Avant-garde
See: The smeary dessert action painting of Blurry the Explorer’s ‘Limited By Jelly’
BLURRY THE EXPLORER is a quirkily beguiling new art-rock project oozing outta Brooklyn with experimental composer, drummer, and photographer Jeremy Gustin, aka The Ah, at the helm. They’ve just released their second shortform missive, the Brothers Grimm-meets-Broadcast hallucination of “Limited By Jelly”, the video for which you can be wholly intrigued by below. It sees …
News: Tangents continue to explore beyond jazz and go double or quits with new album ‘Timeslips & Chimeras’; hear the propulsive electronica fusion of ‘Lilliputian’
WITH their last album release, last year’s Timeslips, finding itself somewhat hobbled by – c’mon, you know, it made us all stay in for months on end – the enigmatic Australian quartet Tangents have decided to go double or quits and are set to rerelease that most recent set in tandem with a new set …
News: Derbyshire’s lovely Haiku Salut announce a spectrally concerned new album for August; watch a short making-of doc
MOVING away from their recent investigations of the film score, which includes their last full album proper, 2019’s The General, a score for Buster Keaton’s 1926 early slapstick comedy classic, and two short film commissions last year, Derbyshire’s completely gorgeous (fan? Moi?) post-folk trio Haiku Salut have announced they’re releasing their fifth album in August …
See: c / a’s ‘THE PRIMER’: South London duo lead us further astray into generative audiovisual AI
LONDON audiovisual merry pranksters c / a aren’t quite like anyone you’ve encountered before. Nor me, for that matter. They’re operating in a highly conceptual sphere where AI, generative algorithms and light-touch flesh intervention are making music; there’s others creating out at this mind-bending edge, loosening the reins of human control – witness the video …
Track: Kevin Richard Martin shares the title track from his deeply eerie, forthcoming rescoring of the sci-fi classic, ‘Solaris’
KNOWN in the hallowed halls of dark electronica for his work as The Bug, King Midas Sound and others, when Kevin Richard Martin was offered a commission to write, record and perform a new score for a film of his choice by the Vooruit Arts Centre in Ghent, it’s perhaps not altogether a surprise that …
Track: Mind Maintenance – ‘Valence’: further cognitive hygiene for mbira and guimbri calls you to the hearth
WHEN Chicago rhythm section masters Chad Taylor and Joshua Abrams get together to play, you know the results will be intelligent, off-kilter, crisp; intuitive. The pair have worked together in the engine room on so, so many great and cred records down the past coupla decades, including for the Chicago Underground Trio and all its …
News: Daniel O’Sullivan, Richard Youngs and Alexander Tucker take over Dalston’s Cafe OTO for a three-night leftfield residency in August
WITH the first stirrings of regular gig-going just beginning to make itself felt, a welcome return of one of the things that really makes life bearable, lovers of the leftfield in and around the capital, take note that sui generis musician Daniel O’Sullivan – whose career to date has taken in everything from the deep …
See: Bruno Bavota – ‘Apartment Loop #6’: a personal experience of lockdown captured in modular electronics
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, …
See: Mattia Cupelli – ‘EGERIA’: propulsive ambient darkwave goes down to the water
MATTIA CUPELLI, the Italian darkwave ambient composer, the cyclical, shadowy prayer call of whose “MONOLITH” we covered in these pages just over a week ago, has dropped another track, this time showcasing a more propulsive dark aesthetic. It’s called “EGERIA” and you can watch the video for it below. Built on the hard rock of …
Track: Pan Daijing – ‘Let 七月’: Guizhou performance artist reveals a more intimate but no less potently eerie side
PAN DAIJING is an uncompromising, sonically exploratory artist who hails from Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province, in south central China. Her approach to her art is unbridled, bold, and straddles sound, installation, storytelling, choreography. Her raw approach as composer and performer takes many forms: sound, choreography, installation, and storytelling. Her 2017 album for Pan, …