Chris Sawle, Author at Backseat Mafia

Track: Sugarstone twist the rave into a darkwave nightmare before Christmas on ‘Pink Duct Tape’

MANCUNIAN new wave ravers Sugarstone have tucked away the dayglo, hands-in-the-air synth thang just for now as they embrace the aesthetics of the darkest month; and with the winter solstice…

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Live review: The Charlatans and Martin Carr, Exeter University, December 14th, 2021 plus gallery

A GREATEST hits tour, from The Charlatans, you say? Actually, I thought: with the increasingly Kafkaesque qualities of everyday life in the political, viral and, it being December, the actual…

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Track: Owen FitzGerald investigates the disassociative in the confessional alt.country of ‘Touching The Oven At Work’

DURHAM, North Carolina-based Americana troubadour Owen FitzGerald isn’t just a songwriter of whom you can simply say, he looks askance at life in a refreshing way couched in sound songsmithery…

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Track: Roedelius & Story show us the beauty of four hands working in empathy on the nuanced piano duet, ‘Ba’

PEOPLE can often bandy about terms such as legendary and scion with a carefree laziness; but, when it comes to German electronic and ambient music pioneer Hans-Joachim Roedelius, now into…

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Track: HOLM unfold the post-rock glimmer of ‘In Gardens’ from their Zurich bunker

ZURICH’S fine post-rockers HOLM have taken an unusual, calendrical approach to their forthcoming album, In Gardens; they’ve been revealing it at the steady rate of a track a month over…

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See: Midlake drop a live performance video for ‘Meanwhile …’ – they’re back with tour dates and an album for Bella Union in March

IT WAS a real boon for lovers of expansive, harmonic, suede-jacketed Americana back in October when Denton, Texas’s Midlake announced they were reconvening for their first album in jeez, nine…

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See: Krautjazz quintet Fazer offer an ode to a weird year ending in the whimsical but classy ‘Dezember’

WITH the recent album by Spiritczualic Enhancement Center (which, not to blow our own trumpet, we reviewed here) and others, it very much looks like one of the current leftfield…

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News: Blue Lab Beats will release their debut album for Blue Note in February: hear the sunbright Afro grooves of ‘Motherland Journey’ feat. Fela Kuti and KillBeatz

IT’S A meeting of musical values as well being a perfect colour match: the none-more-esteemed Blue Note Records, 82 years in the game, has announced that the latest addition to…

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See: Memory Pearl takes a New York Met painting and explores it in sound on ‘Red And Brown Scene, 1961’

WITH his album exploring a septet of paintings hanging in American galleries in sound out on Altin Village and Mine this Friday, Toronto’s Moshe Fisher-Rozenberg, has dropped one final video…

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Track: Ilhan Ersahin, Dave Harrington and Kenny Wollesen drop the late-night alt.jazz elegance of ‘And It Happens Every Day’

CLUB OWNER, down in New York’s famous East Village, at which he’s the architect of deeply grooving late-night jam sessions and of which the New York Times notes as a…

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