experimental
See: Album – ‘New And Annoying’: Québécois punk-funkers set out on a Squarepusheresque glide of glitch
QUESTION. Do you love yourself a bit of itchy, broken, nay, fractured and exploded, electronic beat? If someone says words like Aphex and Squarepusher to you, do your eyes light up at the thought of the polyrhythmically torn and juddering, throwing your limbs into new twists? Reckon you’re gonna have room in your life for …
Album review: Masayoshi Fujita – ‘Bird Ambience’: a marimba and electronica masterclass for meditative thought
IF YOU like your music deliciously abstract, abstractedly delicious; arranged beautifully, an absolute world of evocative sound; fell hard, for instance, for the albums Ryuichi Sakamoto made with Alva Noto, Revep, Summvs, Vrioon, et al; or have adored the lusciousness of Chihei Hatakeyama’s new album, Late Spring, then sit down, sit up – Japanese vibraphonist, …
See: Peace Flag Ensemble – ‘Presentism’: a bittersweet, lovely, experimental jazz essay from Saskatchewan collective
ROCK ‘n’ roll: the experimental jazz collective Peace Flag Ensemble has its seed in a meeting at a book group, somewhere, we’re told, between when pianist Jon Neher and ambient artist and producer Michael Scott Dawson had been reading and discussing Her Body And Other Stories, by Carmen Maria Machado and Murakami’s Killing Commendatore. As talk progressed …
Premiere: Jack Prest – ‘Test Tone IV’ and ‘Test Tone VII’: deliciously amniotic ambient electronica from Sydney
JACK PREST, the Australian soundscaper, is perhaps best known for his work on the other side of the plexiglass as an engineer and producer at Sydney’s Studios 301, nine decades of recording absolutely according it legendary status. Best known, for now. That looks like it really could be about to change; lovers of the blissful, …
Meet: LYR on their new music, post-pandemic life, working with Simon Armitage, and more
THE genre-splicing LYR, comprised of Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, musician and vocalist Richard Walters, and producer and multi-instrumentalist Patrick J Pearson, fuse their three distinct but complimentary musical selves into an even more distinct project combining galvanic spoken word with textured ambient canopies and soaring, melodic vocals. The trio released their debut album, Call In …
Track: Hear Christina Vantzou’s spectral mash-up and remix of LEYA’s ‘ABBA’ and ‘Mary’
CHRISTINA VANTZOU, the Belgian-based vocalist, composer and film-maker who began her career with Stars of the Lid’s Adam Wiltzie in The Dead Texan and who’s gone to establish a powerful and eerie musical aesthetic over the course of four album for Kranky, has brought her otherworldly ambient skills to bear on a rerub and mash-up of …
Track: Mark Shippy & Alex Cunningham – ‘Clear Walkway’: US Maple guitarist brings the improv for guitar and violin
AFICIONADOS of the free music, this way please: Mark Shippy, former guitarist with the legendary Chicago noise-rock voyagers U.S. Maple, has got together with St Louis, Missouri violin improviser Alex Cunningham for a real exploration of what the two stringed instruments can achieve together in and of the moment. They’re releasing a two-handed album, Ghost …
Track: Mattia Cupelli reveals a dark ambient aesthetic with the eerie prayer call of ‘MONOLITH’
ROMAN composer Mattia Cupelli likes to play on the borders of modern classical, electronica, ambient and soundtrack elements, which has stood him in good stead over nearly a decade of composing scores for more than a dozen films. He’s now embarking on a non-filmic exploration of dark ambient, with an album, RUINS, coming out in …
Track: Trippers & Askers – ‘Chance’s Wake’: warming, spiritual Americana lays out the path towards an album drawing on the near-dystopian classic, ‘The Parable Of The Sower’
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER was a Californian African-American science fiction author whose 1993 novel, Parable Of The Sower, has rippled out with staying power across culture, with its tale of the marginalised attempting to survive a (really, very) near-future ecological and economic collapse. it was only written less than three decades, in the lifetime of many …
Album Review: Babe Rainbow – Changing Colours
With the rise of studies into psychedelic and also their profound effects on mental health, Australians Babe Rainbow themselves might be a sonic microdose into the exploration of transformative consciousness. The Byron Bay outfit have almost quietly gone about their business in recent years as one of the finest bands on the planet, with a …