“I became interested in the idea that recording is a bottomless medium,” explains multi-instrumentalist Gryphon Rue in the press notes of his new album. “You have a bag that can fit any sound; the room in the bag is limitless.” Indeed, the sounds conjured up by Rue on I Keep My Diamond Necklace in a Pond of Sparkling Water draw from a variety of sources and span multiple genres within the “experimental” umbrella. Rue plays bowed chimes, modular synthesizer, acoustic guitar, Mellotron, bells, and more, but also adds found sounds, animals, and even planetary signals to create a setting that is at once mysterious, soothing, complex, and quirky.
Coming off last year’s 4n_objx, which implemented a more electronic, processed aura,…
Category: ***
Songs introduces Santiago Diez Fischer – a composer/performer with roots in Buenos Ares and branches in contemporary European institutes – poetically expressing a form of abstract electro-acoustic composition with an almost punkish approach not normally heard on explorative contemporary minimalist label Another Timbre, yet clearly resonating its tenets. An instrumentalist at heart, who turns to electro-acoustic forms for their immediacy and the limitations of playing with an ensemble back in Argentina, Diez Fischer can coincidentally be grouped with a number of other Argentine composers – Lucio Capece, Gabriel Paiuk, and Tomàs Cabado – who grew up with Argentine rock, tango, folk music, and make music that challenges perceptions of…
“Feels like all I ever do is try / And try again,” Kerrin Connolly sings on “Try”, the first track on her latest album, Simpleton. While the song seems like a monument to self-doubt, the album by the Boston-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist shows an artist overflowing with chops and dedication. While there are plenty of similarities between Simpleton and previous albums like Almost (2020) and Transitions (2024), Connolly has stepped up her game on her latest record, with smart, sophisticated arrangements and an arsenal of pop songs that are a quantum leap from those already-great earlier works.
Connolly describes Simpleton as “a concept album which explores the themes of a hero’s journey – some classic, others modern and…
Not everything is Twin Peaks, but Rockie does kinda feel like the album Donna Hayward would make if she could pursue her musical ambitions: She’d be influenced by Julee Cruise, for sure, and probably Chromatics, and Sky Ferreira, and what could be more Badalamentian than the cloudburst of synth that opens “On Our Knees”? Maybe you feel like you’ve seen this show before, but it’s actually the spooky and charming debut from New York songwriter Cate Osborne, aka Rockie Rode, an unassuming indie-pop record with the aura of a vintage cult classic.
In Rockie’s New York, there is no traffic, every jukebox is stocked with Sharon Van Etten records, and the road to heaven begins with a U-turn to Queens. Osborne produces on…
Charles “Poppy Bob” Walker’s guitar compositions have a liquid, expansive cosmic Americana scope. The notes linger in pellucid backwashes and slide eerily between the known tones. Not much is known about the Yuma-based outsider artist, now apparently deceased, but his work on DOUBLE-WIDE —and on the earlier Dirt Bike Vacation — is a far cry from the usual pickin’ and grinnin’ proficiencies of blues-folk old-timers.
The guitarist and song-hunter Cameron Knowler stumbled on Walker’s work at, of all places, a Texas local library branch. Intrigued enough to track down a sample, Knowler immediately became obsessed with the music, which evokes ambient kosmische players like Chuck Johnson, Luke Schneider, and in some moods, William Tyler.
We always want life to make sense, yet despite our best efforts, it does not. This is the starting point for Asymmetry, which distills a lifetime of thoughts and emotions into 88 keys. Alex Kozobolisis no stranger to such efforts; his seasonal quadrilogy, The Seasons Are Not Four, swept 14 tracks into four quadrants, a tidy project, although as the title indicates, the “real” seasons seep into their neighbors’ yards.
Asymmetry includes wholly original tracks, plus a couple reimaginings; the slightly jazzy tone represents a shift from the composer’s prior works, but a holiday spirit bubbles below; at times the tender notes call to mind Vince Guardini’s classic Peanuts score. As early as opening track “Lost Hours,” one can hear the snow…
…Close to a century ago Virginia Woolf captured duration and sensation in flux in her 1928 novel Orlando in a line Sunik Kim quotes in an essay accompanying her new album, Formenverwandler: “An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second”.
