernist cover art sits there on the desk looking inscrutable. It transpires that the album was recorded in Ravenna and consists of three members of Italy’s burgeoning alternative music scene
Svart When Throat‘s latest album and their first for Svart arrived, I must confess I was a little put of by the sticker on the cover proclaiming them to be “The princes of Finnish Rock”. I guess I had a certain image in my head, which thankfully was completely eradicated by putting on the CD.
Consouling Sounds Thisquietarmy have been seriously prolific over the last ten years, scattering a good thirty or so albums into the musical universe across an array of different labels. However, this latest via Consouling Sounds is the first to find Eric Quach expanding TQA into a three-piece. The inclusion of Charles Bussieres and Marc-Olivier Germain allows the trademark sound
London 5 December 2018 The good people at Upset The Rhythm have been trading for fifteen years now and the calibre of artists that they have to play seems to improve with every year. It feels as though they made their home at The Islington and tonight’s treats for the ears teamed UTR friend and recording artiste Robert Sotelo with Canadian guitar legend and Constellation label stalwart Eric Chenaux.
Lo Recordings Lo Recordings have been going for over twenty years now. An often overlooked but important arbiter of modern electronic based music, they have chosen this moment to release a compilation of material that they see as exploring the connections, overlaps and roots of that oft over-used term ambient. In association with Strange Attractor Press, they have invited a wide variety of artists to offer a contribution […]