Album Review: Affiliate Links – Enough Light : poetic, powerful indie song-craft.

Read More

Conceived before, within and beyond pandemic times, Cork based musician and underground shaper Elaine Howley has emerged with a bold personal record ‘The Distance Between Heart And Mouth’ on Belfast’s Touch Sensitive label (available from 12th August). Best known for bringing her distinct experimental sensibilities to The Altered Hours’ psych-rock as well as the song …

When curious minds eventually meet, things usually happen. Multi-instrumentalist/singer Nyati Mayi and DJ/producer soFa elsewhere (aka The Astral Synth Transmitters) may circulate within the wild oscillations of the Brussel’s experimental electronica scene but it took the relative isolation of the 2020 lockdown to bring the pair together. One of the many musical snapshots Nyati posted …

Where do they find them? Those intrepid sound seekers at We Are Busy Bodies look set to keep on delivering. Following their bountiful dig through the ‘As-Shams‘ back catalogue of seminal South African jazz, the Toronto based label have switched their attention momentarily to the equally hip Venezuelan seventies scene. The result of these new …

You may have already caught ‘Baby’s Changing Stations’ the first trailer to Affiliate Links’ debut solo album ‘Enough Light’ (available via We Are Busy Bodies from 9th September). A yearning lo-fi jangle with a Go-Betweens flourish that captured the memorabilia of indie-kid days gone by, it was a song that looked back but carried you …

If you didn’t catch onto the joyous West African pop of Star Feminine Band when their self-titled debut burst onto the scene a couple of years ago, then you really missed something. The all-girl, teenage group from Natitingou village Benin, make music forged in friendship, sparkling with youthful energy and powered by commitment. Delivering upbeat …

As a practitioner and sound artist Shahin Entezami (aka Tegh) has produced a consistent stream of expansive works which have put him at the forefront of the Iranian experimental music scene, a community that continues to reach way beyond its homeland. His music entranced under the melodic swell of 2015’s undulating ‘Night Scenes’ then took …

Now here’s a band that don’t hold back. Brighton/Lewes electronic post punk duo Be Kind Cadaver (Daniel Hignell-Tully and Leroy Brown) grab at real issues and wring them out through their highly charged, shell shocked anti-pop songs. Their debut EP ‘Postpartum’, available from 21st July on the forward thinking Difficult Art And Music label, probes …

Steve Bates, Canadian musician and sound/video artist, has the biography of someone restlessly in pursuit of possibilities. His background as a key figure in the Winnipeg anarcho-punk community through the 80s to explorer of more avant/experimental territories over the past decade has been expressed through an evolving catalogue of music, curation and art works. Probably …

BKO are a band with stamina and staying power who have been needling for attention on the global beat circuit for getting on ten years. Formed in Bamako in 2012 by master percussionist Ibrahima Sarr and his then drum pupil, Frenchman Aymeric Krol, the band soon expanded to a five piece with the introduction of …

Birmingham’s Supersonic, that compact but perfectly realised gathering which The Quietus have designated ‘the mother of British underground festivals’, returned live to central Brum last weekend after a two year COVID hiatus and, judging by the final day, readily reclaimed its deserved touchstone status. Revered but relatively conspicuous in the festival furore, Supersonic is not …