After a loved one dies, might part of their essence be inscribed in the objects they owned? When the object is as personal as a beloved accordion, the case grows stronger. When a member of Arigto happened upon such an instrument, memories came flooding back: not only of the relative playing but breathing, an act performed not only by the artist, but the instrument. When one hears the lungs of this accordion – the only instrument used here – the impression of breath is so strong that we wrote to receive confirmation. Is this really Arigto (Noah Haußmann and Sebastian Stauß) or a communication from the great beyond? There’s no reason why it cannot be both.
The cover photo is haunting; black-and-white lends itself to such moods, and has been…
Category: ***
“Hypnagogic” is a word that refers to the unique space between sleeping and dreaming, and it’s not surprising that the term has been used to describe the music of Greg Jamie. Hailing from Portland, Maine, Jamie’s music is often an odd, woozy, and unsettling place, but his songs also contain warmth and comfort, as if he’s your guide through a dark place just before dawn. His debut album, Crazy Time, was a seductive, lo-fi gem, and the follow-up, Across a Violet Pasture, covers much of the same territory, but with a broader scope and greater ambition.
Jamie, who sings and plays guitar and synth, is joined primarily by Colby Nathan, who produced the album and also contributes bass, synth, guitar, and vocals (and was also a crucial….
Two years on from the hedonistic rush of their debut, Eades return with a record that trades chaos for clarity.
On Final Sirens Call, their long-anticipated second album, they shed the last remnants of their scrappy post-punk adolescence and step firmly into a more refined, expansive sound – one steeped in Americana-tinged melancholy, mid-90s indie grit and the restless introspection of artists coming to terms with their place in a fractured world. Growth is placed front and centre, as the quintet dive ever deeper into their roots, finding rare solace amidst the shifting earth.
Following 2022’s Delusion Spree – an album that ricocheted through the anxious energies of early adulthood – and 2024’s Fight Or Flight…
Drueling is a first for each of its participants, and quite possibly the world. It is a sequence of improvised duets between two shahi baaja players, Turner Williams Jr. and Derek Monypeny. Neither had jammed with a like-equipped player before, and if there’s another record of one, it’s flying below the radar of readily available search engines. So, let’s just say that this LP is the first, and if a genre is to ensue, it’s off to a good start.
Monypeny is based in California, where he’s carved out a solo career playing desert-kissed electric music on guitar and shahi baaja following early involvement with the groups Alto and Oaxacan, as well as membership in Sir Richard Bishop’s Freak of Araby band. Williams is an Alabama-born visual and musical artist who has played…
1905 gave the world the concert premiere of Claude Debussy’s La Mer. 1905 was also the date of an Austrian ethnographic expedition to Papua New Guinea that brought back sound recordings from the island.
120 years later, London-based DJ Nkisi (Melika Ngombe Kolongo) used those recordings as part of the fuel for her latest outing, Anomaly Index: 40 minutes of acoustic imperfections, club beats, and traces of the music that a few pre-1910 expeditions attempted to document. Suffice it to say, this sounds nothing like La Mer.
Nkisi is known for throwing wildly disparate influences into the pot. She has roots in Central Africa and has drawn on ethnographic material before. Performing in clubs, the beats…
There are artists who treat solo albums as side notes, and there are those who seize the chance to excavate new terrain. With Taproots, Robin Richards, principal composer of Manchester’s idiosyncratic art-pop band Dutch Uncles, delivers a record that feels less like a digression and more like a statement of intent. If Dutch Uncles built their reputation on angular pop exuberance, Richards’ debut long-player re-roots him in a more contemplative, exploratory soil: part electronic meditation, part modern classical suite, part intimate diary.
Richards is no stranger to ambitious projects. With Dutch Uncles, he helped shape six albums that earned comparisons to Talking Heads for their wiry rhythms and brainy exuberance.
