experimental
See: The incredible hand-drawn video to ’68’s ‘Bad Bite’: righteous noise proves less is so much more
ATLANTA noiseniks ’68 have a much-anticipated new album, Give One Take One, out on Cooking Vinyl at the end of next month; in advance of which they’ve unveiled a frankly excellent hand-drawn video for lead single “Bad Bite”, which you can watch below. It showcases how much cathartic noise you can make with just two …
Track: Gazelle Twin & NYX – ‘Deep England’; burrowing into the dank peat of a merrie old nation
THE DANK, dystopian country that is Merrie England is being scried through a glass darkly by Gazelle Twin in shadowy conceit with the NYX electronic drone choir, who are kicking aside the collapsed slates of a realm that exists in our collective consciousness and revealing the rich, wriggling, sightless life scurrying underneath; a project they’ve …
Album review: Mapstation – ‘My Frequencies, When We’: playful, immensely thoughtful tronica
My Frequencies, When We may not flaunt its wares with garish insouciance; but like so many of the albums that end up welded to your turntable, it keeps on enticing you back for more exploration, further interaction. It occasionally raises a grin and equally occasionally, an eyebrow; it’s varied in its approach yet thoroughly cohesive. It’s an immensely thoughtful record
Track: Only Now & Beneath the Ruins – ‘Mine Of Memories’: scorched earth blues foraging for what remains
IT’S A dark meshing of minds: experimental electronic producer Only Now and guitarist Beneath The Ruins have convened out in the sonic edgelands for a joint debut EP, Anamnesis, out next month. The artists born Kush Arora and Peter Arensdorf respectively have meshed to investigate badlands atmospherics, dark electronica and wasteland West Coast blues – as you can hear …
Track: Cameron Knowler & Eli Winter share the spiralling guitar wonder of ‘Parapraxis of a Dragonfly’
TWO ADEPT young guns of the fingerstyle guitar, Cameron Knowler and Eli Winter really came to appreciate each other on a winter tour of the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas. The Trans-Pecos is a land of stark beauty, of ghost towns and mountain ranges. The pair spent the winter of 2018 gigging through the small …
Album review: Samuel Sharp – ‘Patterns Various’: diaristic, timeless sax explorations
Patterns Various sits in a emerging tradition of very beautiful single-instrument essays; a very personal journey, and a very English one, captures its moments so well that people will be sure to revisit it for decades to come
Track: Mike Lazarev – ‘Finale’: Ukrainian composer drops the final curtain from next week’s delicious mini-album
THE IDEA of a soundtrack to an imaginary film is something we here at Backseat Mafia love straight off the bat, right back to when we fell for Barry Adamson’s rather wonderful Moss Side Story all those years ago. Injazero Records, the imprint overseen by London and Istanbul-based producer and journalist Siné Buyuka, which we’ve …
Album Review: FM Einheit orchestrates dreams with “Exhibition Of A Dream.”
Having made mention of KMFDM in a previous review, it would seem that the more euro-centric oddities that are emerging from the winter have made their way into the collective leftfield inbox a lot more than anticipated. That’s fine; when you’ve been asked to take a listen to an album by former Einstürzende Neubauten percussionist …
ALBUM REVIEW: CAMERA – ‘Prosthuman’: the current Berlin motorik
SO, LET’S talk krautrock. In many ways, it’s all about the rhythm, isn’t it? Think Can; think Jaki Liebezeit, that perfect control, poise, underpinning. Motorik, propulsion, but also tremendous fills and patterning. Metronomic, relentless, the beating heart of the record. Berlin’s CAMERA have that. They have their own Jaki in the shape of the excellently …
TRACK: Balmorhea – ‘The Myth’: Texan duo reveal a first track from their forthcoming album for Deutsche Grammophon
BALMORHEA, the Texan duo of Rob Lowe and Michael A. Muller, whose particular take on the modern compositional form nods to the American West, have signed to Deutsche Grammophon for their seventh album, The Wind, which record will be out at the end of April. That The Wind should be released by Deutsche Grammophon, which …