Ever lock your gaze on a fractal animation and have the dizzying impression you were tumbling into the screen? The British multimedia artist Lucas Dupuy’s recent exhibition One panoramic view after another will unfold operates on a similar principle. His artworks begin as airbrush studies, which he then photographs and rephotographs, zooming in on smaller and smaller details, drilling down to microscopic levels of granularity. Only at the end of this iterative process does he hit solid ground: Having achieved the desired tangle of lines, he pulls out his pigments and paints the ropy forms on heavy burlap, the fabric’s pits and threads giving the piece a three-dimensional, larger-than-life quality.
If Dupuy’s paintings are a way of removing…
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While Humanist is essentially a solo project for Rob Marshall, his music is always rounded out by his impeccable choice of guest vocalists. Marshall’s first album under the moniker was a welcome surprise, seemingly coming out of nowhere, and fully formed.
On the Edge of a Lost and Lonely World has a task ahead of it to match its predecessor, not least because one of the voices that made such an impression on the first Humanist album is now floating, gruffly, in the ether.
The husky, damaged vocals of Mark Lanegan always made an impression no matter the band or artists he was working with. Marshall had worked with him previously, on Humanist material and in writing a number of songs for Lanegan’s…
Colombia’s Bomba Estéreo and Venezuela’s Rawayana, two award-winning Latin pop power- houses, have combined forces in ASTROPICAL. What began as a collaboration on a single expanded to become a full-length eponymous album. ASTROPICAL contains two members of each: Bomba’s Li Saumet (vocals) and José Castillo (keys), and Rawayana’s Beto Montenegro (vocals, guitar, bass) and Andre “Fofo” Story (drums). Saumet called Montenegro to collaborate on a single, and he agreed. After he sent her the demo for the first single, “Me Pasa (Piscis),” she finished it in six hours. They booked a small Miami studio and cut three more songs. Impressed, Montenegro traveled to Saumet’s house in Santa Marta, where they wrote the remainder of the album…
After their excellent reissue that centered on non-LP and unreleased songs recorded between 1988 and 1990 at Noise New York studio, the Silver Current label has unearthed another excellent treasure from Galaxie 500. This time it’s a live set recorded in December of 1988 at CBGB where the band was appearing on the bill with Sonic Youth, B.A.L.L., and Unsane. Taken from mixing desk recordings helmed by their long-time producer Kramer and remixed for release, the set captures the band in stunning form that goes a fair way in belying their image as slowcore somnambulists. Ripping through an eight song set made up of tracks from their first album Today, Dean Wareham‘s guitars cut through the mix like jangling bells in the verses and rip…
It’s good to have The Gotobeds back. Guitars, feedback, noise: glad to hear ‘em. The band’s two-album stint on Sub Pop wrapped up over six years ago, with 2019’s Debt Begins at 30, and, uh, the world has seen some shit since then.
They sat out the whole Biden administration — honestly, kind of a smart move. But America is done with its latest half-hearted attempt to maybe just barely try to hide how dumb and evil it can be, which makes a new Gotobeds record even more welcome than usual. The good stuff is needed now more than ever, and Masterclass is about as good as it can get.
Cutting corners and putting it plainly: Masterclass (and the Gotobeds as a whole) sounds like what people meant when they talked…
The three chamber works on New Thread Quartet‘s Saxifraga speak vociferously on behalf of the saxophone ensemble’s commitment to new music. Favouring texture and atmosphere over melody and traditional compositional forms, the group’s second New Focus release utilizes multiphonics, alternate tunings, non-pitched sounds, and other techniques to navigate unconventional sonic territories. Such explorations are consistent with the quartet’s avowed mission to present daring new music for the saxophone and to use its high-level playing in the service of living composers.
The NYC-based saxophone quartet comprises Geoffrey Landman (soprano), Kristen McKeon (alto), Erin Rogers (tenor) and Zach Herchen (baritone), though Jonathan Hulting-Cohen is…
The material heard on Emptyset‘s album Dissever was first presented at London’s Tate Modern gallery, where it was performed as part of an exhibition about the global history of art and technology titled Electric Dreams.
Like other Emptyset releases, the pieces were recorded in single takes, capturing the spontaneity and raw energy of the duo’s unique creative processes. Emptyset are often known for improvising on self-created instruments, and on Dissever, they returned to early hardware as well as spatial and multitrack recording techniques. Their music focuses on timbre rather than melody, often establishing a vibrating pulse and dousing it in distortion. Opener “Gloam” stares straight forward, rocking back and forth while…
Donna Allen’s second song diary is just a shade softer and more florid than her other project Chronophage, an outfit that already fell towards the more lyrical end of the post-punk spectrum in the vicinity of Blue Orchid and Microdisney.
