Avant-garde
News: Sarah Davachi announces an autumn album, ‘Antiphonals’; hear a first track, ‘Rushes Recede’
WHAT is a drone? Over the last decade it’s become a word associated with surveillance, voyeurism, secrecy, stealth and those tired sweeping aerial shots that plague every other film that blasts onto our screens. So maybe we need our sonic explorers and sound adventurers to remind us of the drone’s real roots, the powerful hypnotic …
Track: Cellist Gaspar Claus begins the imaginary journey of his September debut for InFiné with the day-into-night odyssey of ‘Une Foule’
A FRENCH cellist who sees no genre boundary, having worked with artists as fine and disparate as Sufjan Stevens, The National, Jim O’Rourke, Third Eye Foundation, Efterklang, Pedro Soler (his father), Electronic, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Keiji Haino and Barbara Carlotti – and that’s just a thumbnail summary – Gaspar Claus is finally stepping out under his …
News: Erland Cooper signs for Mercury KX, buries his latest album in the soil of Orkney as a three-year time capsule with a treasure hunt ensuing; watch a short film
SIGNING today with one of the leading modern compositional imprints, Decca/Mercury KX, Orcadian composer Erland Cooper has marked the occasion in a fascinating if not entirely expected way. He already has his first album recorded; it’s entitled Carve the Runes Then Be Content With Silence, and is a new work written and recorded for solo …
Album review: Lightman Jarvis Ecstatic Band – ‘Banned’: a fever dream of impressionistic acid-folk-soul for the jaded ear
BY THEIR name, they sound like they should be some great lost Moog-psych outfit from ’69, and weird and wonderful is definitely a touchstone for the Lightman Jarvis Ecstatic Band, be sure. It’s the musical mind-melding of Yves Jarvis, whose album from last autumn, Sundry Rock Song Stock, was a really clever and rather ace …
See: Ted Byrnes takes us back to the primeval beat with the raw percussive expression of ‘Preparation’
HAVING in the past laid down the rhythmic anchor for artists as diverse as Zola Jesus and LA’s experimental hiphop collective clipping, among an absolute host of others, sticksman in demand Ted Byrnes has stepped out, stepped forward and stepped back to the intense, raw roots of the drum for his new album of solo …
Album review: Kevin Richard Martin – ‘Return To Solaris’: The Bug is the ghost in the machine for this ecstatically eerie rescoring of the Soviet sci-fi classic
WORKING with huge acclaim in the shadowier textures of electronic music now for longer than we care to recall, Kevin Richard Martin – aka The Bug, King Midas Sound, Techno Animal – has composed a new score for Andrei Tarkovsky’s incredible 1972 sci-fi Solaris, which work will be released on Phantom Limb on June 25th. …
Track: Maarja Nuut -‘Kutse tantsule / A Call For Dance’: fluid, bewitching and seductively free Estonian folktronica – it’s 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 …
See: Experimental clarinettist Jeremiah Cymerman pays meditative tribute with ‘From The Metaphysical To The Transcendental (For Bill Smith)’ – his album’s out in August
JEREMIAH CYMERMAN is a producer and clarinettist who’s been working within the New York avant-garde music scene for nigh on two decades now, and more specifically where the tectonic plates of improvisation, experimenta and electro-acoustic music meet. Having recently celebrated his 40th birthday, with all the societal tradition and psychic numerological significance attached to that …
See: Liars are back in the game, still have a ‘Big Appetite’ for hallucinatory incantation ahead of their August album
LIARS have always been a pretty unique presence in our musical landscape, gnawing and needling away at the bones of rock as the whole edifice collapses, from right back when they presented that noise-rock concept album about witchcraft, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, jeez, 17 years back now. Never mind always finding them in …
Track: Clark releases ‘Suspension Reservoir (Air Version)’ – a new take from the mini-series, ‘Lisey’s Story’
WITH his first album for his new home Deutsche Grammophon, Playground On A Lake, now out in the world – and a far-reaching, ambitious record it is, too, spread over four sides – and it seems it wasn’t just the IDM cognoscenti who’ve been wowed. Also more than a little taken was Pablo Lerrain, the …