As Kim’s essay explains, Formenverwandler seeks to explore perceptions of time and memory. Spread across two CDs and close to two hours, the album sees dazzling irruptions of electronics test the limits of how much information and variation can be stretched across or condensed into units of time. Where long-form compositions…
Setting aside initial plans for a second chapter of THE HARP, Kety Fusco has forged forward with the full-length BOHÈME. In a remarkable confluence, Iggy Pop (who appears on early single “SHE”) is having a moment, coming off the wild success of Teddybears’ “Punkrocker” from the Superman soundtrack. “SHE” underlines both Fusco’s gothic sensibilities and her efforts to bring the harp into what one might call an alternative mainstream. “The harp is not heard as much,” says Iggy, but one wants it to be; or at least, one wants the harp to be heard in surprising fashion, no longer relegated to the upscale and staid. One can also glean the shift in the video for “BLOW,” which references films such as Friday the 13th and The Blair Witch Project, albeit in…
Now 20 years since the start of the project, The Winter Sounds has an international sensibility and a distinct global vision. Formed by Patrick Keenan in Athens, GA, the group now includes a few European members and has Prague as its home base. The group hasn’t necessarily adopted a world music sound, but instead maintains its roots in indie pop and new wave. Despite this, the band has articulated a global outlook, drawing specifically on the ideas of the solarpunk literary movement, with a focus on grassroots movement toward a sustainable future. With The Winter Sounds’ seventh album, Jupiter, the band puts forth a positive and encouraging message supported by bright and optimistic sounds.
With single “Kaleidoscope,” the album opens…
H.R. Giger (1940-2014) was a surrealist artist known most for his design of the xenomorph from the Alien films and a number of album covers and related artwork for Magma, Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, Celtic Frost, and the Dead Kennedys. A Giger insert in the latter’s Frankenchrist album was the subject of a criminal lawsuit, where members of the Kennedys and several other parties were alleged to have contributed to “distribution of harmful matter to minors” due to the sexual nature of the artwork. The trial ended in acquittal, with the judge recognizing that the piece had at least some artistic merit. This publicity probably led to more people (including teenagers) becoming aware of Giger’s psychosexual works.
But Giger is mostly known for his disturbing…
Doo Dah Nean is an entirely characteristic release from La Musica records, the murky Japanese underground cassette label that’s been around since the ‘90s, occasionally putting out sonically debased bootlegs of artists’ work to make them fit with the noise aesthetic of label founder Asahito Nanjo. Nean was a mysterious trio, consisting of Naoko (vocals), Yui (bass/electronics) and Non (drums) and this was their only album, released in 1996. Few people, least of all Nean themselves, can have expected a reissue on limited-edition vinyl in a gatefold sleeve 20 years later, but here it is, and it’s so eccentric, such an acquired taste – though not an inaccessible one, by the standards of Japanese underground music – that it’s guaranteed to sell out quickly.
Czech guitarist Jakub Šimanský identifies himself with the “American Primitive” genre, evoking in his picking and sometimes in his song titles figures from Fahey and Basho to Rose and Bachmann. He does so with tongue in cheek, though; his previous releases were titled Face to Face Against American Primitivism Vol. 1 and 2. What Do You Mean by That? his third full-length solo release, demonstrates his progress as both a player and a composer. The ten taut tunes, all under five minutes in length, are rich with melody and dazzling fingerpicking. Šimanský reminds us of the inexhaustible potential of just one person and (with one exception) an acoustic guitar.
The focus here is on the six-string. “Knife Thrower,” “Cannoneer,” “Devshirme,” and…
Long-standing U.S. art rock collective Biota releases a new album every few years. Measured Not Found, its first since 2019’s Fragment for Balance, is a woozy and disorienting journey through shimmering and haunting collages that have become the group’s signature sound.
The instrumentation is broad, including clavioline, French horn, prepared music boxes, Hammond organ, guitars, ektara, Fender Rhodes, strumstick, trumpet, bass, piano, synthesizer, harmonica, flute, rubab, pump organ, accordion, kit drums, tabla, biomellowdrone, bent circuits, dumbek, and violin. The most prominent are piano, synthesizer, guitar, and the other stringed instruments. Vocals are present on a handful of tracks.
