Constellation For Siskiyou‘s fourth album for Constellation, they appear to have returned to their roots with that lo-fi home-recorded sound that echoes the kind of direction in which Mark Linkous originally headed. On Not Somewhere, Colin Huebert has taken on the majority of instruments and constructed frayed but hopeful vignettes
Mr Olivetti
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Rune Grammofon For Fire! Orchestra‘s fourth album for Rune Grammofon, the core group has once again reduced the numbers, this time to a far more manageable fourteen. The introduction of a string quartet (three violins and one cello) still has reed players outnumbering strings, but it doesn’t make for a top-heavy sound at all.
Motto Motto Incredibly, the band Now have been plying their charming trade for the last twenty years or so, and yet every release sounds so fresh and imbued with the joy of a band that have just started playing together.
Bronson Martin Bisi‘s famed BC Studios in Brooklyn is renowned for bringing the noise to New York, and in celebration of it reaching the grand old age of thirty-five, they decided to throw a party in January of 2016, invite a load of old friends and record the ensuing fun for release. A first volume was released back in 2018 and now the response has demanded a second […]
Thrill Jockey Once again, Thrill Jockey play host to the Appalachian folk-influenced duo House and Land, and here they take seven songs of various origins and imbue them with a sense of their own characters. The songs, being the age that they are, are far from feminist tracts and it feels as though Sarah Louise and Sally Anne Morgan wish to reclaim them, to try to infuse them […]
Thrill Jockey The classic idea of the sort of band that one might expect to find on Thrill Jockey seems to be blown apart with every new release. Iowa City’s Aseethe are a great case in point with their second album for the label upping the heavy ante to monolithic proportions.
Rock Action As far as I am concerned, Luke Sutherland has been away from producing his own music for too long now. After helping to create the blood-rush post-rock of Long Fin Killie to the dreamy trip-hop of Bows and the pan-European Music AM, he wrote some delightful novels and then disappeared into the welcoming bosom of Mogwai. Until now…
Va Fongool In her bid to subvert the sound of the trumpet and meld it into something that is purely her own, Hilde Marie Holsen has teamed up with synthesizer artist Magnus Bugge as Bilayer to generate an album’s worth of esoteric and other worldly soundscapes. If you are lucky, you may recognise the sound of her primary instrument here and there, but often it is disguised
Spècula A serial collaborator, Teho Teardo has been releasing music for the last thirty years, both as a member of various bands and also as a solo soundtrack composer. Max Porter‘s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, a book that has been adapted for the stage, directed by Enda Walsh, is a tale of sorrow and loss and for this album, Teho has reached deep inside himself to […]
Border Community Leafcutter John‘s latest comes with a stylised map of the east coast of England, and places that we can visit from where he has taken some of the samples used in the construction of the seven tracks here. It is a great idea and somehow, along with the brief descriptions John provides of the circumstances surrounding the pieces, it feels as though we could almost be […]
Not Applicable Sam Britton, the polymath behind Isambard Khroustaliov, originally trained as an architect, but was swayed into electronic composition early on and has been recording for the last twenty years or so, often in collaborations. The likes of percussionist Maurizio Ravalico and trumpeter Tom Arthurs have crossed his path recently, but here on This Is My Private Beach, This Is My Jetsam, we have the sounds of […]
Frequency Domain For the second volume of Partials, only a couple of the artists from the previous release make a return visit, leaving the way open for plenty of fresh artists doing their bit for this fantastic cause. Once again, it is a real chill-fest, the majority of tracks happily nestled into the drifting ambient side of things, with only a few adopting beats and allowing the vibe […]
Constellation The latest release from Efrim Menuck finds quite a dramatic change to the sound we have come to expect from him. Teaming up with Growing‘s Kevin Doria has seen a move away from the kind of grandiose string arrangements of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and A Silver Mt Zion, and more of an embrace of the kind of slow moving, subtly evolving guitar soundscapes for which Growing […]
Svart By the looks of the duo on the back of the cover and the long list of electronic machines that Timo Kaukolampi plays listed on the inside, with Tomi Leppänen having just drums and a Juno, I figured maybe K-X-P were some sort of twenty-first century take on Silver Apples. I was not too far off the mark, but the vocals that appear on IV are buried […]
Blue Tapes Henry Plotnick‘s excursion on Blue Tapes from 2014 (when he was thirteen) is a meditative collection of pieces that are about slow build, decay and regeneration. Over the course of an hour and six tracks, Henry shows his abilities with a wide variety of instruments and atmospheres that makes for an intensely satisfying, if at times bewildering, collection.
Truant For Kinbrae‘s second album, the brothers Truscott have chosen to weave an aural tapestry of the River Tay. It serves as a kind of love letter and story as to the impact the river has had on their lives, and their interactions with the surrounding landscape. Newly started label Truant has issued this on lovely 12″ vinyl with dramatic photographs on the inner sleeve
Upset The Rhythm Hot on the heels of the Drecksound LP, the third NOTS LP finds Hash Redactor‘s rhythm section Charlotte Watson and Meredith Lones reconvening with singer / guitarist /keyboardist Natalie Hoffmann for another high-intensity post-punk charge, smashing what came before out of the way.
Discus For Discus‘s eightieth release, Martin Archer has decided to go solo again, while also attempting to reproduce some of the sounds of his hornweb sax quartet that was active between 1983 and 1993. Not only that, it appears also as a kind of love letter to those saxophonists that have influenced him over the years of his playing, from the likes of Paul Desmond and Lester Young […]