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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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 nearly here, they’ve taken a swerve into goth-pop drama with a final single for ’21, “Pink Duct Tape”. The song keeps that rave squelch and …

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 darkness of the UK at the fraying, fag end of 2021, that would be an absolute tonic. Too right I’m in. The Charlatans have been …

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 – I mean he is all that, of course he is – but he brings back postcards from his own particular day-to-day travails, this mucky, …

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 his eighth decade with us, those epithets are both wholly apt and richly deserved. And with something around the 90-album mark in his catalogue since …

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 the past year, with that project reaching completion with a final track in mid-January. Which means, of course, that we’re but one track away from …

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 years, For the Sake of Bethel Woods. Too long, guys, too long. And it seems like the coming back together stems at least partly from …

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 trends to be ear to the ground for as 2021 melts inexorably into 2022 is krautjazz; that scene fermenting in city basements and performance spaces …

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 its proud roster, the bright Afrojazz textures of London’s Blue Lab Beats, will release their first album for the label, Motherland Journey, on February 25th. …

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 single, “Red And Brown Scene, 1961”. Moshe is by day, as it were, a member of experimental group Absolutely Free and collaborator with fine indie popsters Alvvays, …

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 space “where everything goes”; and a saxophonist by instrumental trade, either wholly or partly responsible for at least 30 full-length recordings, it’s hard to argue …