Recorded with clarity but without much fuss, these songs frame strong melodies with jangling guitar. Their forthright, unvarnished sincerity might link them to the lo-fi movement, but there’s not much fuzz in the tone.
Chronophage split the difference between baroque pop and slashing, banging rock and roll, but solo Allen tends more towards the former. “Nightmare of your Dawning,” picks radiant patterns on acoustic guitar and spins out an ear-wormy sing-along chorus, all sunshine in the music.
In the second decade of the twentieth century, one of Italy’s most revolutionary artistic movements was born in the face of rapid technological and social change: Futurism.
One of its key figures was Luigi Russolo, a painter, inventor, and composer. In 1913, he published the manifesto ‘The Art of Noises’, which proclaimed that if the world’s sounds have changed, then music should keep up. Instead of using classical instruments and harmonies, Russolo advocated the use of noise – the hum, screech, shriek of the new soundworld of machines.
To realise his vision, he constructed a series of instruments called intonarumori (literally ‘noise intoners’). They were mechanical devices resembling boxes with large resonance tubes…
Pantsula dancing and kwaito go hand in hand. Both emerged from the townships of Johannesburg, and both were forces of joy and genius during desperate times. When kwaito landed on the global main stage around the turn of the millennium, star acts like TKZee, featured pantsula dancers in their hit music videos like the brilliantly upbeat “Dlala Mapantsula.”
Mahlubi “Shadow” Radebe and Zwelakhe “Malemon” Mtshali were two dancers from the township of Tembisa, in northeastern Johannesburg, who decided to transition from the shuffling and low movements of pantsula to singing over kwaito’s laidback hip-hop-meets-house swagger. But to do that, they would need to upgrade from their beat-up cassette player to an actual,…
Composer Catherine Lamb (b. 1983) deals with harmonic spectra and microtones in her work.
Slow, staggered presentations of overtones unfold into rich vertical sonorities, with the tiniest shift in intonation serving more as an event than an inflection. Ghost Ensemble (Margaret Lancaster, flute; Sky Macklay, oboe; Ben Richter, accordion; Lucia Stavros, harp; Chris Nappi, hammered dulcimer; Martine Thomas, viola; Tyler J Borden, cello; James Ilgenfritz and Gregory Chudzik, contrabass) is a go-to for adventurous music-making, and they take to Lamb’s with commitment and precision.
Interius/Exterius (2022) is a large-scale piece in which Lamb deals with the spatiality of sounds. As the title suggests, the juxtaposition…
There are highly conceptual, process-based albums, and then there’s GHOST, which absolutely thrives on a whole other level. Combining themes of grief and loss with the controversial concept of artificial intelligence, Amsterdam-based musician Asa Horvitz searched for the right combination of words and music and called upon AI designers and fellow musicians to complete the task.
Grieving from the 2017 loss of his father, jazz and experimental guitarist Bill Horvitz, Asa was looking for a musical language “to evoke our metaphysical and tangible experiences with loss and the weight of history that surrounds those who have passed on”, according to the press notes. Assembling a dataset of more than 150 pre-existing texts from throughout history that deal…
Over recent years Norway has had an influx of emerging and firmly established talent that cross genres and offer their distinctive take, with Fucales being the latest in a long line to share their interpretation of jazz-infused psych/alt rock.
In their latest album Airhead, the band channel their personal stories into a vibrant exploration of circumstances told through the collaborative fusion of the band members driven through playful compositions, daring arrangements, and emotive lyrics.
With Airhead being their most creatively adventurous record to date, the band introduces their audience to the evolution of their sound and songwriting with album opener ‘Live’. Delving into their new-found maturation of musical…
The latest in Ivo Perelman’s endless parade of stimulating duets pairs him with the drummer Tyshawn Sorey who is every bit as perceptive, inventive and wily as the tenor saxophonist himself. Parallel Aesthetics will doubtlessly conjure up comparisons to the original sax/drums free jazz exploit, Interstellar Space by John Coltrane and Rashied Ali. But the concept of dual improvisation with a saxophone and drums has as many differences as there are similarities.
Perelman is a tenor saxophone of boundless facility but was never accused of aping Trane, as he has long ago developed his own language, one deeply rooted in the tradition established before JC emerged, but always looking forward.
Likewise, Tyshawn Sorey is not Rashied Ali.
Although she has been releasing albums since 2011, the Serbian-born New York resident, composer, pianist, performer and improviser Teodora Stepančič is here making her second appearance on Another Timbre — the first as a composer as her previous appearance on the label was as the pianist who performed Mark R. Taylor’s compositions on his album Aftermaths (Another Timbre, 2018).
In the years between that release and O A | F G, years which included the COVID disruption, Stepančič self-released an impressively varied 14 albums digitally. One of those featured “OA” performed by the ensemble Ordinary Affects and Douglas Farrand + people buying books at MIT bookstore Boston, released in December 2018.