Phantasmagoria: A bizarre or fantastic combination; a constantly shifting, complex succession of things seen or imagined. These definitions wholly encapsulate the circumstances that shaped the narrative structure and exquisite tonal palette coursing through Ani Glass’s thrilling second LP. Its long-awaited arrival ends a five-year gap since the Welsh-Cornish artist released her critically acclaimed solo debut, Mirores, a momentous milestone in her career that was unfortunately usurped by a benign brain tumour diagnosis. Glass’s latest material, on which her production style demonstrates great growth, is a sumptuous synth-pop meditation on processing that traumatic period whilst untangling the experiences and emotions that steered her to…
Morton Feldman‘s composition “Intermission 6” dates from 1953, and is considered to be one of his most open, indeterminate piano works. Its score comprises a single page on which there are fifteen events — single notes or chords — which can be played in any order by one pianist or two. According to Feldman’s writing, “The pianist or pianists begin with any sound on the page, will hold until barely audible, then proceed to whichever other sound he/she/they may choose. Sounds may be repeated.” The music on this version of “Intermission 6” was all played by Finnish pianist Antti Tolvi and was recorded in Westers, Kiila, Finland, on 21st October 2024.
Feldman’s writing and music for “Intermission 6” are reminiscent of various other issues.
The star of Trio Ramberget‘s self-titled sixth album isn’t Trio Ramberget, but a “fourth player”, a big oil cistern on the island of Svanö, Sweden, in which the album was recorded. While it’s unclear how many people can fit in such a cistern, while listening, one yearns for the live experience; such is the gorgeous reverberation, the echo, the decay.
Released on New Year’s Day, Trio Ramberget is perfectly suited to the sprawl of deep winter and the contemplations of a new year. There are no markers in the slow, six-part suite, which flows together as one, although the tone changes subtly from piece to piece: for example, the peering into a higher register in the second part. The trombone, bass clarinet and double bass find themselves in conversational territory with…
Intrinsically entwined with the landscapes of Hokkaido, Japan, Whispers of the Distant Past is a meditation on transience and nostalgia. Yuki Aizawa’s first physical release acts as a vessel to preserve and reflect on the fading vestiges of childhood. This emotional core is rooted in Aizawa’s memories of vast fields of lavender in Furano, an endless purple horizon acting as a calming yet melancholic backdrop to the passing of time.
The soundscapes of Whispers of the Distant Past were built through the intricate layering of guitar volume and feedback swells. Aizawa then sculpted the resulting textures into living spaces using a variety of treatments and effects, flecked with field recordings of rivers and wildlife captured…
…digital release with 7 bonus songs.
Congolese guitarist, composer and singer Dr. Nicolas Kasanda wa Mikalayi, aka Docteur Nico, reigned supreme during the ’60s and ’70s as a key innovator of African rumba.
This three-LP package includes 30 of his songs, from the African Fiesta Sukisa catalogue, featuring hits, never-before-reissued recordings and bonus tracks available digitally via Bandcamp, alongside a 28-page booklet containing expert commentary and previously unpublished photos from the Kasanda family archive.
The music testifies to Dr. Nico’s technical virtuosity and adventurous creative control of the African Fiesta band. A heavy Cuban sway drives songs like ‘A la Savana’, ‘Alto Songo’,…
Violin is a site of adventure for Darragh Morgan. The Irish violinist performs compositions that unite the instrument’s sweet acoustic timbre with electronics, enhancing and warping its sound. His 2017 record, For Violin and Electronics, first presented this interest through six icy meditations. On For Violin and Electronics II, he follows that experiment with nine more pieces that showcase the versatility of this instrumentation through the eyes of nine different composers.
Uniting strings and electronics isn’t a new concept, but it’s one that continues to offer plenty of leeway for expanding the possible textures and timbres of age-old instruments like the violin. Groundbreaking works like Steve Reich’s Violin Phase, for example, brought the potential of…
Labeling any music as spiritual can play as a (fiery) double-edged sword for any artist involved, and if that is your debut full-length album, like is the case with Brooklyn’s multi-media artist AnAkA, and her album Crisis of the Concrete, those edges just might get a bit sharper, and those edges might spew just a bit more fire either way.
Of course, that spiritual element that the artist might be trying to evoke could have more or less openly religious content (less in AnAkA case here), and it can involve a number of musical elements and/or genres, and AnAkA certainly goes that multi-genre route here. Very often, the best music with that spiritual element was done with quite a few jazz elements, and AnAkA certainly doesn’t shy away from bringing them in,…
Golden Toad is the solo project of Al Brown, former co-creator of indie-psychers Japanese Television. He’s also made music videos for the likes of UNKLE, Lambrini Girls, Idles, and Deap Vally.
