Posts in tag

Avant-garde


Album review: Matchess’s ‘Sonescent’: an irresistible flow of experimental, meditative drone recollection and conscious absence

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Album review: Tom Dissevelt – ‘Fantasy In Orbit’: seminal Dutch space-age electronica gets a deserved reissue

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Album review: Adam Stafford – ‘Trophic Asynchrony’: Falkirk composer moves to a deep, cyclical set of formal minimalism to address the ecological state we’re in

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STUMP were one of those ultra-Peel bands, like The Noseflutes, Bogshed, The Fire Engines, who sorta belonged to the (no doubt press-confected) ‘shambling’ movement of the Eighties – Beefheartian, collapsed, askance, freakishly fun, revealing truths about the world from an oblique perch above it all. They had an all-too-brief moment of notoriety in the public …

BRETON pianist Vanessa Wagner, who began her long romance with the piano aged 7 and who, earlier in her career, released albums tackling the works of Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Scriabine and Mozart, came to something of a crossroads in her musical development in 2016; that year she recorded a collaborative album with Leaf Records’ Mexican electronicist …

DISASSEMBLER is the nocturnal ambient playground in which visual artist, multi-instrumentalist and producer Christopher Royal King – whose work includes album covers for both Thrice and Deftones and videos for Adult Swim – comes together in a perfumed, ambient post-classicism with violinist and composer Christopher Tignor, in which they look to weave together current thinking …

NEW YORK composer, bassoonist and Berlin Prize for Young Artists nominee Joy Guidry is an artist who likes to – nope, is compelled to – dive deep into the music they investigate, be that modern composition, the high flight of free jazz, the expanse of drone, or the articulation of spoken word pieces. The artist …

ELSEWHERE a very fine guitarist with The Phantom Band, Duncan Marquiss is stepping out into the world of solo instrumental guitar in the spring with an album for folk imprint of high regard, Basin Rock. And he’s already held in such esteem in guitar soli circles that he’s picked up a support slot with the …

MONTREAL’S Constellation, who’ve brought us so many great leftfield moments these past two decades from Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Fly Pan Am, Do Make Say Think and a host of others, have added another string to their bow with the signing of Kee Avil, the new project from hometown singer, guitarist and producer Vicky Mettler. …

GRADUATE of the esteemed Royal Academy of Music, and a man who’s collaborated musically with a host of the truly great and good – that CV including, since you ask, Brian Eno, Imogen Heap, David Byrne, Grace Jones, Regina Spektor, Jon Hopkins and Paul Simon, and that’s just a précis; on that CV Leo Abrahams also has also …

THE POTENT, experimental sonic meeting of minds that is Fhunyue Gao and Sven Kacirek came about quite by chance, and with a first single and video from that meeting, “Bowie”, being released today, those of us who enjoy our music nuanced and leftfield and odd can be thankful for the serendipitous. Fhunyue, who has previously …

MAGISTERIAL Orcadian composer Erland Cooper has released his second choral collaboration with the Shards ensemble, an EP focussing on one of Orkney’s northern islands, Egilsay, featuring four tracks of and about the island with a population of 14. Here at Backseat Mafia we featured a track, the moving, almost holy “Glimro”, at the beginning of …

ARTIST extraordinaire Hannah Peel, fresh from her reimagining and recasting of Delia Derbyshire’s library music work, Fir Wave, and her folksier collaboration with Philippe Cohen Solal, Mike Lindsay and others, Outsider, has announced details of a major new work, The Unfolding, in collaboration with the award-winning, premier British conductor Charles Hazlewood and his Paraorchestra; expect, from the …