experimental
Album review: Adam Stafford – ‘Trophic Asynchrony’: Falkirk composer moves to a deep, cyclical set of formal minimalism to address the ecological state we’re in
FALKIRK’S Adam Stafford, the film-maker and folk artist whose lockdown notebook album Diamonds Of A Horse Famine we warmly embraced here last summer – not least because it contained the free-associating “Erotic Thistle” and its fantastic line, “melt down my death mask to fashion it into a dildo” (read our full review here) – has returned …
Track: Arandel celebrates the release of ‘InBach vol.2’ with the stirring space pop of ‘Fabula’
ARANDEL, the French artist whose album of expansions and reinterpretations – often, complete genre reshapings – of the works of the great Johann Sebastian, InBach, received deserved acclaim upon its release early last year, is looking to repeat that cultural success with a second volume released today. With that album out to purchase right now, …
See: Bureau B tease for the Faust boxset with unreleased cine footage from Gunther Wüsthoff to accompany ‘Fernlicht’, from the mythical ‘Punkt’ album
WITH the recent news that Hamburg’s excellent imprint Bureau B is marking the half-century of Faust with a box set entitled Faust 1971-1974 in October (and already available to order – for details see below, as this isn’t the sort of thing you’d want to delay on), the label has this very morning released a video for …
News: Black Dice fire back into the ring with their first album in nearly a decade; watch the video for ‘White Sugar’
BLACK DICE, the dub motorik sonic sprites who came blasting out of Rhode Island before the turn of the century with awe-inspiring drone-percussive mantras such as “Endless Happiness”, are back in the rung, gloved up, with a new album entitled Mod Prog Sic due on a new label, FourFour Records, at the start of October. …
Track: Typical Sisters splice Tortoise’s rhythmic precision to the trippy deep-space glow of Stones Throw on ‘Grains’
WITH their new album, Love Beam, out in just under three weeks – and following our premiere of their last single, the brightly rhythmic and curious “Recurring Memory” last month – read that here – Typical Sisters are mixing it up with hallucinatory abandon on their final preluding single, “Grains”, which you can hear below. …
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 …
Meet: Land Trance talk of their debut album, the places that informed it, and more
ALTHOUGH their debut album, First Séance, was only released via Rocket Recordings last week, and originally through Forest Swords’ Dense Truth label in May 2020, the duo behind the Land Trance name have developed their musical selves in close proximity and in tandem with each other for more than a decade. Land Trance are comprised …
News: Pole announces an August 12″ for Mute; hear the percussive mantra of ‘Rost’
WITH last year’s excellent, enveloping album Fading under his belt, Berlin’s legendary sonic master Stefan Betke, aka Pole, has just dropped a new track, “Rost”, which is taken from a 12″ forthcoming for Mute in August, Tanzboden. Stripped back to a neo-industrial essence, “Rost” circles forward on a mazey, cyclical twining of tones, gently mantric, …
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 …