experimental
ALBUM REVIEW: Paradise Cinema – ‘Paradise Cinema’: shimmering, vivacious, percussive, Afro ambience
Paradise Cinema, the self-titled project of Portico Quartet’s Jack Wyllie, sings of new Afro-ambient futures to immerse in. It’s vivacious, swathing and haunting
SEE: The beautiful visuals for Ólafur Arnalds’ ‘Woven Song’
ÓLAFUR ARNALDS is preparing for his new album, some kind of peace, to hit turntables across the world on November 6th; and he’s followed the beautiful noir of previous single-track teasers “Back To The Sky” and “We Contain Multitudes” with another stunning audiovisual drop in “Woven Song”; let yourself be dazzled down at the end. …
PREMIERE: JR Samuels – ‘Doomer’: fine porchside guitar soli outta Philly
JR SAMUELS has been involved in the indie and underground scenes of the North-Eastern United States for the better half of a decade now. While resident in Ithaca in New York’s Finger Lakes back in 2015, he tickled the six strings in fine lofi outfit Izzy True and also steered the good ship Sweet Baby …
Track: Oliver Coates releases new track, ‘Honey’, from forthcoming album
TO CALL Oliver Coates a cellist tells you nothing at all. Oliver Coates is a musician whose work connects the circuits at the edge of dance and classical worlds. It’s not crossover, it’s not fusion, it’s experimental, rewiring sounds in a dangerous and delectable way (ask Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood) … and yes, he …
TRACK: A Lily – ‘Slept Through The Storm’: complex minimalism for a dark time
JAMES VELLA is, like the rest of us, concerned with the horrifically dark period we’re living through right now: the anxiety, the mental privations. The storm. We all need to find a way through: on October 16th, under his recording pen-name A Lily, he releases an album advocating his complex and seductive musical approach to …
TRACK: Lama Lobsang Palden and Jim Becker – ‘Blessings’: where acoustic postrock meets Tibetan chant
2020, eh? As it wearies on, the need for music, the need for the good things, for stillness, to find our own thread to follow through it all, becomes ever more necessary. An album, then, as much 2020 as it perhaps 1968 is the forthcoming album on Drag City from Lama Lobsang Palden and Jim …
MEET: We chat with landscape artist and musician Richard Skelton ahead of his new album
RICHARD SKELTON is an artist in the deepest sense of the word. He publishes intense poetry in lovingly designed editions with Corbel Stone Press; he also makes a very deep music with a fierce geographical, experiential focus – initially very much about the undervisited, bleak West Pennine Moors; and more recently, the Scottish borderlands. Often …
TRACK: Paradise Cinema – ‘Possible Futures’: exhilarating Afro-ambience
JACK WYLLIE, the musician best known to those of us with a deep and abiding penchant for the leftfield, the beautiful and the widescreen as a member of The Portico Quartet, has announced a new solo project under the nom-de-musique Paradise Cinema, a full album under which alias will be out on October 9th. Paradise …
ALBUM REVIEW: Olivier Alary and Johannes Malfatti – ‘u,i’: beautifully humanist post-classicism, listening to the world talk to itself
ISDN, fibre-optics, the web. Sharing platforms, Skype, Facebook, Zoom; instantaneous transmission, the world shrunk to a pebble’s dimension. Our modern world, and especially the broader swathe of this fractured year 2020 would be unimaginable without it. And the latest offering from FatCat’s ever-intriguing leftfield imprint, 130701, a collaboration between Montreal-based Toulousain Olivier Alary and Berlin’s …
TRACK: Steph Richards – ‘Underbelly’: marvellous free jazz trails LP – with accompanying scents …
STEPH RICHARDS – the composer, free jazz trumpeter and bandleader who’s worked with artists as diverse as St Vincent, Yoko Ono and Anthony Braxton, knows a thing or two about how to envelop the senses. But for her new album, Supersense, she’s taking a step further into the multi-sensory, even the synaesthesic – working alongside …