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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BLENDING the longform, addictive unfolding blueprints of postrock with a more pastoral chamber quartet aesthetic and thus very much bringing to mind the lately little-visited territories established by the gorgeous Rachel’s, BRUIT ≤ have released a video of them performing the title track of their forthcoming album, The Machine Is Burning, in the hallowed acoustics …

Outtakes these nominally may be, but a decade on these tracks would have all seen a parallel life in the 12″ and the like; a format which was only just starting to find its viability Stateside at this point in the Seventies. And remember not just that these ten tracks are culled from a year or more’s intense creative fire, but that those sessions gave birth to three albums. It’s an album for intense post-dusk savouring, soundscapes to fall sideways down the rabbit hole into, deep and otherworldly sonic immersion from one of the greatest electronic music brains.

TAKE two of the best instrumental guitarists currently working in instrumental Americana, Marisa Anderson and William Tyler; put them together in a studo; press record. It’s a simple idea, but an idea as brilliant as the results. In some ways it’s a surprise the two haven’t married their winding, mesmerising aesthetics before. In fact they …

JENNIFER is the avatar adopted for the world of music by Denver’s Zach Spencer, an artist who read an interview with instrumental guitar legend John Fahey in which John did away with the reputation garnered by his own work in one pithy couplet: “cosmic-sentimentalism” he called it. But that phrase stuck with Zach not as …

FOUGÈRE is the modern compositional project of Jamie Norton, an artist who’s quietly gone about helping fashion some of the biggest songs of modern times as a musician and arranger; he’s worked with The Brand New Heavies, Brett Anderson and Take That. But as Fougère his work sits in the bright melodic shimmer of artists …

THOSE good people over at Berlin’s Sonar Kollektiv imprint, the label founded by Jazzanova in ’97, have announced themselves coloured excited by the debut album of Dutch drummer and producer Joris Feiertag, who’s released a clutch of singles – strickly surname only – since 2015. He’s developed something of a rep for warm electronica, which …

SULKA is the vent for Glasgow-based Lukas Clasen to let loose lofi, low-key guitar loveliness out into our minds; and he’s just dropped a single culled from Take Care, his debut album for Eigg’s Lost Map. “Hollow Days”, the lyric video for which we’ve installed at the bottom there, is a wholly huggable drop of …

IT’S AN interesting name that cool Glasgow electronicist Lewis Bingham has decided to mask up in order to bring his musical creations to the world. Glassmasterer? Er? Well, we’re told it’s actually taken from an arcane process employed at the very last stages of CD duplication, – a process known as ‘glassmastering’. There, that’s a …

WITH musical scores for the BBC/AMC series McMafia and the Storyville strand documentary Locked In, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Franz Kirmann’s latest single, “Saudade”, in collaboration with Roberto Grosso, should be so damn cinematic. Dark and sweeping electronica with a classic Sixties shimmering, twangy guitar riff draped over the top for …

YVES JARVIS is the artist and autodidact Jean-Sébastien Audet who, in a pseudo-Bill Callahanesque move, came out from behind his Un Blonde facemask after 2016’s excellent Good Will Come To You (according to his personal colour palette, it was bathed in yellow, for optimism), reborn with a new name. Over here at Backseat Mafia we adored his …