California sounds revival? Not called as such yet, but that line leading from The Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield through the ‘70s scene seems to be being revived and modernized by the likes of The Lemon Twigs and a number of other artists. Judging by Entropy, its new album, San Diego trio Foxtide should definitely be included in any such revival list. You can add to that revived term modernized one, as Elijah Gibbins-Croft, Oey James, and Ian Robles, who comprise Foxtide have that modern touch to songwriting and production, as they filtered their digest of all sounds California through current concepts of pop/rock music. The key lies in an excellent songwriting that relies on that well-proven concept ‘let’s write and sing something that sounds like…
Category: ***
Adam Kyriakou’s Department is a one-man band in the style of Neil Hannon’s Divine Comedy and Matt Johnson’s The The; others may pass in and out, but Kyriakou steers the ship.
Audacity Files proves to be the maiden voyage for what should be an interesting and impressive career in sonic development. “Shadow Play” embodies the freneticism of the Lennon-McCartney opus “A Day in the Life”: brass, loops, and percussion lunging at the unsuspecting listener. Incidentally, “Shadow Play” is the longest tune on the record: despite pushing the boundaries of pop, Department wisely keeps the runtime to a palatable two-minute average.
Purportedly inspired by a voyage to his ancestral Macedonia, Department incorporates…
Having previously cast themselves as 19th-century American vagrants, Anglo-American duo Ben Parker and David Berkeley, aka Sons of Town Hall (named for a ’90s “junk raft” built by octogenarian nomad Poppa Neutrino to cross the Atlantic), present a new concept and fictional world on Of Ghosts and Gods. Here, Victorian-era explorers Josiah Chester Jones (Berkeley) and George Ulysses Brown (Parker) travel the world on a self-built, mythical raft. They are joined, musically at least, by Jordan Katz, variously on trumpet, flugelhorn, trombone and tuba, David Felberg, Elizabeth Young, Kimberly Fredenburgh and Dana Winogradhorns on strings, percussionist Mathias Kunzli, woodwinds by Elizabeth VanArsdel, Kevin Vigneau and Jesse Tatum, with Will Robertson…
-1 outside / 24 inside documents collaborations between Zhao Cong and Kevin Corcoran when the two were in Beijing to perform at a series run by Aloe Records. After the show, the two spent an evening recording outside in an underpass below a major bridge on the northeastern stretch of Beijing’s 3rd Ring Road. Then later, they spent an afternoon recording in a studio often used to present shows. Both of these musicians focus on the materiality of sound and the processes of sound creation, delving in to the tiniest detailed textures and timbres of objects they utilize. Zhao is credited with “rotating mobile phone stand, karaoke light, tape recorder, etc.” and Corcoran with “snare drum, objects, and feedback.” But both Zhao and Corcoran are also keenly interested in…
Browse the live listings in Tokyo long enough and you’ll inevitably stumble across a party themed around modular synthesizers. Whether it’s an annual event at a multi-level nightclub (Festival Of Modular) or an intimate set at a cozy neighborhood venue (Modular Wednesday at Shibuya Otto), the itinerary remains the same-artists plugging away in the moment, tinkering ad hoc for a live audience.
Ephemeral & Fleeting: Modular Music of Japan celebrates the transient nature of the country’s contemporary modular scene. Curated by accomplished modular artist Yumi Iwaki, these 10 songs are a chronicle of the diverse sonic approaches taken by synthesizer aficionados, and the creative rewards that await those steadfast enough to master…
There are so many ways that musicians can currently cooperate, without necessarily having to be physically together in the same studio, room, basement or whatever, and we got a clear example here with Developments, the album that is, well, developed by Six Missing & Patrik Berg Almkvisth.
Behind the Six Missing moniker is Austin, Texas-based ambient composer and sound designer TJ Dumser, while Almkvisth is a musician/pianist and actor from Stockholm. To create this seven-part set of ambient movements, Almkvisth kept sending improvised solo piano pieces in their raw form to Dumser. Then, as their PR notes, Six Missing then expanded each one into a fully realised scene, cycling them through tape machines, routing them into modular systems, and…
The latest album from Spencer Doran, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Visible Cloaks, bills itself as an ensemble work — but what a strangely nebulous and numerous group it is. On the album opener, “Block,” we hear three prepared pianos and a chamber ensemble; on another track, the credits list four guitars, five cellos, a clarinet, an oboe, and a bowed piano. Moreover, these performances seem to possess the super-charged cadence of a computer: the trilling piano flurries of “Block” accelerate with non-human speed; the notes have a pointillist quality, like scattershot dots across a DAW — until serene woodwind breathes calm into the composition. The point is that no human ensemble could ever play this music, not even one comprised of virtuosos. But that…
There are debut albums that arrive with intent, and there are debut albums that arrive like a pneumatic drill through drywall. GNAT, the first full-length from Manchester’s drummer-fronted psych-punk quartet Wax Head – recorded with long-term collaborator Borja Regueira at Manchester’s GLUE Studio and mastered by Melbourne’s Joe Carra – is emphatically the latter: sub-thirty minutes and zero patience for anything resembling restraint.
