Avant-garde
Album Review: M.Takara & Carla Boregas – Grande Massa D’Agua : exhilarating earth-beats and electro-acoustic energy from the Sao Paulo duo.
You might remember a couple of years ago the first offering from this pair of Sao Paulo experimentalists Linha D’Agua ‘ which sneaked up from the underground and demanded attention with its fluidity, inventiveness and dynamism. This was the sound of sustainable energy, a musical relationship thriving on an intuitive connection with the synth circuitry …
Track/Video: Surveying at the edges – DAAM presents ‘bivouac of the avant garde vol 2’.
Lewes/Brighton based experimental music label Difficult Art And Music (DAAM amongst friends) are certainly setting the pace with their alternative countdown to the festive season. In October, as part of their expansive rummage through the contemporary fringe music scene, they revealed the first instalment of this vital review ‘bivouac of the avant garde vol 1’ …
Album review: Duncan Marquiss – ‘Wires Turned Sideways In Time’: Phantom Band guitarist conceives of an instrumental, pastoral motorik for a place yet to exist
FROM disastrous events that upend your world can sometimes come good things; sometimes, I’m no Pollyanna here. Fortunately for Duncan Marquiss, guitarist with Chemikal Underground’s The Phantom Band, a major setback has led to another path, and a rather excellent one, albeit eventually. That quartet, with four albums such as Fears Trending and The Wants …
Album review: Matchess’s ‘Sonescent’: an irresistible flow of experimental, meditative drone recollection and conscious absence
WHITNEY JOHNSON has been releasing albums that explore gorgeous deep inner space in song and sound as Matchess for a number of years now. She began in 2015 with the downtempo ambience of Somnaphoria, vocodered vocals, clock-ticking beats, swirls and aural glitter to put The Orb to shame in the cosmic stakes. Since that blissful …
Album review: Die Wilde Jagd – ‘Atem’: a dark, occluding drone masterwork
DIE WILDE JAGD – it translates as “The Wild Hunt”, Anglophones, which will surely be the only possible connection to Swedish troubadour The Tallest Man on Earth we shall ever explore – is the sonic project of producer and songwriter Sebastian Lee Philipp. Across three albums from 2015’s self-titled debut, through 2018’s Uhrwald Orange and …
News: Bitchin Bajas bring their Sun Ra moogfest out on the road Stateside and in Europe
COOPER CRAIN’S side-alley Moog buccaneers Bitchin Bajas are taking their their latest album, a re-exploration of the works of Sun Ra purely for synth and keyboard, out on the road in the new year. That album, Switched On Ra, their seventeenth, sees them apply the concepts of one avant-garde legend to that of another: Cooper …
Track: Roedelius & Story show us the beauty of four hands working in empathy on the nuanced piano duet, ‘Ba’
PEOPLE can often bandy about terms such as legendary and scion with a carefree laziness; but, when it comes to German electronic and ambient music pioneer Hans-Joachim Roedelius, now into his eighth decade with us, those epithets are both wholly apt and richly deserved. And with something around the 90-album mark in his catalogue since …
Track: HOLM unfold the post-rock glimmer of ‘In Gardens’ from their Zurich bunker
ZURICH’S fine post-rockers HOLM have taken an unusual, calendrical approach to their forthcoming album, In Gardens; they’ve been revealing it at the steady rate of a track a month over the past year, with that project reaching completion with a final track in mid-January. Which means, of course, that we’re but one track away from …
See: Krautjazz quintet Fazer offer an ode to a weird year ending in the whimsical but classy ‘Dezember’
WITH the recent album by Spiritczualic Enhancement Center (which, not to blow our own trumpet, we reviewed here) and others, it very much looks like one of the current leftfield trends to be ear to the ground for as 2021 melts inexorably into 2022 is krautjazz; that scene fermenting in city basements and performance spaces …
See: Memory Pearl takes a New York Met painting and explores it in sound on ‘Red And Brown Scene, 1961’
WITH his album exploring a septet of paintings hanging in American galleries in sound out on Altin Village and Mine this Friday, Toronto’s Moshe Fisher-Rozenberg, has dropped one final video single, “Red And Brown Scene, 1961”. Moshe is by day, as it were, a member of experimental group Absolutely Free and collaborator with fine indie popsters Alvvays, …