experimental
See: The video for Mind Maintenance’s ‘Glow & Glimmer’: Chicago’s Chad Taylor and Joshua Abrams step out for some exceedingly cool world-jazz melodicism
TAKE one of the finest and most intuitive leftfield jazz rhythm sections of past decades, Chicago drummer Chad Taylor and bassist Joshua Abrams, who between them amass waay over a couple hundred performance credits to their name on Discogs for artists such as the Chicago Underground Trio and all its various spiralling iterations, Brokeback, Sam …
Track: Peace Flag Ensemble – ‘Human Pyramid’; Canadian improvisational jazz quintet drop a lovely, fluvial piece ahead of their debut album
LADIES and gentlemen of the weirder musical persuasion: introducing a new act to especially intrigue the weird jazzers among you, Peace Flag Ensemble, an experimental collective drawn from various points across the verdant central Canadian province of Saskatchewan. The quintet are set to release their first venture into long-playing recordings on June 18th on Toronto’s …
See: Patrick Belaga – ‘The Tunnel Is A Tower’: off-kilter ambience in which electronica plays against shadowy cello
AS YOU can pretty much deduce from the photo, Patrick Belaga isn’t your common or garden cellist. Classically trained, natch, he loves to bust out of convention – whether that’s collaborating with performance artists such as Wu Tsang, or scoring Lady Gaga’s Netflix documentary. Life – and music, and art – are for living. His …
Track: Gazelle Twin ensures you won’t sleep easy with ‘The Well’, from the soundtrack to forthcoming British horror ‘The Power’
WITH her seductively dark beckon to the dark sides of a dankly merrie old country in cahoots with NYX, Deep England, now out and wreathing like evening mist around the collective consciousness, you may well be forgiven for thinking Elizabeth Bernholz, aka Gazelle Twin, could rest easy, her work here done at least for the …
News: Erland Cooper announces digital epilogue to his astonishing Orcadian trilogy; hear Bill-Ryder Jones’s rerub of ‘Haar Over Hamnavoe’
THE SUPERB ambient-psychogeographical triptych by Orcadian musician and composer Erland Cooper, Solan Goose, Sule Skerry, and Hether Blether – which themselves are receiving a gorgeous box set treatment, more of which below – is gaining an excellent addendum at the end of next month in Holm, a collection of variations, B-sides and reworkings by artists …
Track: Lea Bertucci – ‘An Arc Of The Horizon’: drone and woodwind in impressionistic compositional flight prelude her new album
NEW YORK’S Lea Bertucci is a composer and sound artist who first picked up a sax at the tender age of 9, going to learn the disciplines of the instrument in classical and jazz before, always hungry for the news, starting to explore more abstract musical forms in her late teens. With roundabout a dozen …
See: Tristan Kasten-Krause – ‘From Thin Air’: high choral grace with stunning visuals lead us to a liminal better place
TRISTEN KASTEN-KRAUSE, the intensely collaborative dronescaper who’s all set to release his debut album come late April, has dropped some beautifully tailored visuals to accompany his second teaser for that record – you can watch that below. “From Thin Air” follows the delicious drones of “Dawn Looming”, his first reveal from late last month; a …
See: Ben Seretan – ‘Fog Rolls Out Rabun Gap’: beautiful piano and environment ambience from the New Yorker heralds an April must-have for NNA Tapes
BEN SERETAN, the New York composer whose song-based and folksy album from last year, Youth Pastoral, made massive waves Stateside – earning itself a spot in Pitchfork’s 35 Best Rock Albums of the Year list – and whose 2018 My Life’s Work was 24 hours long, recorded over three consecutive nights from sunset to sunrise, is …
Track: There’s Little to Mourn on Elegiac’s Debut Single, Vous Et Ici
Marking a collaboration between two iconic British artists, experimental group Elegiac has released “Vous Et Ici” as a single leading up to the release of their self-titled debut on Friday, March 26th. The duo is composed of post-punk bassist/vocalist Edvard Graham Lewis (Wire, He Said) and saxophonist/vocalist Ted Milton (Blurt), and their collaboration creates envelope-pushing …
See: SORBET unveils a video for his theatrical tale of our lived purgatory, ‘I Heard His Scythe’
IT WAS just a fortnight ago that Chris W Ryan, the Irish producer and veteran of many bands on the Emerald Isle scene, unveiled the palate-cleanser of his new project, SORBET; and he did that with the widescreen, theatrical sweep of “I Heard His Scythe”, featuring the Einar-like declamatory tones of Chris entwined with Galway …