Avant-garde
Album review: John Thayer – ‘Supermundane’: a palimpsest of nuanced, intelligent ambience
NEW YORK percussionist, audio engineer and all-round musical polymath John Thayer, fresh from two collaborative, cassette-only albums last year – Untangling The Ghost, on which he sparred with reeds player Stank Zenkov, and Mountain Rumors, in tandem with Craig Schenker – is not about to depart this grinding year of our lord 2021 without dropping …
News: William Basinski to bring his magisterial ‘Disintegration Loops’ to The Barbican next June
INCREDIBLE news for lovers of the drone and the textural; New York sound artist and composer William Basinski is to bring his masterful degrading tape-loop work The Disintegration Loops and last year’s set for Temporary Residence, Lamentations, to the awesome brutalist architecture and superb acoustics of London’s Barbican next summer. The concert will celebrate the …
Album review: Tom Dissevelt – ‘Fantasy In Orbit’: seminal Dutch space-age electronica gets a deserved reissue
WELCOME. Now, before we fasten your belts – they’ll keep you safe against the enormous Gs as we break the atmosphere, gain the vast promised land of outer space – it’s as well as we run through a final checklist to ensure a safe and enjoyable journey. So. Question. When names like Broadcast, Stereolab, Vanishing …
Track: Leo Abrahams’ ‘Harm Organ’ refracts solo guitar through a hall of ‘tronica mirrors
LONDON-based guitarist, composer and sonic manipulator Leo Abrahams has shared another track of out-six string journeying from next month’s album for figureight, Scene Memory II. it’s called “Harm Organ”, it’s a real hall of mirrors, and you can listen to it below. An alumnus of Marylebone’s Royal Academy of Music, and besides being one half …
See: Mario Batkovic – ‘Repertio’ feat. Clive Deamer & MXLX: the accordion flurrying into an unexpected breakbeat future
IT BEGINS with slow, almost marine tones, for a brief bar or two; but without warning it launches as a whole other being, a busy Seventies’ cop show break underpinning a melodic run so fast it’s practically liquid. It almost has the feel of a lazy breakbeat burner from the early Nineties, by Pressure Drop …
See: Gazelle Twin and NYX celebrate All Hallows’ Eve with a limited cassette, T-shirt and more; watch a new video for ‘Deep England’
GAZELLE TWIN and NYX, the artist and choir who have been working with a deep, dark vision of the country this year to fully deserved acclaim, awe, trepidation and immersion, are welcoming the coming of All Hallows’ Eve, the day the dead are remembered and, in folklore, the day when the veil between our world …
EP review: Clarice Jensen – ‘Identifying Features’: a second, delightful leftfield venture into filmic cello
WAY BACK in January we took a dive into Ainu Moisir – our full review can be found, here – a deft, brief quarter-hour of exploratory cello and electronica meshing and also a first entry into the world of the soundtrack for Clarice Jensen, the artistic director of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. The titular …
Album review: Bruno Bavota – ‘For Apartments: Songs And Loops’: protection against those days of lockdown in warm piano vignette and glorious modular sweep
WE LOCKED the door; we waited. We waited, we combed the airwaves; we counted the days some more. The experience is nigh on universal, save those of you lucky enough to be reading in Taiwan, Christchurch, Auckland and elsewhere. Italy was caught by the pandemic earlier than many, and as it swept across the country, …
Album review: Maarja Nuut – ‘Hinged’: percussive and playful, free as a bird future folktronica from Estonian genius
BORN in Rakvere, a small town in the very north of Estonia, a handful of miles from the Baltic Sea, the experimental musician Maarja Nuut was first introduced to music by her mother, a choir conductor, which opened up a world which would become her métier. Aged 7 she began taking violin lessons, studying at the Tallinn …
Album review: Neil Cowley – ‘Hall Of Mirrors (Reflected)’: ambient piano is tripped further into leftfield on this excellent remixes set
THE REMIX album is a really interesting thing, a gathering of the tribes in a meeting place that’s arisen from the sphere of dance music, in which like minds bring their aesthetics and splice it with another’s; a trading, the one overlaying, informing the other, creating a new offspring. When it comes off in the …