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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ALWAYS grinning devilishly from the corner of the room, observing the way music was unfolding with a knowing gaze, an askance understanding, Cathal Coughlan, the intelligence behind Microdisney and The Fatima Mansions, has always been a joyous thorn in the side of alternative music. He’s been away a decade – how did that happen? The …

YOU WANT intelligent folk songcraft? Look no further than Polly Paulusma. Fresh from teaching English to undergraduates at Cambridge, and having recently been awarded a PhD, English folkie Polly Paulusma is set to returned with an album of songs which inspired Angela Carter’s dark retakes on the traditional folk tale paradigms, to be entitled Invisible …

YORKSHIRE’S shoegaze princes-in-waiting bdrmm have rescheduled their long-awaited UK tour to October and November, hoping as we all are that live music will be fully functional by then. See the rearranged dates below. Sonic Cathedral, voicing the natural frustration I’m sure so many of us feel at the Government’s … idiosyncratic handling of the pandemic, …

Cedars is quite a record – two records really; the first more orange and various other colours of the sun’s framing of the beginning and the ending of the day, alive with a heartfelt yearning and cosmic sonic thrill. The second is far more verdant, deep green, homespun, and focuses in very much in on the wonder of the simple; the moments we all return to, perhaps, at least us rural dwellers. If you’re at all conceptually familiar with the work of William Blake, his Songs Of Innocence And Experience, you’ll see; the twining and correspondences. Climb into Cedars, join the two worlds for yourself; the album is long on thought and also on beauty.

Neil Cowley has been on a journey away from, and returning to, the piano; Hall Of Mirrors is a striking love letter to the instrument, and also to his adopted city of Berlin. But all these conceptual asides fade away beneath the main thrust: it’s a truly bloody great record. Buy.

Stirring, seeking, wide-spectrum emotional,The Age Of Oddities is a stunning debut and part-tribute to Jóhann Jóhannsson from a friend and collaborator; 130701 has the golden touch at present

WASHINGTON’S dark ambient guitarchitect Tristan Welch has announced a new album for the end of April, Temporary Preservation; and has released a first taster single in the twilit soundscapes of “I Live In Filth”. Take a listen herein. Tristan follows on from last year’s Capitalist Teeth and Ambient Distress and continues his sonic exploration of …

ROSS TONES, the Northern Englishman who’s made his way to a rural retreat in the South West via the capital, is regarded as something of a mainstay over at Houndstooth, the label that’s spiralled out of London’s fabric club. He’s just followed up last year’s The Folly of Pangloss EP, which he released under the …

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?) After university, Matt matriculated into the world of the recording studio. He’s worked …

SONY is venturing into the world of modern composition and has set up a new imprint, XXIM Records, to issue musics from that liminal space where classical abuts ambient and experimental; its first signing is the Icelandic composer and pianist Eydís Evensen. Eydís hails from the remote town of Blönduós in the north of Iceland. …