Chris Sawle, Author at Backseat Mafia

See: Harkness gestures to a prettier, baroque pop world beyond the virus with ‘Moon Spell’

HARKNESS is a beautiful musical enigma wrapped up inside a conundrum wrapped inside a rather fetching, actuellement, mask and gown; from within which couture he has a very personal line…

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Track: Slip inside the gorgeous, dubby blur of ‘The Visitant’ as Scottish ambient duo Cahill/Costello announce an enthralling debut album

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…

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See: Alasdair Roberts og Völvur lead you through the sombre, beautiful out-folk of ‘Nu Solen Går Ned’

WITH a rather gorgeous new record in cahoots with the Norwegian experimental folk collective Völvur just a little over a fortnight away now, our favourite Perthshire and formerly appendically removed…

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See: Sølyst brings a playful, fractured machine-dub-pop with ‘Hold’ ahead of his August album

THOMAS KLEIN, otherwise drummer for the fine post- and krautrock rhythmic venturers Kriedler, also has a natty occasional sideline as Sølyst, wearing which hat he strides out with an album…

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Track: Swiss post-rock trio HOLM bring the shimmer and the dapple to ‘Flickering Leaves’: a second, impressionistic step towards their 2022 album

WITH a months-long concept of dropping one single track every month on the pilgrimage towards their 2022 album, Swiss post-rock trio HOLM have followed up the cinematic and metronomic wash…

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Album review: Adam Stafford – ‘Trophic Asynchrony’: Falkirk composer moves to a deep, cyclical set of formal minimalism to address the ecological state we’re in

FALKIRK’S Adam Stafford, the film-maker and folk artist whose lockdown notebook album Diamonds Of A Horse Famine we warmly embraced here last summer – not least because it contained the…

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With his debut solo album just a fortnight away, Cameron Knowler invites us to contemplation in ‘Kuyina’

WITH HIS two-hander album with Eli Winter, Anticipation, an excellent study in guitar primitivism, just three months behind us in the rear-view mirror, Texas acoustic explorer is just a fortnight…

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See: Devendra Banhart and Noah Goergeson unveil an expansive, meditative ‘Refuge’ double set for August; come float within ‘Into Clouds’ and ‘In A Cistern’

THEIR first meeting may have been entirely inauspicious – the one enquiring of the other whether in fact he was, indeed, a French drug dealer – but once that initial…

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Track: Bellatrix fashions toxic romance into alt.pop silk with ‘Bad Love’

SHE’S got one of those brilliantly tonally expressive voices, which skips up and down the register with easy fluidity, flowing through the notes in the way Bjork does; but then,…

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See: Lucid Express wrap a fleeting romance in the shoegaze bliss of ‘Hotel 65’

THE HONG KONG shoegaze quintet Lucid Express have tapped into the beautiful blur of that genre at its finest as a safe and exhilarating space away from the continuing political upheaval,…

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