Album Reviews
Album Review : Rumpistol’s ” Isola” is an thing of beauty.
It’s not very often that I partake in reviewing what could be traditionally described as ‘ ambient’ music. The word ambient should really be used to describe a texture, or a musical motif. I’m happy to disclaim that the latest album from award winning Danish producer, composer, film composer and pianist Jens B. Christiansen (aka Rumpistol) …
EP: Auckland’s Silk Cut shape out another elegant dream pop delight in new EP ‘panda’.
Last year’s ‘astronaut’, the debut EP from New Zealand’s enigmatic Silk Cut (reviewed by me here) was a hazy dreamy introduction to a band that has, amongst its constituent members, a breadth of experience. Singer/guitarist Andrew Thorne has played with Modern Chair – a collaboration between him and another veteran of the NZ music scene, Wayne Bell. …
Album Review: Aldous Harding – Warm Chris – Fire Walk with Me
Aldous Harding’s ‘Warm Chris’ is an early contender for album of the year.
Album Review – Francis Harris – Thresholds
Beginning with 2012’s ‘Leland’ New York artist Francis Harris has been doing a deep dive into the sonic swells and contrapuntal granularities that articulate our most abstract, and sometimes slowest moving, virtualities. Through found sound, analog synthesis, and concise instrumentation Harris has delivered works that transcend the diagram-matic exposition often found in electronic music in …
Album Review: Camp Cope Back with a Blissful new Album
Camp Cope are back with melodic, vulnerable album Running with the Hurricane
EP: Grids/Units/Planes unveil the heady and mesmerising electronica of ‘Diverge And Coalesce’
The sounds of Brisbane project Grids/Units/Planes (GUP) are that of a cloudy, diffuse space that glitches and hums in a languorous rich texture: awe-inspiring and transfixing. I have always thought that the magic in effective instrumental music is the ability to tell stories and create images without words, and in ‘Diverge and Coalesce’, GUP have …
Album Review: Big Thief – ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’
Crikey, but Big Thief have had a busy COVID. 4AD’s Brooklynite indie darlings issued their fourth album, ‘Two Hands’ (billed as the “earth twin” to their hugely successful ‘U.F.O.F.’) in October 2019, and they’re already back with a twenty-track, 84-minute, monster of an album, ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’. When you add …
Album Review – The Allegorist – Blind Emperor
For one empire to rise, another must fall.For us to reach the highs, through dark holes we must crawl.For the vision in the deep, we need,we sacrifice and bleed, to make the leap. The Sacrifice – Poem Written by The Allegorist As a holistic artist, Anna Jordan (The Allegorist) encapsulates a myriad of her talents within her …
Not Forgotten: We revisit Augie March’s stunning debut ‘Sunset Studies’ from 2000 – still an essential antipodean sonic milestone – which gets a belated 21st birthday party.
By 2000, by the time Y2K anxiety had dissipated and, before the events of 9/11 cast a pall everywhere, post grunge was solidifying its place in the world and the vestiges of Britpop were bouncing along in ever decreasing circles. The Australian indie scene towards the end of the previous decade was mostly typified either …
Album Review: Tapani Rinne & Juha Maki-Patola – Open: exquisite jazz electronica that restores and inspires.
Some records arrive that make you wonder if there is much value to writing about music. ‘Open’ by the Finnish ambient jazz partnership of reedist Tapani Rinne and composer/producer Juha Maki-Patola is one of those albums. Elusive, shivering with atmosphere, the immersive soundscape that the pair have crafted elevates listening beyond the incidental and reduces …