The title track opens as both decree and detonation: a blitzing, subterranean riff-storm whose fretboard acrobatics would make Dillinger Escape Plan’s Ben Weinman raise an eyebrow. At 90 seconds, it doesn’t so much announce the album as ambush it. ‘Bug Doctor’ follows with equal ferocity, the rhythmic convulsions and…
Ferdinand Schwarz studied jazz trumpet in Cologne before his compositional interests took off during the pandemic, when he became “obsessed with the music of John Cage, Éliane Radigue and Morton Feldman, but also Jon Gibson and Arthur Russell.” He was drawn to “music that allowed me to dissolve in it, whether listening or playing… a sort of creative perceiving, as a tool to grow, transcend, to lose ego.” During his free master studies in Oslo, he became “more specifically fascinated with the act of listening and its creative potential,” engaging with sound art, instrument building, intonation systems, and listening-based music territories.
Listening Time is a 45-minute work developed collaboratively with AREPO – Madara Eleonora Mežale (clarinet), Marco Slaviero…
May the spring of amazing music sourced from the original UK DIY scene never run dry. Similar to other widespread, years-long U.S. macro-scene equivalents like mid-’60s garage rock or early 1980s hardcore punk, the well of UK DIY seems to be an inexhaustible resource. We owe a debt of gratitude to labels like Minimum Table Stacks, whose first foray into archiving UK DIY yielded a superb EP from long-lost Welsh group Violin Sect. It’s not an easy process tracking down band members, securing the rights, digging up unheard material, remastering the audio and presenting it with just the right amount of reverence — but not too much. After all, this cheeky, arch music was made by a generation that grew up watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus and…
It is hard to believe that Oxis, the marine-based electronic singer/songwriter/producer, only started her series of self-titled releases three years ago. Her music reaches a level of intimacy and vulnerable storytelling that makes listening to it feel like a chat with an old, prophetic friend, someone you never forget but can never pin down for too long. All this, despite her production percolating with alien-like textures derived from nimble drum patterns and palpable ambiance. Oxis’s pop-tinted, experimental approach has been stretched out across seven projects so far, and the next installment is finally here.
Oxis 8, the latest addition to the multi-hyphenate’s beloved album series, is another quick yet potent and fun exploration into…
A flicker of light was the namesake of Lia Pappas-Kemps‘s first EP, 2024’s Gleam, but the Toronto singer-songwriter’s full-length debut Winged proves that she’s more than just a flash in the pan. The idea of depicting a new indie rock-adjacent local artist often conjures one blurry-edged, vague cipher with a pretty generic sound profile. While Pappas-Kemps is adamantly a deviation from the norm, depending on where you start with her already-chameleonic œuvre, that may or may not be immediately apparent.
The second half of Winged opens a portal that makes it undeniable. On a twisted, knotty tree trunk of a song called “Wound Up and Coiling,” Pappas-Kemps kicks the project’s mouth agape as the titular tension becomes too much…
Martín Schellekens and Martín Espinosa have never been shy about their fondness for Sonic Youth. They started out calling themselves Hey Joni, after all. But that alias didn’t last; eventually they hit on Land Whales, a name with no associations attached. Subtly surrealistic, “Land Whales” conveys a blurry constellation of ideas: brute force and sheer impossibility; weightless grace and its gravity-bound opposite.
All those potential connotations take on greater significance when you consider that the group came together in Cuba and recorded its music — a fusion of grunge, post-hardcore, and shoegaze — in a Havana apartment, against all odds.
Land Whales’ sound is uncannily familiar. Their second album, How to Make a Breakfast,…
Remember when Matmos’ Drew Daniel posted about “hit em,” an imaginary electronic genre at 212 bpm and in 5/4 time? Seoul-based producer Guinneissik was one of many across the world who submitted an interpretation: “London Hammer,” a noisy techno belter with screamo vocals, later included on the resulting Machinedrum-curated compilation. But 2024 was already shaping up to be Guinneissik’s breakout year, with his slow-building trance single “Farewell Two Shell” nominated for Best Electronic Song at the Korean Music Awards. Daniel’s infamous tweet might have sparked Guinneissik’s entry into an international story, but the kindling had been accumulating for years.
