experimental
Album review: Cluster – ‘Cluster 71’: the German electronica scene on the cusp of breaking through, lovingly reissued
AS WELL as hosting a whole stable of contemporary bands that are mainly spinning in the leftfield electronics and synthpop galaxies, Hamburg’s Bureau B has also been doing sterling work in curating the krautrock archive, keeping the torch burning with deep dives into the unreleased tapes of Conrad Schnitzler, reissuing lost gems and offering that …
Album review: Jim Wallis & Nick Goss – ‘Pool’: immersive, ocean-going, pastoral ambience
MODERN NATURE might be flying under your radar, but the Bella Union band who’ve just one full-length and one-mini album to their name – 2019’s How To Live and last year’s Annual, respectively – are someone you should be wrapping your head around, especially if the post-rock pastoral brilliance espoused by Mark Hollis and Talk …
See: The ghostly soundtrackery of The Arteries of New York City’s ‘Capable’; the album’s on its way to a full release
NO, AND you’d be forgiven for thinking it with the name they trade under, but the experimental ambient duo The Arteries of New York City isn’t some semi-psychogeographical project arising from dérives across that city from Queens or Yonkers or somewhere in the Five Boroughs; the project instead has its roots our side of the …
Track: Spanish ambient explorers Suso Sáiz and Menhir combine for the deep, pristine drift of ‘Alike’ ahead of their album for Spirituals
HE MAY Not be quite as familiar a name on these shores, but in Spain Suso Sáiz is something of an Eno figure; a pioneer of ambient and minimalist music in the country, he’s released something like 28 albums of beautiful and exploratory music since his 1984 debut, Prefiero El Naranja (‘I Prefer Orange’). He’s …
See: Matchess invites us to embrace meditative drone and transcend the flesh in the practise of ‘Almost Gone (Excerpt)’
WHITNEY JOHNSON has been releasing albums exploring really gorgeous deep inner space in song and sound for a number of years now as Matchess. Her journey in this guise began in 2015 with the downtempo ambience of Somnaphoria, vocodered vocals, clock-ticking beats, swirls and aural glitter to put The Orb to shame in the cosmic …
See: NONEXISTENT pull you below the surface in the ink-black ambient murk of ‘UNTITLED 3 (AUBURN VACUUM)’
NONEXISTENT is the three-waters-meet of exceptional leftfield talents Astrud Steehouder, otherwise of Opal X and Paper Dollhouse; Alex Tucker, whose work as MICROCORPS and Grumbling Fur we’ve had occasion to be beguiled by elsewhere in these pages; and Mancunian-in-London Luke J Murray, known for his work as and with Grimescapes, Iceman Junglist Kru and Stonecirclesampler. …
Album review: Joel Vandroogenbroeck – ‘Far View’: a curated, cosmic library set from the Belgian psychedelic scion
A MUSICIAN who ventured far in both life and his chosen creative form, Joel Vandroogenbroeck is maybe not a name that trips with ease from your lips; unless of course, you’re a proper head of the deep psych persuasion. For Joel was both the driving force behind and ever-present in the hard-psych voyagers Brainticket, whose …
Track: Former Zun Zun Egui sonic traveller Yama Warashi steps up and out with the space-jazz chant of ‘Dividual Individual’
BASED in Bristol for a decade and more, since she, Kushal Gaya, Matthew Jones and Luke Mosse first fell upon the complex high-life meets psych meets Deerhoof grooves sound of Zun Zun Egui, and with that band precipitously in the rear-view mirror, Yoshino Shigihara has, for a while now, needed to ring the changes. Come …
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 …
Album review: Resina – ‘Speechless’: a record that takes cello and choir into the apocalypse
KAROLINA REC is the darkly immense talent behind the Resina name, and she’s about to release her third album for FatCat’s modern and post-classical imprint, 130701, entitled Speechless; and as we dive deeper, we’ll see that that title was chosen with acuity. It’ll leave you, often, lost for words. It’s a hell of a record, …