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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A MEETING of delicate pop like minds: musician-producers David Tanton (aka Rhoda/Tender Spring), Éloi Le Blanc-Ringuette (aka Thomas White), and Lia Kurihara (aka LIA) met on the fertile Montréalais music scene in 2018, began to share and mesh ideas, and formed Afternoon Bike Ride – and listen up, friends; they’re an absolute delight of hazy, …

PIE EYE COLLECTIVE is the solo project of Bristol-born, London-based sound scientist Matthew Gordon, who melds elements of ambient, broken beat, dub-techno and hip hop, all refracted and discoloured via a spectrum of tape-saturated synthesis; and thus makes a beats-driven and -occluded magical underground to immerse in. Sprite-like, enveloping, oozing with intelligence and devoted to …

ARE YOU a sucker for an imaginary soundtrack, filmscore funk? Hell, I am. Ever since the days of Barry Adamson’s inestimably influential Moss Side Story, the score for a Manchester crime flick yet to be made, and its strapline: “In a black and white world, murder brings a touch of colour”. And it really did, …

KEVIN DANIEL CAHILL and Graham Costello, guitarist and drummer respectively, first set off on the path that would lead to them wedding as a musical act with an oblique and rapturous aesthetic when they met at Glasgow’s prestigious Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, at which Kevin was pursuing a classical music education and Graham, jazz; they …

THE PRO-TEENS – or, to give them all due full credit, Snooch Dood and the Pro-Teens, and we wouldn’t want to be putting Snooch’s nose out of joint quite this early in our relationship, who knows what vengeful redress he might seek – describe themselves as being “a collection of professional teenagers from the Darebin …

WE LOCKED the door; we waited. We waited, we combed the airwaves; we counted the days some more. The experience is nigh on universal, save those of you lucky enough to be reading in Taiwan, Christchurch, Auckland and elsewhere. Italy was caught by the pandemic earlier than many, and as it swept across the country, …

BORN in Rakvere, a small town in the very north of Estonia, a handful of miles from the Baltic Sea, the experimental musician Maarja Nuut was first introduced to music by her mother, a choir conductor, which opened up a world which would become her métier. Aged 7 she began taking violin lessons, studying at the Tallinn …

THE REMIX album is a really interesting thing, a gathering of the tribes in a meeting place that’s arisen from the sphere of dance music, in which like minds bring their aesthetics and splice it with another’s; a trading, the one overlaying, informing the other, creating a new offspring. When it comes off in the …

YOU KNOW that if no less a renaissance man than Max Cooper is taking enough of an interest in what you’re sculpting in sound to sign you up for his label, Mesh, then you must be doing something not only very right, but also very interesting; Max really these days being at the forefront of …

THERE’S a very strong argument to be made, in the sphere of the more introverted singer-songwriter and that of Americana, that the best music is the living music, the real music, captured in the moment, not fussed with in any way – far removed from the sheen and multi-tracking and the endless possibility of the …