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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WITH music this beautiful, it’s so very good to see them back: the Icelandic quartet amiina, who’ve been away for half a decade, have returned to the fray with the musically beautiful and visually spectacular new single, “Beacon”, which you can watch herein. The song is taken from the forthcoming Pharology EP, which the band …

AT THE beginning of last year, the supremely talented Italian violinist and composer Laura Masotto had just began a residency at the former textile mill turned centre for the arts Fabra I Coats, in Barcelona, where she was planning on beginning the process which would lead to her new album, WE, which is due out …

MOVING away from their recent investigations of the film score, which includes their last full album proper, 2019’s The General, a score for Buster Keaton’s 1926 early slapstick comedy classic, and two short film commissions last year, Derbyshire’s completely gorgeous (fan? Moi?) post-folk trio Haiku Salut have announced they’re releasing their fifth album in August …

WE’VE thrilled to the stream of Japanese psych bands that have been melting our heads over the past few decades – Acid Mothers Temple, Ghost, Bo Ningen, Kikagaku Moyo; embraced fully and irrevocably Japanese ambient formalism, in the shape of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Chihei Hatekeyama, et al. Perhaps it’s time we drew back from the exploratory …

GROWING up on the North London-Hertfordshire borders of Enfield, producer Loraine James was up on the escarpment, able to gaze down across London in the bowl of the Thames valley below. That skyline, the city so near, silhouetted, morphing as new towers grew from reinforced steel skeletons, informed and continues to inform her enthralling future …

FOLLOWING on from last autumn’s majorly expanded reissue of Miami – read our piece on that, here – Blixa Sounds have now turned their fine archival attention to The Gun Club’s album from the year before – 40 years on now, their punk-blues debut Fire Of Love is getting the deluxe treatment and will be …

COMING to us from the scene in Hong Kong, and comprised of multi-instrumentalists James Banbury (synths, bass, percussion, cello) and Joseph von Hess (vocals, clarinet, sax, percussion), Blood Wine or Honey describe themselves as hypno-tropicalia and fashion a technicolour haze of brazen sax, declamatory spoken word, Jimi Tenor-type pixieish funk and groove. We were pretty …

CHIMING with crisp twelve-strings, the like of which you last encountered being toted by a McGuinn or a Buck, but also possessed of a thigh-slappin’ Brit-glam silvered groove, Roxy sax raunch, The Fernweh are spanning continents and decades and whirring it all up on their new single, “The Pike” – the very first stomper to …

LONDON audiovisual merry pranksters c / a aren’t quite like anyone you’ve encountered before. Nor me, for that matter. They’re operating in a highly conceptual sphere where AI, generative algorithms and light-touch flesh intervention are making music; there’s others creating out at this mind-bending edge, loosening the reins of human control – witness the video …

TUSH; who they? You enquire, entirely within your remit. Well, if the groove is in you, they’re someone whose acquaintance you should make forthwith. Coming from the dancefloors of Toronto with a love of disco, soul, electro, Nineties’ house and more, the twin pillars of Tush are the dulcet vocal talents of Kamilah Apong and Jamie Kidd. They’ve …