Unlike any other outfit aside from…
When Crimson Whisper emerged out of the ether in 2024, it was with an EP of synthy, metallic textures, muscular live drums, and gossamer vocals, making for a giddy version of shoegaze that incorporated some dream pop and post-punk vibes. As intangible as their sound was the lack of background on the project. That EP, Flutter, was followed the next year by a mini-album and another EP. The Shelflife label stepped in to give the band their first label release, Flutter & Beautify, a track-for-track compilation of their two EPs. Meanwhile, it was revealed that Crimson Whisper consists of San Francisco-based singer Na Lim and an unnamed member of an “established shoegaze band.” The mysteriousness extended to Beautify, which on occasion incorporated…
The music of BlankFor.ms, aka Tyler Gilmore, emphasises duality, at its core representing both the calm and chaos of everyday life. The Brooklyn-based ambient artist is known for his disruption and manipulation of degraded tape loops, taking a medium which is by definition repetitive and making it unpredictable, shadowing the beats with slow, shifting synths which are sometimes sinister, sometimes glorious.
Gilmore’s 3rd solo album contains audible elements of his 2023 jazz-electronica album Refract, released in collaboration with pianist Jason Moran and drummer Marcus Gilmore. ‘Crail Family Post Office’ is where this is most apparent, with somewhat atonal and seemingly improvised bleeps dotted in rapid succession throughout.
When I Like to Sleep first emerged, the Norwegian instrumental trio’s sound combined polar opposites. Vibraphonist Amund Storløkken Åse, six-string-bass/guitar player Nicolas Leirtrø and drummer Øyvind Leite were all schooled jazz musicians, and they all liked to rock, so they put the two together by combining vibes-forward post-bebop jazz with hammer-of-the-gods riffs.
Ten years and five albums down the road, they’ve filled in that middle space with studio sound manipulation and additional instrumentation. Amplification and effects have transformed the sounds that roll away from Storløkken Åse’s vibraphone from pure waves to sodium-vapor bursts. And he spends as much time playing Mellotron as mallets, a move that’s…
Bliss is the kind of record AI would make if it were actually what its most delusional adherents say it is: Not a pathetic, thought-terminating, and uncanny imitation of human creation but a beguiling alien intelligence capable of wringing new forms out of a near-bottomless archive.
Listening to it, it’s easy to imagine its maker (Alice Gerlach, erstwhile cellist for claire rousay and Tomberlin) as a strange cyborg locked inside a spacious chamber, worming their way through clusters of instruments with preternatural curiosity and mathematical precision. Across four tracks, each clocking in at exactly ten minutes, Gerlach assembles soundscapes from witchy ambient tones, buzzy drones, field recordings of birds chirping and muffled conversations, and…
Marc Sabat is a Canadian composer who was born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada in September 1965. He went to the University of Toronto, where he studied violin, composition and mathematics, completing a BA in 1986. He followed this with a Master’s at the Juilliard School in New York and then two years of string quartet playing in Banff and St. John’s Newfoundland. He has been based in Berlin, Germany, since 1999. Despite that, in 2017, as part of Another Timbres’ Canadian Composers Series, Sabat’s album Harmony was released on the label alongside Linda Catlin Smith, Cassandra Miller and the like.
Sabat is a pioneer of instrumental music written and performed in Just Intonation (JI) and one of a few composers who compose for…
The Nakibembe Embaire Group’s self-titled debut album was one of the highlights of 2023. Nyege Nyege Tapes captured the disappearing East African tradition of the embaire, a giant wooden xylophone designed to be played by as many as eight musicians at a time. The instrument can be the social center of a village, placed in a deep pit to amplify what is already a powerful sound.
On its own, the embaire ensemble generates a huge amount of energy. Repeating, overlapping figures are a kind of proto-minimalism, Steve Reich without the precise, bookish glaze.
…The result is their live collaboration with Japanese live-sound engineer Naoyuki Uchida, Phantom Keys. Six men do their thing on the embaire, while Uchida applies his live-dub…
Described in the press materials as “an outstanding visual artist, a righteous community member, and a kind soul”, Chad Kouri has been absorbing and meditating on music in Chicago and Detroit for decades. His full-length debut album, Mixed, brings together an abundance of inspiration filtered through his lyrical saxophone, combined with field recordings, percussion, and synthesizers to create a unique, deeply felt musical experience.
For Kouri, 15 years of visual art and community work – including commissions from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Art and Design New York, and Adidas, in addition to solo exhibitions and performances in Los Angeles, New York, and Italy – were followed by five years of returning to music practice as…