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.
Mr Olivetti
753 posts
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 mysterious and oily gatefold cover
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, so we knew we were in for a full on evening’s treat.
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 listen.
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 neither played) we have something a little different into which to sink our aural teeth.
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, more immediate style that dovetail well.
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 could be done using the basic constructs of rock music
Tapete Nick Nicely is a bit of a mystery. It would appear that he has been recording and releasing music for the best part of the last forty years, but this album released on Tapete is only his third non-compilation full-length record in that time. A series of psychedelic singles were released in the early ’80s and then a series of dancefloor-filling twelve inches in the nineties
Alien Agency For Dig Deeper‘s third long-player, leader Einar Kaupang has chosen to cast a light on the plight of refugees as seen from the perspective of a Norwegian citizen; one who is discontented with the inhumane attitudes and “close the border” mentalities of that government
Mute After thirty years spent as Sonic Youth guitar wrangler, plus his intermittent and incredibly varied solo career of experimentation, collaboration and wild ideas, I thought I knew a little of what to expect from this latest release from Lee Ranaldo. The stark, contextless cover image of tyre marks on a rural road further confirmed my assumptions, only to have them dashed completely
Stickman Papir are a young power trio from Copenhagen plying an expansive take on instrumental guitar music. Together since 2010, V is, as the Roman numeral suggests, their fifth album and squeezes just seven tracks onto two discs, lasting as a little over an hour and a half. Brevity is not their strong suit.
Gizeh The French neo-classical collective Astrïd has been playing together for the best part of twenty years. Back in 2012/2013 after various e-mailed correspondence, they invited the pianist Rachel Grimes, most well known for her US-based collective Rachel’s, to attend a gathering in the French countryside and see what might come forth from such a collaboration.
Bureau B Sound architect Nikolai von Sallwitz and experimental artist Alsen Rau have been collaborating on various projects for the last fifteen years or so and for this mysterious duo of albums, the ever-reliable Bureau B have been chosen to release them. This time around, the duo have chosen the name Esmark under which to trade
Hubro Of the three recent Hubro releases that have come across my path, this Brutter album is the one that perhaps pushes experimentation with rhythm to its optimum limits.
Upset The Rhythm After being seriously impressed with a fantastically rhythmic and propulsive live set by the dynamic duo courtesy of the very lovely people at Upset The Rhythm
Distant Spore After luxuriating in the carnival like atmosphere of 2014’s full length Make It Look Like Nothing Happened and the head spinning smorgasbord of 2016’s Everything Is Magick, nobody could really second guess Impuritan‘s next move. The colours and textures employed in the previous releases made them a fantastic new discovery and I was intrigued to see what the next step would be.