experimental albums
Album Review: Slow Knife – A Hymn Supreme
Todmorden experimentalists Slow Knife have returned with a second album, the fully improvised two track long player, A Hymn Supreme. Taking its lead more than likely (as well as half of its title) fromJohn Coltrane opus, it’s explores spiritual jazz, but alongside noise electronics and lyrically explores the ‘authenticity of spiritual transcendence’. Part 1 lies …
Album Review: Tegh & Adel Poursamadi – Ima ایما : probing electro-acoustic possibilities and reaching to the future.
As a practitioner and sound artist Shahin Entezami (aka Tegh) has produced a consistent stream of expansive works which have put him at the forefront of the Iranian experimental music scene, a community that continues to reach way beyond its homeland. His music entranced under the melodic swell of 2015’s undulating ‘Night Scenes’ then took …
Album review: Duncan Marquiss – ‘Wires Turned Sideways In Time’: Phantom Band guitarist conceives of an instrumental, pastoral motorik for a place yet to exist
FROM disastrous events that upend your world can sometimes come good things; sometimes, I’m no Pollyanna here. Fortunately for Duncan Marquiss, guitarist with Chemikal Underground’s The Phantom Band, a major setback has led to another path, and a rather excellent one, albeit eventually. That quartet, with four albums such as Fears Trending and The Wants …
Album review: Matchess’s ‘Sonescent’: an irresistible flow of experimental, meditative drone recollection and conscious absence
WHITNEY JOHNSON has been releasing albums that explore gorgeous deep inner space in song and sound as Matchess for a number of years now. She began in 2015 with the downtempo ambience of Somnaphoria, vocodered vocals, clock-ticking beats, swirls and aural glitter to put The Orb to shame in the cosmic stakes. Since that blissful …
Album review: Die Wilde Jagd – ‘Atem’: a dark, occluding drone masterwork
DIE WILDE JAGD – it translates as “The Wild Hunt”, Anglophones, which will surely be the only possible connection to Swedish troubadour The Tallest Man on Earth we shall ever explore – is the sonic project of producer and songwriter Sebastian Lee Philipp. Across three albums from 2015’s self-titled debut, through 2018’s Uhrwald Orange and …
Album Review: Matt Baber & Richard Wileman – Baber Wileman
Richard Wileman’s 2020 album, ‘Arcana’ was a melodic yet unnerving gothic treat, with a Hammer Horror, Wicker Man vibe. This new offering continues in a similar vein, a collaboration with Matt Baber of Sanguine Hum. They had previously worked together in 2011, on a track (Mondo Profondo 1) for Wileman’s earlier incarnation, Karda Estra. This …
Album review: Cluster – ‘Cluster 71’: the German electronica scene on the cusp of breaking through, lovingly reissued
AS WELL as hosting a whole stable of contemporary bands that are mainly spinning in the leftfield electronics and synthpop galaxies, Hamburg’s Bureau B has also been doing sterling work in curating the krautrock archive, keeping the torch burning with deep dives into the unreleased tapes of Conrad Schnitzler, reissuing lost gems and offering that …
Album review: Jim Wallis & Nick Goss – ‘Pool’: immersive, ocean-going, pastoral ambience
MODERN NATURE might be flying under your radar, but the Bella Union band who’ve just one full-length and one-mini album to their name – 2019’s How To Live and last year’s Annual, respectively – are someone you should be wrapping your head around, especially if the post-rock pastoral brilliance espoused by Mark Hollis and Talk …
Album review: Joel Vandroogenbroeck – ‘Far View’: a curated, cosmic library set from the Belgian psychedelic scion
A MUSICIAN who ventured far in both life and his chosen creative form, Joel Vandroogenbroeck is maybe not a name that trips with ease from your lips; unless of course, you’re a proper head of the deep psych persuasion. For Joel was both the driving force behind and ever-present in the hard-psych voyagers Brainticket, whose …
Album review: Spiritczualic Enhancement Center – ‘Carpet Album’: filmic, psychedelic and enveloping – travel deep, travel wisely
IT’S ONE of those sentences you hear periodically when chewing the fat about the music: “Ooh no, though, I really don’t like jazz”. Which, each to their own, live and let live, vive la difference without question; but, which, you imagine may be based on some particularly untethered, free-associating inversion of the style, say, Coltrane’s …