Album review: Bill MacKay and Nathan Bowles – ‘Keys’: pull up a pew for bluegrass instrumental delight
You know what the best thing about Keys is; for all its intimacy, the focus wholly on how the two players and their instruments mesh,a real joy in creation rings through. William Tyler, Black Twig Pickers, Jack Rose fans; please come on over and pull up a pew
See: Theo Alexander’s ‘Bright-Eyed Hunger’: London composer targets the dream state with his dazzling minimalism
LONDON pianist Theo Alexander likes to loop, to evoke the dreamstate, to explore the beauty of harmony and melody and repetition. He’s an album coming up on Toronto’s lovely Arts & Crafts imprint in late May that looks to seal his reputation as one of the most interesting people working in the minimalist end of …
Album review: Balmorhea – ‘The Wind’: Texas post-classical duo present a lovely set for Deutsche Grammophon
Balmorhea draw a line back in the tradition to the much-missed Louisville, KY outfit Rachel’s, who opted to take an idea and use whichever instrumental mix they found brought out the best of what they wished to convey. And The Wind roams freely and with precision across a spectrum from formal classical through a more pastoral take on the form and all the way out to ambient experimentalism, spoken word, found sound, with a unity and cohesion. It’s just a lovely, thoughtful record; complex in its simplicity
Album review: Chihei Hatakeyama – ‘Late Spring’: a halcyon, beautiful ambient journey
Late Spring takes elements of IDM, shoegaze, and drone, and fashions them together in an impressionistic, delicious fog, with a pretty unique pastoralist feel, alive in nature. It’s pretty much the only album I’ve ever heard that makes me reconsider such unassailable classics of the slow leftfield as Stars of the Lids’ The Tired Sounds Of … and Windy & Carl’s Consciousness and made me think: whoah there guys, these records are a bit … sharp-edged, right? Take it easy. Let it breathe. That halcyon. Late Spring is bloody, bloody beautiful.
Track: Hear Jim Stewart’s ‘Dead Sea’: the composer responds to a Paul Nash painting, taken from the forthcoming ‘Stills 01’ music and painting project
STILLS 01 is the first, beguiling three-track release from new imprint String and Tins Recordings that looks to marry the disciplines of music and fine art, insomuch as each piece of music recorded and issued in the series is a direct response to a painting in the collection of Tate Britain. The first in the …
Track: Birthday Ass – ‘Plubbage Bubbage’: flicking the Vs at punk and jazz and making them dance with abandon
PRIYA CARLBERG, singer and wayward guiding light behind the fun as hell and wonderfully weird punk-funk concoction of Birthday Ass, won’t be drawn on the meaning of the title of their latest single drop, “Plubbage Bubbage” which, if you “think it’s fun to say, roll it around your mouth now – best collocation of words …
See: the hand-animated video for Icarus Phoenix’s lovely ‘Cassie Knows, Or How A Shy Person Says I Love You’
COMIN’ atcha with a bagful of tunes that strike right at your heart in a simply lovely way – in that way the songs of Daniel Johnston or BMX Bandits do, naive, true, unaffected, from the heart – Drew Danburry, who also sometimes dons the Icarus Phoenix baseball cap for recording purposes – is the …
Track: Rainy Miller – ‘Meridian, 1520’: a new and leftfield pop language from Preston artist
PRESTON. Lancashire city, First section of British motorway avoids it. First KFC in the country. Brutalist bus station. According to the Happy Mondays, home of “some c**t from”. Roaming the city astride the Ribble and evoking it in music is Rainy Miller, who’s just dropped “Meridian, 1520”, a slice of urban pop with sliding, eerie …
See: The lyric video for psych-pop songwriter Barnaby Keen’s ‘Lay Our Cards’
LET’S welcome to the grand pantheon of recorded music a debuting (at least solo) songwriter and a new label: firstly Barnaby Keen, who has, on the evidence of “Lay Our Cards”, a nicely whimsical take on the psych-pop troubadour form, taking some of the quirky delirium of the post-Carnaby Street comedown vibe and giving a …
See: Throwing Snow unveils a June album for Houndstooth; watch the grainy, generated imagery for the hip-fizzin’ groove of ‘Brujita’
ROSS TONES, the West Country-based practitioner of a very I form of textural IDM, has announced he’s releasing his forth album under that moniker for Houndstooth come the end of June. It’s to be entitled Dragons, and he’s dropped a first sonic enticement in “Brujita”; scroll down, press play, come back up to finish reading. …