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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WORKING with huge acclaim in the shadowier textures of electronic music now for longer than we care to recall, Kevin Richard Martin – aka The Bug, King Midas Sound, Techno Animal –  has composed a new score for Andrei Tarkovsky’s incredible 1972 sci-fi Solaris, which will be released on Phantom Limb on June 25th. Based …

MISCHA BLANOS is a Romanian pianist and electronic producer who found himself becalmed in Bucharest when the lockdown bit and, with time on his hands as we all had, began to consider the city as a thing, and how we as humans who created them, interact and are altered by them. With the Romanian lockdown …

ROARING back into spiky guitar contention from their adopted North London fastness with a lithe new tune that has all the stop-start passion of Elastica or Menswe@r, FEET have announced a new EP, Walking Machine, due for release on August 6th on their new home, Nice Swan Records; and it comes fanfared with a first …

THEY SOUND like they should be some great lost Moog-psych outfit from ’69, and weird and wonderful is definitely a touchstone for the Lightman Jarvis Ecstatic Band, be sure. It’s the musical mind-melding of Yves Jarvis, whose album from last autumn, Sundry Rock Song Stock, was a really clever and rather ace melange of political …

GROWING up listening to a mixture of Jean-Michel Jarre and Jimmy Smith, Matt Robertson certainly had a good early primer in the weirder beauties of music; big-screen synthesiser worlds, the grooviest, cinematic organ jazz (you mean you haven’ heard Jimmy Smith’s The Cat?) Matt studied at the University of Surrey and matriculated into the arcane world …

AXIS: SOVA began, as many excellent bands do, as a means to a gigging end (see similarly colonised TEKE::TEKE over at Kill Rock Stars, for example). Brett, the Sova of the equation, was watching his previous outfit Mass Shivers enter its death throes – we’re talking back in 2009 here; and having been offered an opening …

THANK the good lord for the fun. The Allergies kept us keeping on through the trials and tribulations of last year with so many great single drops – “Get Yourself Some” and “I’m On It”, “Just Got That Feeling”, more – and a party-vibe fourth album, Say The Word, which helped a lot, brought the …

THEY’RE nothing if not prolific and industrious, John Darnielle’s much-loved exponents of Americana, The Mountain Goats. It was only a year or so ago that John was in conversation with NPR about a breakneck ten days spent writing and recording Songs for Pierre Chuvin, the initially cassette-only release he put together on his boombox (it’s since had CD …

E.R. JURKEN is a singer-songwriter with a deeply moving, beautiful and fragile take on psych-pop with a 1968 Anglophile twist and a Neutral Milk Hotel twirl to his aesthetic, for whom Drag City have initiated a whole new boutique imprint, Country Thyme; you just know they know when they’re on to a good thing. E.R. …

1000 ROBOTA, the trio of Sebastian Muxfeldt, Jonas Hinnerkort and Anton Spielmann, got together while they were still at school in northern Germany and released their debut album of stern post-hardcore, Du Nicht, Er Nicht, Sie Nicht, for Tapete in 2008. A second long player, Ufo, came out two years later, and then; nothing. Nothing, …