Learning the ropes of Ableton from Korean electro-house pioneer KIRARA, Guinneissik…
1. Miles Davis – When Lights Are Low
2. Sarah Vaughan – It Might As Well Be Spring
3. Sonny Rollins Quartet – I Know
4. Charlie Parker’s All Stars – Ah-Leu-Cha
5. Miles Davis – Jeru
6. Coleman Hawkins All-Stars – Bean-A-Re-Bop
7. Miles Davis – Weirdo
8. Miles Davis – Générique
9. Michel Legrand – ‘Round Midnight
10. Lee Konitz Sextet – Odjenar
11. Miles Davis All-Stars – Milestones
12. Cannonball Adderley – Autumn Leaves
13. Miles Davis – The Maids of Cadiz
14. Herbie Fields Band & Rubberlegs Williams – That’s The Stuff You Gotta Watch
15. Miles Davis Quintet – Solar
Split Apex navigates a murky subterranean river, the headwaters of which lie in the craggy caverns between The Shadow Ring’s stark moonscapes and the blown-out craters that Wolf Eyes patrols. The London-based duo — bassist/vocalist Peter Blundell (Mosquitoes, Komare) and Finnish ex-pat Jussi Palmusaari on electronics, percussion and guitar — prepare oblique, haunting sound constructions that thrum, squall and slither. Theirs is a squirmy brand of deconstructed song, featuring meaty bass and snippets of droll spoken word from Blundell and uncanny electronics and guitar scree courtesy of Palmusaari. The pair focus on atmosphere, squeezing sound into a warm, fluid environment that’s as suitable for thoughtful rumination as it is for growing…
…Timothy McCormack, currently Assistant Professor of Composition at University of California San Diego, already had an impressive list of compositions and a significant discography before turning to the piano. Although that list included substantial solo pieces for other instruments, McCormack recounts that the piano had been avoided until the discovery of a ‘strange chord’ whose ‘intervention’ became more and more compelling and difficult to ignore. In the end it proved the eventual catalyst for mine but for its sublimation, a work which started as what the composer thought was going to be a ‘small side-project’ but which ended up being a year’s full on compositional effort. The pianist Jack Yarbrough was the intended performer from…
“Bariken” is a 2004 album by Merzbow, and as its title suggests, the theme of this work centers on the Bariken itself. The Bariken, also known as the “Taiwan Duck,” is a species of duck and has some characteristics that are its vivid green and ultramarine plumage and the red caruncle that extends around its bill and eyes.
Around 2003, I happened to notice a peculiar-looking duck in a river near my home. Upon investigation, I learned it was a Bariken — likely one that had escaped or been abandoned after being kept for food, subsequently adapting to the wild. There were also Bariken inhabiting the pond of a nearby Japanese garden. At the time, it was common to see ducks swimming in the rivers and ponds of Tokyo. A few years later,…
The album Reach Their Final Destination and Play Their Greatest Hits by Geof Tick & the Howling Fantods is a masterclass in conceptual noise and experimental soundscapes, released in early 2026 under the Easyriders Noise imprint.
Despite the title suggesting a conventional “Best Of” compilation, the record is anything but. It functions as a dense, atmospheric journey that feels more like a career-spanning manifesto than a simple collection of tracks. The album leans heavily into the “extreme sound” aesthetic typical of the label. It blends harsh industrial textures with moments of haunting, melodic decay. Geof Tick utilizes the “Howling Fantods” moniker to explore themes of finality, transition, and sonic exhaustion. The “hits” here are reimagined…
Mark Fell has spent much of his career building castles out of splinters. Or their digital equivalents, anyway: The Sheffield native’s music is an amalgamation of shards, fragments, and slivers of electronic sound sculpted into dazzling arrhythmic bursts. Composed on software platforms like Max/MSP, his pieces are rigorously formalist in nature, their shapes largely determined by the interaction of elements within closed systems. Even in the absence of understanding just what makes his music tick, one intuits the action of inscrutable processes at work, arcane rules generating sequences that unspool at the speed of black MIDI. To listen to Mark Fell often feels like standing in the shadow of the mathematical sublime.
Still, while the effects may be bracing, titles…