When solo and collaborative releases are counted, the discography Ian Hawgood‘s amassed is nothing short of staggering. What makes it all the more impressive is that, as this latest release shows, he’s still capable of creating vital and imaginative work unlike anything he’s produced before. One of the ways he accomplishes that is by devising ever new strategies for creating material, in the case of Savage Modern Structures the sound-generating gear he used, specifically guitar and that beloved prog standby, mellotron. It’s all Hawgood, though in October 2024 he and Will Bolton brought the album to its final form by using the AKG BX20 spring reverb units at Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm to give the material extra analog warmth and organic reverb.
Category: ***
French musician Sébastien Roux is an inveterate sonic explorer, utilizing an engineering background in computer signal processing to develop compositions, multi-channel sound installations, radio pieces and site-specific performances. Over the course of the last 20 years, he has released recordings like More Songs and Quatuor which use the individual parts of Beethoven’s “String Quartet No. 10” as the basis for an electroacoustic exploration of form and timbre.
Inevitable Music #5 is a sonic translation of Sol Lewitt’s instructions for wall drawings composed for the Dedalus Ensemble while Musiques D’ordinateur is computer music developed from formal investigations into algorithmic procedures. Roux’s most recent release, Les disparitions…
Some musicians get their first glimpse of celebrity, flinch in the glare of the spotlight, and quickly burrow their way back underground. But Duncan Sumpner, you suspect, knew from the beginning that fame – even fame on a very small and grassroots indie level – was not for him.
A schoolteacher from Oughtibridge, a residential village on the outskirts of Sheffield, Sumpner has released a string of records under the name Songs of Green Pheasant without ever quite stepping into the light. The project’s origin story speaks volumes about his elusive approach. A demo that Sumpner sent to Fat Cat in 2002 became a fixture on the label’s office stereo. But when they decided to get in contact to offer him a record deal, the email bounced back, and it took them…
Multiple recordings are available featuring Melbourne guitarist Cam Butler with ensembles of varying sizes — in addition to the eleven solo instrumental albums he’s issued, Butler’s also contributed to other artists’ projects — but there’s something undeniably special about one featuring him alone. In that context, his command of the instrument and associated gear is especially apparent, especially when it’s not put to self-indulgent or egoistic ends but instead used to realize the artistic expression for a given piece. It also allows his singular tone to be heard clearly and for the listener to better appreciate the textures he coaxes from his Gibson Les Paul.
Being an album of unaccompanied pieces, Spirits Flying Home is naturally intimate and…
Príncipe have been championing the music coming out of Lisbon’s suburbs for the better half of two decades. The dominating style has been batida, a mashup of two Angolan rhythms — kuduro and kizomba — bound together by whatever sonic glue a producer sees fit. Following the success of batida’s first wave, an increasing number of producers have begun experimenting with this style of music; despite the label’s best efforts, it’s becoming nearly impossible for them to house this ever-expanding pool of talent.
Não Estragou Nada is Príncipe’s third compilation and, at 37 tracks long, its greatest. It features music spanning two generations of producers: 19-year-old wonderkid Helviofox shares the roster with OG batida and kuduro producer…
There’s some search for definitions needed here. Of course, both OdNu and Ümlaut are monikers, in this case referring to New York artists Michel Mazza and Jeff Düngfelder.
Then we come to Mitochondria Johatsu, the title of their second joint project. Using two separate terms, they seem to want to create a new one – mitochondria are small organelles found in nearly all eukaryotic cells, often referred to as the “powerhouses of the cell” because they generate most of the cell’s energy. On the other hand, johatsu is a Japanese term for people who vanish from their lives without a trace, often to escape shame or stress.
In many ways that combination of terms does seem to define the music Mazza (electric guitar,…
Experimental is a tag that can scare off listeners. Albums with this label can sound like something from the research and development wing of music: abstract, difficult or even weird. At first glance, Friendship Traces by Steven Lambke and Jimmie Kilpatrick looks like one of these records: it’s based around synths, drum samples and a melodica. There’s nary a guitar in sight. But right from the get-go, this duo shows themselves as open-minded, warm, and friendly.
Friendship Traces is a shade under half an hour long and the result of sessions of playing, overdubbing and tape manipulation by two Canadians: Lambke, a Canadian singer and guitarist, and indie musician Kilpatrick, formerly known as Shotgun Jimmie. Both have…
There is no warning and no chance to prepare. The instant you press play on Ash Fure’s Animal, a mass of thundering sub-bass hits you like a predator pouncing on its prey. With consciousness too slow to react, some ancient, primal region of the brain lights up. Suddenly, you find yourself in fight or flight mode, pumped with adrenaline, heart racing and palms sweating.
The US experimental musician and composer has dedicated a significant part of her career to exploring the physicality of music and our instinctual feedback to sound, with The Force of Things: An Opera for Air (2014–2022) and Hive Rise (2020) tackling the human body’s relationship with fear and the palpable effect that sonic waves have on the psyche. However, none…
Typically, when an artist stays out of our view, every public gesture he or she does make is loaded with extra significance. Think of the ways each demo, cover, or bit of extramusical trivia is instantly subsumed into the canons of D’Angelo, Fiona Apple, or Frank Ocean.
