Nonplace Burnt Friedman is one of those mystery names that seems to often be involved in so many collaborations. His work with Jaki Liebezeit in Cyclopean was a deliciously rhythmic stew and his stuff with David Sylvian, particularly the Nine Horses album was really lovely, so to be confronted with a compilation of his own work was a pleasant surprise and then to discover that it covers a […]
Mr Olivetti
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RVNG Intl. Mark Renner was a mystery name to me, and because of that I must admit to an element of surprise at the attention lavished on the packaging by RVNG on this collection of tracks. The tracks date from electronic music’s halcyon days of the 1980s and cover Mark’s initial foray into recorded sound in 1982 up to the point where he seems to have put music […]
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 the canopy of an orange grove as these subtle, Mexican-influenced, horn-infused delights float around your head like the […]
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 still as deliciously idiosyncratic and strangely surreal as ever.
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 is.
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 space with only the lute and various electronics to guide us.
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 now finds him attempting to translate two specific dreams into a web of musical poetry that sits with […]
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 the artist (I won’t name him as it doesn’t seem necessary, but you can find out if you […]
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 into the sound world that has been created on Livity, (a Rastafarian spiritual concept based on the energy […]
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 Richard Amp have been regularly releasing the kind of drifting, transportative and adventurous albums that really take the […]
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 they were all women; this was a scene that had strong women like Kim Gordon, Lydia Lunch, Ann […]
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 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.