Album review: Matchess’s ‘Sonescent’: an irresistible flow of experimental, meditative drone recollection and conscious absence

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Album review: The Jazz Butcher – ‘The Highest In The Land’: one final pop postcard from Northampton’s foremost gent

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Album review: Black Flower – ‘Magma’: a perfumed souk of North African psych jazz from the Lowlands quintet

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Diamonds Of A Horse Famine is a lyrically precise and freewheelin’ folk set, reviving a rediscovered notebook. Erotic Thistle contends for folk song of the year

IF YOU like your singer-songwriting meaningful, deep, exploratory – in short if Daniel Blumberg, Richard Dawson, Jad Fair, David Thomas Broughton et al spin your dial – then the news that two of the British leftfield’s scions, Daniel O’Sullivan and Richard Youngs, have got together to fuse their thinking and have announced a debut collaborative album, Twelve of Hearts, …

HERE at Backseat Mafia, being the old shoegazers that we are, we have an awful lot of love for Arizona’s Citrus Clouds, who know how a guitar can soar to heaven when caressed correctly. That name? It’s for the majestic sunsets the band – bassist and singer Stacie Huttleston, singer-guitarist Erick Pineda and drummer Angelica …

COMING atcha outta Austin, Texas, Tele Novella is currently the duo of vintage shop-owner Natalie Ribbons and Jason Chronis, who collects rare records. Tele Novella arose from the ashes of other musical projects they were involved deep down in Texas: Agent Ribbons, Voxtrot, Belaire. When they met they knew they could fashion something pretty special. Self-described as “medieval …

BIG CROWN’S first lady of modern soul, Virginian Lady Wray, is shaping up for her follow-up to 2016’s acclaimed Queen Alone with the gobsmackingly deep and heartfelt gospel-soul piano styles of “Storms”. Take a listen to a an absolute blast of a track, below. It looks forward and back; you can hear the church roots …

CAMILA DE LABORDE, who hails from Mexico City, and Münchner Daniel Hermann-Collini have been recording together as Camila Fuchs since encountering each other in London back in 2012. The band released their debut album Singing From Fixed Rung, in 2016, which they followed by signing for ATP for 2018’s Heart Pressed Between Stones; now based in Lisbon, …

ACCLAIMED and award-winning French composer Yann Tiersen has shared two new remixes, by Nine Inch Nails’ Alessandro Cortini and Swedish producer The Field – take a listen to the pristine electronic beauty of the latter, below. In a busy flurry of announcements, he has also revealed details of his updated European live dates for next year; and …

KINO MOTEL is the (currently) Melbourne-based uniting of kindred global and musical explorers Ed Fraser and Rosa Mercedes. They met in a Berlin commune, having both served time in critically acclaimed cult bands: he in the steely, dark grind of Heads; she with out-folker Josephine Foster. Once they’d met and pooled common purpose, they got the …

ALBUQUERQUE-based Bryce Hample, one-third of future sampledelia explorers REIGHNBEAU, also makes beautiful post-classical ambience as Hedia; and today he’s premiering the nature-minimalist video for “Untitled 1”, a lovely essay in viola de gamba (or viol), and piano, in which Bryce explores the luxurious reverberation of that instrument. We’ve embedded the video below; fans of Rachel’s …

ÉL RECORDS recording genius and in-house producer who seemed to find his way onto most of that label’s releases; football correspondent for the English game for France Football, these 21 years now; book award-winner, renaissance man and general all-round good egg, ’tis a shame that Louis Philippe, just as Louis Philippe, has been missing from …