But given how Corbin, who drifted from SoundCloud stardom to deeper recesses of the internet, has released music — first under a different, instantly infamous stage name, and then in intermittent bursts that suggest a true disregard for self-promotion and self-mythologizing — the temptation is to receive his songs as a series of experiments, tips of an iceberg that will languish in a Google Drive folder until it melts.
The grey cover of his new album, Crisis Kid,…
Vazz formed in Glasgow during the early ’80s, and initially consisted of vocalist/lyricist Anna Howson and multi-instrumentalist Hugh Small. With Howson’s ethereal harmonies floating over Small’s sparse drum machines and mysterious guitar hooks, the duo’s music fell somewhere between coldwave, post-punk, and dream pop. The five-song mini-album Your Lungs and Your Tongues (released in 1986 by Cathexis Recordings, also home to records by Fini Tribe and Pink Industry) was one of a handful of vinyl releases the pair made before splitting up near the end of the decade. As Small resurfaced during the 2010s with solo piano and ambient compositions, Vazz’s scant ’80s discography was rediscovered and revived in several different configurations…
It’s been a year and a half since BASIC first emerged out of a bare bones set up of two guitars (Chris Forsyth and Nick Millevoi) and a drum machine. That early experiment, inspired by the 1984 collaboration between Robert Quine and Fred Maher, put a boxy, machine-drilled framework around open-ended guitar jam. Mikel Patrick Avery tended the rough propulsion of the drum machine, enriching its stutter with additional improvised percussion, while Forsyth and Millevoi slashed away at one another on conventional and baritone guitar. It was, at once, disciplined and free-spirited, and you can see why it appealed to Forsyth. Christian Carey reviewed the full-length debut last year, writing “With a rattling drum pattern, synth lines embellished by bent notes…
Despite his relatively young age, Kory Reeder has already produced well over a hundred scores, the earliest dating from 2017 and the Covid years being particularly fertile for him. He has composed in a range of genres which include large ensemble, soloist with orchestra, choral, chamber (5+ players), quartets, trios, duos, solo, open ensemble pieces, art songs, stage music, electronic music, field recordings. In addition, Homestead is his second album release on Another Timbre, his first on that label having been entitled Codex Vivere recorded in December 2021 by Apartment House. Prior to those releases, Reeder’s first album Love Songs, Duets had been released on the prestigious Editions Wandelweiser Records. Two other Reeder albums have been released…
Propulsion and stillness coincide in the atmospheric “State of Motion,” an early single from this third volume in the Nanocluster series. Vibrations build and surge, their overtones merging in limpid pools of sound. A pedal steel arcs over ambient tones, a drum beat pushes it onward, but mostly this music doesn’t develop so much as it exists. You can float on it, on your back, like a swimmer in salt water, effortlessly taking in the liquid tone and pulse of it.
Nanocluster Vol. 3 pairs Wire’s Colin Newman and his creative partner Malka Spigel with cosmic country’s SUSS, two sets of musical talents that Dusted has long admired. We’ve covered works by Spigel and Wire since moving to the Tumblr and Githead in the before times. As for SUSS, of the 2024 Birds and Beasts,…
If you thought Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal evoked the feeling of deepest winter, you should check out this beautifully odd and solitary project from Arkansas-based multi-instrumentalist Chaz Knapp to hear how it’s really done. Chaz is a traditional instrumentalist and field recorder, whose Microfolk series highlighted him as a musical collagist. Winter Music contrasts Microfolk (which was recorded in the summer heat) in that Chaz took his instruments to various locations in the rugged terrain of Northwest Arkansas in the depths of winter, recording with tape loops and improvisations while his fingers froze and his nylon string guitar neck shrank in the cold.
The result is something of a remote and isolated audio diary, as much documenting…
TAKAAT began (and still operate) as the rhythm section to Mdou Moctar, the breakout Nigerien rock band named for its charismatic frontman.
This puts Ahmoudou Madassane (guitar/vocals), bassist Mikey Coltun (the sole American in the group), and drummer Souleymane Ibrahim in the same realm as Calexico. That indie band started out as part of alt-country weirdos Giant Sand, but TAKAAT aren’t seeking to branch out from or expand the sound of their parent outfit. They might have more in common with one of Bob Weir’s non-Dead outfits. Like Weir, Madassane has had to invent his own method of playing rhythm guitar to accommodate a brilliant, dynamic leader–and when that leader’s not in the picture, there’s a lot of space left to fill.
Are we approaching The End? A quick global vibe check points to the affirmative. From non-stop doomscrolling pummeling our neural pathways to climate scientists throwing up their hands in despair, the near future might be a wrap on the world as we know it. Philosophers like Slavoj Žižek and Amador Fernández-Savater have already gone as far as to argue that the apocalypse has already occurred. For so many of us, it feels like we are just drifting through dystopian fallout, waiting out the days until inevitable societal collapse.
So, where to turn when confronted with such dire and defeatist predictions? Hieroglyphic Being (AKA Jamal Moss) offers a few avenues of spiritual release on his latest album, The Sound of Something Ending. The title track drops…