His solo debut Unite the Worms happens to be released twenty years after the extinction declaration of the Costa Rican Golden Toad, the last confirmed sighting of which occurred all the way back in 1989. This Golden Toad, however, decided to hole himself up in a garage in the Garden of England last summer and set about concocting a psychedelic passage through shifting time, riding kosmische grooves and electronic festoonery along the way.
You can picture Al Brown, hunched over his guitar, lost in the hammer ons of eighth…
Kaikō is the second album by Treen, a young band of younger improvisers who come from different places in Europe. Despite their youth and spontaneous methods, they have a very particular sound, one that is aware of the music’s history but not burdened by it. You could say that the trio comes from Copenhagen, since that’s where they first convened in 2023, but only one of them lives there. That would be Gintė Preisaitė, a Lithuanian musician who plays electronics in some contexts, but sticks to piano in Treen. Tenor saxophonist Amalie Dahl is Danish, but she lives in Norway. Although she’s currently based in Oslo, she studied in Trondheim and most of her other ensembles include players with Trondheim roots. And drummer Jan Philipp is from…
Arriving two years after Women, which found the quasi-instrumental psych rock combo expanding their nostalgic, style-shifting sound with string arrangements and guest vocals, Pur Jus is so named because it gets back to basics.
Inspired by near constant touring, the album was entirely written, performed, recorded (live in the studio), and mixed by the Bergen, Norway-based trio, using only guitars (Øyvind Blomstrøm), bass (Chris Holm), drums and percussion (Kim Åge Furuhaug), keyboards (Blomstrøm and Holm), and the occasional vocals. The results may be less diverse and dramatic than their predecessors by comparison, but grooves and chill-out feels are still in plentiful supply.
The album kicks things off with a drum fill…
Working with some musical legends and renowned musicians (often both) can be a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you not only gain specific experience, but it means you have capabilities and are doing something right. On the other hand, when you have to go on your own and present your individually conceived music, it might be a burden if you are not able to come up with something that is at least above average.
That could have possibly been a burden for L.A. vocalist Holly Palmer, whose long list of artists she has worked with includes David Bowie, Gnarls Barkley, Seal, Michael Buble, Billy Preston and Dr. Dre. So far, Palmer has recorded three solo albums, with Metamorphosis being her fourth.
Whatever Palmer, who is also a vocologist…
Leo Chadburn’s Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator is a dream: a deep immersion in another world that is like and unlike our own, described through abandoned landscape, wrecked machines and lost purpose. The dream is here and now, a post-industrial Britain inspired by Chadburn’s East Midlands home town, marked by the closed power stations and coal mines, retreating back to the land and back to the future.
Chadburn is an acclaimed composer who has released several solo albums, including as Simon Bookish. Sleep… is powered by his narration, words murmured into a microphone like the latest of late night radio: the spirit of Chris Morris’ Blue Jam and Delia Derbyshire’s Inventions for Radio. Around his soft, insistent voice, layers of sound…
The title As Human carries a multitude of meanings. What is it like to be human, or to pass as human? At what juncture might one lose or gain one’s humanity? The Chicago band calls the title track “a meditation on vulnerability and the small triumphs that come with choosing to feel, even when it hurts.” The Color of Cyan paints with a wide swath of moods, plumbing the depths of human experience and exploring its potential heights.
Eduardo Cintron’s striking cover image is available separately on t-shirts and linoleum block prints; the vinyl is offered in red-and-white variants. The rich red hues prompt the listener to imagine lifeblood flowing and spilled, even before the record is spun. (For those who are curious, cyan was incorporated into the cover art…
It’s all blurring together. Ambient is emo now. Rap sounds like harsh noise. Drum’n’bass is basically bedroom pop. And Ben Bondy, who until now has primarily dealt in disorientingly dubby ambient music, has emerged with something resembling a singer/songwriter album, but not quite. Bondy, a New York/Berlin-based producer who’s made a name as part of the latter’s cozy Kwia collective, has built a sprawling body of work across a number of labels representing the bleary haze of the left-field electronic underground. West Mineral Ltd., 3XL, Motion Ward, Quiet Time — if they deal in grainy, dissociative soundscapes, Bondy has probably released something for them. Across his scattered releases and DJ sets, Bondy’s demonstrated a voracious, shapeshifting…