See: Patrick Belaga – ‘The Tunnel Is A Tower’: off-kilter ambience in which electronica plays against shadowy cello
AS YOU can pretty much deduce from the photo, Patrick Belaga isn’t your common or garden cellist. Classically trained, natch, he loves to bust out of convention – whether that’s collaborating with performance artists such as Wu Tsang, or scoring Lady Gaga’s Netflix documentary. Life – and music, and art – are for living. His …
Track: Jeshua – ‘IDK (mnlghtr remix)’: classy Scottish dreampop gets a blissful breaks rerub
IT WAS only a month back that we covered the third single drop from rather obscenely talented upcoming Glasgow tunesmith Jeshua, “IDK”; and it was another fine entry in his fledgling catalogue. I mean, he’s been releasing tunes for such a short length of time. And they’re all effortlessly cracking. When “IDK” first came out, …
News: The Lathums announce rescheduled dates, including a massive homecoming show
WIGAN’S indiepop cuties The Lathums have announced their ‘rona-postponed, rescheduled British tour for the autumn – and it now includes a massive homecoming Lancashire show at Manchester’s O2 Victoria Warehouse. The tour has also been extended to 21 dates, with Glasgow Barrowlands and the capital’s Kentish Town Forum now added to the dates. Their last …
Track: Kaktus Einarsson – ‘Kick The Ladder’; Fufanu frontman steps out with intelligent, post-rock pop
YES, THERE are glacial guitars; deep, granular textures, broad-spectrum instrumental effects that see you soaring over the landscape in your mind’s eye; it would be all too easy to stop here and reference back to fellow countrymen Sigur Rós. But then the sweet male vocal makes itself known and the dramatic scenery of the song …
See: Bill Callahan – ‘Cowboy’: a red-rimmed highlight from ‘Gold Record’ gains a visual dimension
WITH his fine and spontaneously realised album from the end of summer, Gold Record, now back in stock and available again on wax, Bill Callahan has stepped once more to the filmic breach with a brand new record for one of the most nuanced and moving nuggets sifted from that album, “Cowboy”. The song? Well. …
Track: Gazelle Twin ensures you won’t sleep easy with ‘The Well’, from the soundtrack to forthcoming British horror ‘The Power’
WITH her seductively dark beckon to the dark sides of a dankly merrie old country in cahoots with NYX, Deep England, now out and wreathing like evening mist around the collective consciousness, you may well be forgiven for thinking Elizabeth Bernholz, aka Gazelle Twin, could rest easy, her work here done at least for the …
News: Erland Cooper announces digital epilogue to his astonishing Orcadian trilogy; hear Bill-Ryder Jones’s rerub of ‘Haar Over Hamnavoe’
THE SUPERB ambient-psychogeographical triptych by Orcadian musician and composer Erland Cooper, Solan Goose, Sule Skerry, and Hether Blether – which themselves are receiving a gorgeous box set treatment, more of which below – is gaining an excellent addendum at the end of next month in Holm, a collection of variations, B-sides and reworkings by artists …
Album review: Ryley Walker – ‘Course In Fable’: Chicago baroque-folk genius brings the prog to his latest dazzler
TROUBADOUR genius touched by the hand of the Tim Buckley, collaborator on some very fine albums, sole architect of yet other records that fall very much in that same category, and one of the funniest and most candid tweeters in music: Ryley Walker is all of these. He’s set to release his new solo album, …
Track: Little Arrow – ‘Poetically Diseased’ (Live at Four Bars, Cardiff, 2014): potent live take heralds the tenth anniversary rerelease of ‘Music, Masks & Poems’
HAILING from far out west in deepest Pembrokeshire, Little Arrow began making waves on the Welsh scene a decade back with a fully musically and emotionally realised debut album, Music, Masks & Poems. Tragically, Little Arrow’s frontman William Hughes died of cancer in December 2018, cutting short the career of a band with real depth …
Track: Abdullah Ibrahim – ‘Did You Hear That Sound?’: South African jazz legend releases a new live recording of the 1979 classic
IF EVER there was a living legend of jazz, then South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, must surely be right up there; Julliard-educated, rubbing performative shoulders with the likes of Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Archie Shepp, he performed at Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration after being a forthriht supporter of the ANC …