Does 50 minutes of heady and chaotic free jazz appeal to you? Good. James McKain, Damon Smith, and Weasel Walter are here to help.
Recorded late last year, …seeing the way the mole tunnels… consists of wailing and screeching sax from McKain, scrapes, harmonics, and percussive strikes on the double bass from Smith, and Walter’s signature punk / prog improv. The trio moves at such a frenetic pace that even the downtempo passages are restless, textural, and full of ideas.
McKain extracts gritty textures and flutters from the lower register saxes, which couples well with Walter’s mix of blast beats, rolls, and fills. Indeed, all three musicians could be thought of as soloing collectively in a fashion that is curiously complementary. Harmonic and melodic…
Category: ***
One of many bands to have explored the country’s more perilous frontiers of DIY culture, Brighton-based bass & drum sludge-punk-noise-rock duo Human Leather finally slam their fury down on tape with their long-awaited debut album, Here Comes the Mind, There Goes the Body. An album that underlines the world’s incessant failures, Human Leather don’t mince their words, rightfully pissed off and unafraid to tells us about it.
The tripwire tension between the two-piece assault team of Amée Chanter and Thomas Close is like a calcified ball of bile and rage. Renowned for their intense live shows, so often the sharp-edged ferocity of a band’s live performance is blunted between the studio walls. Not the case here, however, and it’s thanks to…
Postulate soundtracks a shattered life, mixed and strewn beneath your feet. The album vibrates with menace, as if every track were cut from the same glass that explodes outward in the poem accompanying it. “To your fear, another is added — the fear of windows. / Your transparent, imagined shield has become a weapon of entropy, / tense and ready to kill, / piercing your fragile flesh with a thousand fragments. / Stay away from windows. / Better to move through corridors. / Remember the rule of two walls.” Ujif_notfound transforms this fear into a sonic condition, a landscape where transparency is a lie and safety is an illusion. The record refuses mediation or softening; it is angry, unfiltered, and unapologetic, and it has earned the right to be so. Every sound here is…
A recording consisting solely of the sound of water droplets? As the practice of field recordings continues to expand and extend in to multiple forms of music, that notion is not as odd as it once might have seemed. But this reissue of Shizukutachi by Japanese sound artist Masaaki Takano confounds categorization. Takano began his career in the 1950s developing sound effects for stage, film and broadcasting and working as a recording engineer at music studios. By the 1970s he moved away from sound effects and began performing using self-made sound instruments and collecting field recordings of natural sounds. These two practices intersect in Shizukutachi, his first release from 1978. The project was inspired by a Japanese garden ornament and sound…
To parse the logic of Sex Mad, one must first inhabit the isolation of 1985 Victoria, British Columbia: a provincial capital where middle-class security doubled as a picturesque cemetery for the newly wed and nearly dead. Here, as the looming artifice of Expo 86 threatened to modernize the coast, the Pacific horizon acted as a literal dead-end and the Wright brothers’ basement as a laboratory. While the global hardcore scene was calcifying into a thudding caricature – The Exploited’s gurning pantomime merging with the metal-hocked bluster of the US crossover set – Rob and John Wright were busy deconstructing the very physics of the power trio.
When guitarist Andy Kerr completed the circuit, internal pressure reached a critical mass.
Do you need a sensitivity to divine forces to be drawn into Nilza Costa’s new album? Not necessarily. But it does require a willingness to listen to music that resists explanation. Nilza Costa is a Brazilian singer and songwriter from Salvador de Bahia, now based in Italy. Her new album revolves around cantigas – sacred songs from the African diaspora – sung in Yoruba, Kimbundu and Brazilian Portuguese. These songs function as direct invocations of the orishas: spiritual entities that, in traditions such as Candomblé and Santería, connect human life with nature, history, and the divine. Rather than presenting this tradition from the outside, the album positions itself within it, as a continuation in sound.
