Avant-garde
See: Deniz Cuylan – ‘Flaneurs In Hakone’: stunning, chiming guitar soli from Turkish composer
IT ALL started with Beethoven’s Fifth. That’s LA-based, Istanbul-born composer and exponent of modern guitar composition Deniz Cuylan’s first and wholly abiding memory of music; it’s the early Eighties, he’s at home in the Turkish capital, all of 5, and the Fifth is spinning on his parents’ turntable. Duh-duh duh-duh … the grandiosity, the majesty …
SEE: Sarah Neufeld – ‘Stories’: Arcade Fire violinist reaches for the eternal
SUPPLYING the power of her violin to Arcade Fire from their breakthrough smash Neon Bible on; founding member of exploratory instrumental sextet Bell Orchestre, alongside Richard Parry, whose career has run contiguously with the former band; solo artist in her own right, Sarah Neufeld has her fingers in many Canadian musical pies. Initially releasing her …
TRACK: Hear Naoko Sakata’s ‘Improvisation 3’ – free piano expression leads for album for Anna von Hausswolff’s label
NAOKO SAKATA is a supremely free, expressive, elemental pianist, very much cheerful and thriving in the avant-garde end of the modern piano spectrum. Born in Japan, she’s now based in Gothenburg; whence she’s come to the attention of Anna von Hausswolff who, caught by her experimental incantation, is to release Sakata’s album on her own …
NEWS: experimental composer and Cocteaus collaborator Harold Budd reported to have passed, aged 84
SAD NEWS this evening as reports began to circulate across social media that the poet, avant-garde composer and pianist Harold Budd, a progenitor of the modern ambient piano style, has died at the age of 84. Budd was born in May 1936 in Los Angeles, but was raised in Victorville, in the Mojave desert. He …
TRACK: Sturle Dagsland – ‘Harajuku’: the new prince of intense, avant-garde pop
DO YOU remember the first time you heard The Sugarcubes, Sigur Rós? How music seemed to have subtly recombined in weird and exciting new ways that spoke of another direction? Maybe, like me, you’ll have the that same kinda bright-rush when you hear the music put together by Sturle Dagsland. He’s just released a track …
TRACK: Arca’s ‘Mequetrefe’ is shattered-mirror futurism
XL RECORDINGS’ avant-pop futurist Arca has premiered a new track, “Mequetrefe,” ahead of forthcoming album Kick i, which XL is releasing next Friday, June 26th (with a vinyl press available from July 17th). Draped in stuttering, post-Squarepusher percussive stutter, AFXy cut-up and Arca’s disembodied vocal chanting, treated and filtered into a distant century, it’s out …
See: Colin Stetson releases video for Spindrift
Leather-lunged sax-botherer Colin Stetson is back, back, back! Er, OK then. Stetson whose last release, Sorrow, was a ‘re-imagining’ of Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, is back building his wonderful layered avant-garde sax noise. Live he hits like a one-man Swans. On record he’s subtler, but still reliant on drones and repetition. Spindrift is a track …
See: Falling Stacks release video for No Stops
Bristol three piece Falling Stacks describe themselves, at least via their Facebook page, as being ‘Frowncore’. As fans here on backseat mafia of all sorts of ‘core’, it seemed the ideal time to check them out, with the release of their debut album ‘No Wives’ on June 9th via Battle Worldwide Recordings. It opens with …