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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FLYING high, flying free, with an absolutely gorgeous line in glittery, psychedelic synthpop, LIP TALK – the musical avatar of New Yorker Sarah K Pedinotti – has returned to the melodic modular breach once more with the absolutely lush “Solar Return”, gloried with her mellifluous tones, breathy, bell-clear, more than a little Liz Fraser in …

ARANDEL, the French artist whose album of expansions and reinterpretations – often, complete genre reshapings – of the works of the great Johann Sebastian, InBach, received deserved acclaim upon its release early last year, is looking to repeat that cultural success with a second volume released today. With that album out to purchase right now, …

BRUM’S garage-psych-doom power trio Table Scraps have, like the rest of us, been busy frying their heads and kicking anxious heels indoors for like: doesn’t it feel like forever now? But they’ve also been busy with the guitar, bass and drums and things, because the lockdown league is one you can play your way out …

HAILING from two great port cities – Kiel, on the German Baltic coast, in the case of Ulrich Schnauss, and Liverpool, in the case of erstwhile Engineers guitarist Mark Peters – these two musicians are united in a musical approach that’s always touched upon a hazy shoegaze from various exploratory angles and looks forward, outward. …

IT’S ALWAYS an absolute pleasure for us here at Backseat Mafia to be invited to premiere a new artist who brings the quirky thrill to music, has that excitement of the new, appears from behind the curtain with a tune that’s fun and breezy and effortless, combines melody and fun in new shapes. So, obvs …

WHEN shoegaze was so cruelly traduced by the British inkies, dazzle-eyed by their enthralment with the twin coming of grunge and early Britpop, us aficionados shed a quiet tear for a lovely sound, a gorgeous aesthetic seemingly consigned to the history books; but you can’t, as we can see in retrospect, keep a great idea …

WITH the recent news that Hamburg’s excellent imprint Bureau B is marking the half-century of Faust with a box set entitled Faust 1971-1974 in October (and already available to order – for details see below, as this isn’t the sort of thing you’d want to delay on), the label has this very morning released a video for …

BLACK DICE, the dub motorik sonic sprites who came blasting out of Rhode Island before the turn of the century with awe-inspiring drone-percussive mantras such as “Endless Happiness”, are back in the rung, gloved up, with a new album entitled Mod Prog Sic due on a new label, FourFour Records, at the start of October. …

HAILING from the buzzing East London scene, Dominic Woolf is on a mission to seduce with a kaleidoscopic approach to a hazy leftfield indiepop, as you can hear on his new single, “Fool”, which we’ve got for you below. Beginning in an up-close, confessional US alt.rock, all acoustic guitars and wayward vocal melodies, in which …

WITH East Yorkshire’s shoegaze princes bdrmm blowing out the candle on the first birthday cake of their cracking debut album, Bedroom, the band have lined up a week of events to celebrate that milestone (what, already, a year, really?) When Bedroom hit the shelves on July 3rd last year, we noted that its songs were …