Costa’s voice anchors the album. It carries…
For the front cover of his fifth solo album for Home Normal, Wil Bolton‘s opted for something a little more unsettling than the usual kind of bucolic imagery favoured by ambient practitioners. Shot by Bolton, the grainy photo shows a building structure on the left and on the right the upper part of a dome, its distinctive shape initially suggesting it could be an observatory. However, upon learning that the recording merges synthesizers (Buchla, Nord Wave) with “environmental sounds, radio waves, and found objects” collected by him along the Suffolk coast, the interpretation shifts as the locale is home to a nuclear power station, specifically the Sizewell B nuclear reactor. That one of the seven track titles is “Reactor Dome Haze” would seem to lend further…
Contemporary composers working with just intonation tend to have an affinity for early music, when Pythagorean tuning was mainstream and before equal temperament became the standard. Léo Dupleix is no exception, and he takes the connection one step further, putting the harpsichord at the center of much of his music.
Round Sky is Dupleix’s latest, a close cousin of his 2024 release, Resonant Trees. Both albums place the composer’s harpsichord within a small chamber ensemble including flute, guitar, and in the case of Round Sky, double bass. (Resonant Trees called for clarinet and viola instead of bass). Dupleix also plays analogue synthesizer, a color that is particularly central to the longest piece on the new album, the nearly 20-minute…
Back in the early nineties, when Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine came up with their Loveless album, they practically broke the back of Creation Records, which soon after went bankrupt. Yet, nobody at the time envisioned what kind of influence that album would have decades after its initial release.
Its ripple effects keep washing up on listeners to this day, and the latest proof comes in the form of Come Back Down, the new album by Nashville (yes, that Nashville) duo Total Wife. It is too easy to say that Luna Kupper and Ash Richter, who comprise Total Wife, are just ‘simple’ fans of MBV and all things that were good about the original shoegaze for two reasons.
First of all, following in the footsteps of…
Bug Teeth’s debut full-length arrives softly, building and scrutinising loss down to its fine veins, even as it gazes upward to the skies.
With a title drawn from Robert Hooke’s 17th-century scientific text magnifying the minutiae of living forms, Micrographia zeroes in on the subtleties of grief, familial memory and the burden of loving someone who is gone.
At the heart of the album is the rupture of PJ Johnson’s life when their mother died suddenly in 2021 which left them unmoored and desperate to make sense of the absence. “Tapeworm” questions if her mother would prefer no children if she were to live her life over, “With time again would you give it up / A sacrifice / Would you give me up?” It’s a crippling place to begin.
Formed in 2020, toso toso is made up of producer, drummer, and sound designer Kabir Adhiya-Kumar; synth and keyboardist Rahul Carlberg; producer and guitarist Celia Hill; and interdisciplinary artist Isabel Crespo Pardo, the group’s vocalist and wordsmith.
Essentially a wide-ranging supergroup of left-field solo acts from across a plethora of musical forms as classical pianists sit beside sound designers and improvisational vocalists, toso toso forge these disparate crafts into something dense, emotional and properly distinctive on their self-titled debut album.
Opener ‘cLAcLAcLA’ serves as a microcosm of the record; bounding out in a flurry of micro-sampled chaos, like the contents of your…
In 2024, Georgia-based guitarist, composer, and improviser Shane Parish released Repertoire, an album of 14 covers on solo acoustic guitar. The songs were mostly from forward-thinking jazz composers – Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, among others – along with interpretations of songs by the likes of the Minutemen, Captain Beefheart, and Aphex Twin thrown in for good measure. The result is a gorgeous puzzle of acoustic recordings that brought together unique compositions interpreted by a fearless soloist.
Now, with Solo at Café OTO, Parish has created something of a companion piece, swapping out the acoustic guitar for a Squier Telecaster electric, and covering a variety of compositions…
Dinamarca has a soft spot for vocalists. In 2019, he invited a host of artists to perform vocals on his LP Sol De Mi Vida, then went on to record a reggaeton EP with Bay Area singer La Favi, a trap single with rising Chilean rapper AKRIILA, and now this hyperpop/reggaeton hybrid with Ángel Ballesteros — lead singer of pop-perreo trio Meth Math. Earlier Dinamarca productions would have spoken to the hard and fast dembow of Meth Math tracks like “Mermelhada” from their last LP Chupetones, which was co-produced by Nick León. But as of 2018, Dinamarca has been kneading out the harder edges of his reggaeton rattle into something generally mellower and happier. His first foray with Meth Math leaned towards trap, while his solo debut album soñao pulled…
Equipment Pointed Ankh is a truly bizarre collective. While the profile of Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band has risen precipitously over the last few years, the same gang of adventurers has continued to make strange, colorful, mostly instrumental music as Equipment Pointed Ankh behind the scenes — of which Eggs a Little Late is the latest taste. It sounds as though this fresh batch of music has been influenced by the collective’s recent recording and touring experiences as The Roadhouse Band, stirring in more honky-tonk, country-rock influences, and it’s certainly more accessible than their last couple of efforts, 2023’s excellent From Inside the House and Downtown!
