experimental
ALBUM REVIEW: Bolomite Jr. – ‘Cold Feet’: classical meets experimental in tectonic layering
BEN CALHOUN has been quietly working away for a while now, leading a double life as a construction worker-cum-experimental musician having begun using Digital Audio Workstations as a creative tool way back in 2014, reconnecting him finally to a performative sphere as a childhood musician he’d left behind Since then he’s digitally released a series of …
TRACK: Endlings – ‘Fragil’: raw evocation from John Dieterich and Raven Chacon
ENDLINGS is the collaborative project of John Dieterich, guitarist with the ever bizarre, angular, captivating Deerhoof, and Navajo Nation ambient and field recordings voyager Raven Chacon. They’ve worked together once before, on their self-titled debut album of experimental abstraction for sicksicksick back in 2017; and they’ve got a new full-length set ready for us now, …
TRACK: The Notwist feat. Juana Molina – ‘Al Sur’: returning with exploratory pop chops intact
SEVEN years is too long, to paraphrase the northern soul classic; yep. that’s how long it’s been since we’ve heard from Bavaria’s always delightfully off-kilter The Notwist. Since they dropped their last album for It’s been seven years since The Notwist’s last studio album, Close To The Glass, for City Slang in 2014, the always …
TRACK: Rutger Hoedemaekers – ‘Not For That Hour, Nor For That Place’: modern composition with electronica glimmer
RUTGER HOEDEMAEKERS is the most recent addition to 130701’s almost obscenely strong and talented stable of artists working at the forefront of modern composition. You may not yet have come across him, even if you are an aficionado of modern composition; but if you are amongst that number, you’ve heard him collaboratively in the work …
ALBUM REVIEW: Yvette Janine Jackson – ‘Freedom’: two suites of free expression of the Black experience
If real, unafraid, powerful sonic architecture, dialogue and expression is your thing – and in terms of consciousness, maybe it should be – then this record is essential. But enter steeled and go carefully, friend
PREMIERE: bolomite jr. – ‘Ants’: hallucinatory soundscapery from Philly
BEN CALHOUN is, by day, a carpenter in the construction industry, keeping body and soul together with a craftsman’s skill; the better to set up him up for when he slips inside that phone box, swiftly changing to emerge in his experimental soundscaper guise as bolomite jr. And here today at Backseat Mafia, we’re pleased …
SEE: The animated video for Samuel Sharp’s ‘Dawn Rises’; the English dawn captured in solo sax
HE’S QUITE the scion of British solo saxophone, is Samuel Sharp; not, perhaps, on the face of it, an easy thing to comprehend, but what he’s offering over what’s now a triad of single drops and next month’s album, Patterns Various, is experimental, pretty, dubby, evocative; pastoralist, impressionist, and I think an album which will …
ALBUM REVIEW: Jon Mueller – ‘Family Secret’: an immersive drone palimpsest
Family Secret is a journey of deep interiority: it’s implicit that it be served fresh, after dark, suitably lit with no distractions. Clever, eerie and beautiful, it’s an album that will continue to reward you
TRACK: Rachika Nayar – ‘The Trembling Of Glass’: an exciting voice in experimental guitar
HAILING from the borough of Brooklyn, ambient composer Rachika Nayar has left her previous nominative chrysalis as Rachika S behind to spread her wings as a potent ambient guitar sound artist; as wholly witnessed by this first single, “The Trembling Of Glass”, taken from her March debut album, Our Hands Against The Dusk. Take a …
SEE: Jon Mueller – ‘Welcome’: glorious drone textures from Wisconsin
WISCONSIN musician? Sound artist? Explorer? Curator? – all of these things, Jon Mueller is always seeking new confluences of thought and sound. He may be best known to you as part of Volcano Choir, in which he lined up alongside Justin Vernon of Bon Iver to push out the boundaries of alt.rock into weirder, treated shapes, employing …