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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SHE LEFT the big, big vistas of her native Bergen, Norway, and relocated to Liverpool in order to study; found she really liked it by the Mersey, decided to stick around, and soon found that songs were flowing. It’s been quite the journey from university to rising alt.folk talent for Sara Wolff, whose duvet-day summation …

SONY has decided to get itself a little of the modern compositional pie and to that end, has set up a new progressive instrumental label, XXIM Records; which has opened its catalogue by introducing its first signing, Icelandic pianist and composer Eydís Evensen. To mark the label’s launch, she’s released her debut single, “Brotin”, the …

THEY may at first somewhat unlikely bedfellows: Matthew E. White, who arrived back in 2011 with his debut album The Big Inner, seemingly a fully formed gentleman of classic Southern Americana; and Lonnie Holley, the scrap sculptor who released his debut set of free-flowing outsider funk, Just Before Music, at the age of 62 in 2012. …

HE’S SO much fun, right? Sub Pop’s favourite Albertan singer-songwriter, Chad VanGaalen – he’s made his whimsical home at the Seattle imprint since 2006’s Skelliconnection – has revealed that actually, horticulturally speaking, he’s the World’s Most Stressed Out Gardener; well, actually that would be musically too, since that’s also how his new album will be …

No Fender Jazzmasters or Vox Teardrops were likely harmed during the course of this record, but many are reported to have emerged bruised, sweat-slicked and smiling. Dirty, sexy and necessary

Tele Novella’s humble country-psych-folk sincerity is magic. They have, quite simply, a belief in the power of song. Timeless, quirky and utterly charming.

WELL, wow. If you haven’t fallen into the world of Monsieur Minimal, that’s quite the place to go for a sun-kissed visit. He’s outta Greece with a really pretty entrancing take on psych-pop; there’s a little bit of summer easy listening in there, powerpoppery à la say, Todd Rundgren; a whole whack of Khruangbinesque Eastern …

ART & SPENCER is a newly forged collaboration between Juan Martínez Pérez, aka Elson Complex, a fingerstyle acoustic guitarist of Andalusian and Catalonian heritage who loves soundscapes with acres of space – it’s the space between the notes that interest him just as much; in which he’s fusing a new direction with Belgian multi-instrumentalist Marc …

WHEN it was initially sketched out as project, Notes With Attachments, Welsh bass legend Pino Palladino and Californian songwriter and producer Blake Mills’ forthcoming album for New Deal/Impulse!, was all set to be a Pino solo affair; but, in the way of these things, especially when these things feature two wholly open-minded creatives, it grew, …

IT MIGHT just be the first properly essential UK hip-hop track of 2021, and it comes from Peckham’s Confucius MC, longtime friend of Kae Tempest, teacher, outreacher; and it’s a readymade headnod classic, fo sho, in which Confucius is joined in the flow by Sonnyjim, Verbz, and Jehst, a loop of bells glimmering over a …