The clearest throughline from past EPA recordings is the two spoken-word pieces,…
Spinnen (“Spiders”) is the Munich-based duo of Sophie Neudecker (drums/vocals) and Veronica “Katta” Burnuthian (bass/keyboards/vocals), and although this is technically their debut album, they have been active in Munich’s experimental noise-rock scene for some time, working alongside groups like Friends of Gas. Pushing the spider theme, they say this album consists of two body parts (i.e. side one and side two) and eight legs (songs), but this is just a witty way of pointing out that Warmes Licht (“Warm Light”) is, structurally, entirely conventional. The music, too, is far more accessible than you might expect, with eight disciplined songs, the longest under six minutes long and the shortest just one minute and forty-four seconds. But the relative…
…The long-standing duo of percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys, hereafter GBSR and augmented here by flautist Taylor MacLennan, offers Morton Feldman’s homage to his erstwhile artistic comrade Guston, along with Why Patterns? (1978) and Crippled Symmetry (1983) in a wonderfully annotated six-disc set commensurate with the label’s other Feldman and Cage boxes, for which all involved have been justly lauded. The label has made a specialty of these two composers who are, clumsily and too often, still associated with the New York School, a designation that does the individuality of their work no justice. It is, however, music for which performance traditions are still in formation, making these sets doubly important for the deep dives…
Spectralism is a type of composition that is organized by taking as its basis aspects of the harmonic series, or the overtones resulting from a sounding pitch. From the ’70s onward, composers, many of them residing in France or Romania, have looked at spectrograms of sounds to plot out the harmonies that they will deploy over time in a piece. This may sound rarified, but it is also one of the oldest traditions in music. Early humans listened for resonances, particularly in caves, some even using conch shells (brought in from many miles away) to create loud enough sounds to hear lots of reverberating overtones. Throat singers manipulate their voices to sound more than a single pitch at a time. If you have ever heard a bunch of higher sounds…
The last few years have been a resounding celebration of club music from Latin America and its diaspora. The rise of TraTraTrax. The virality of DJ Ramon Sucesso and DJ K. The dizzying reggaetón, techno, cumbia and electro hybrids from Miami. Critic Shawn Reynaldo has called it a “Latin Music Gold Rush”.
This excitement by punters and the press, however, obfuscates one important fact: Central and South America, plus the Caribbean, has a long, elaborate history of bangers.
These regions have produced some of the best dance music in recent decades, including hardgroove, afterhours techno and Latin house. This has been the argument long pushed by Chile-born, Brazil-based Valesuchi, a staunch…
…remastered 40th Anniversary Edition originally recorded and mixed by the lauded British sound engineer Ian Burgess.
One of the first major bands on the Chicago punk scene, the Effigies arrived as first-era punk was being supplanted by hardcore, but their sound reflected little of either. The band was less interested in speed than impact: their songs were simple but intelligently constructed, their lyrics were angry but artful meditations on urban alienation with shout-along choruses, and their performances were muscular and made clever use of dynamics with the guitars grinding and slashing. The Effigies’ influence in the Midwest (especially in their hometown) was significant, and one can hear the faint echo of their early work…
The latest volume in Bulbous Monocle’s Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 reissue campaign vaults over the Matador years back to the band’s earliest LP. Tangle was released in 1989, prior to TFUL282’s years of rigorous touring.
It’s a first album; you can hear styles engaged and influences acknowledged in a partially digested manner that differs from their later years, when, if they wanted to sound like something, they just covered the song.
There’s a deep vein of blues and western guitar, most evident on the slow, sinister groove of “Cold Cold Ground,” but also audible on the twangy lead guitar of “Sister Hell” and the languid slide intro to “Choke.” The band works a few Sonic Youth moves into the mix as well, like…