Annea Lockwood was sitting on the shore of Flathead Lake in Montana with her partner, the composer Ruth Anderson. It was the summer of 1975, and it’d been a couple years since the two fell in love.
Lockwood was, among other things, enamored with the way Anderson’s music could make her feel “so at peace and so part of everything.” A similar phenomenon was happening here — she was soaking in the sounds around her, like the jet skis and motorboats in the distance. She was fascinated by the difference in speed between human activity and, say, a stone striking water, rippling outwards. “What if we could hear all those rhythms,” she wondered, “as one huge rhythm?”
At the heart of her sentiment is a certain…
Category: indie
nagoyaka na kaze / 和やかな風 – (quiet wind): a collection of forward-thinking electronic experiments sourced from central Japan – co-curated by Nagoya artist abentis for Facta & K-LONE’s Wisdom Teeth imprint. The project profiles a close-knit community of music makers operating in and around the Japanese city of Nagoya: one of the country’s most populous and industrial cities, but one all too often overlooked in terms of its cultural significance.
Curated in close collaboration with local scene organiser Yuya Abe – aka abentis – the record seeks to capture the creative energy of a community of artists making hard-to-define, future-facing electronic music away from the clamour of the bigger cities.
1. Caroline Polachek – Look at Me Now
2. Mike Polizze – Cheewawa
3. Royal Trux – Waterpark
4. King Kong – Scooba Dooba Diver
5. Steve Gunn – The Handshake
6. Red Red Meat – Gorshin
7. Oneohtrix Point Never – Krumville
8. The Halo Benders – Virginia Reel Around the Fountain
9. Jessica Pratt – World On a String
10. Kim Gordon – Dirty Tech
11. Viktor Vaughn – Vaudeville Villain
12. Stress Eater – Giving Back to the Universe
13. Sun Ra – Trying to Put the Blame On Me (Live)
14. Sunburned Hand of the Man – Nimbus
15. Kurt Vile – Constant Repeat
“When I was faced with the challenge of writing and recording a new album, I had the choice to stay where I was comfortable, under the sage guidance of a producer or to step out into the dark and produce it myself. It became clear that if I was going to grow in the craft, I needed to become my own lighthouse. So I made the commitment to take on the Producer role. There were a lot of sleepless nights.
Writing Long Wave Home, though no less daunting, became a refuge for me—a place to explore interpersonal connections and the rise and fall of emotions that come with relationships. Writing an album can be very agitating, but it’s a discomfort I am comfortable with. What a gift it is to spend my time examining my inner world…
-1 outside / 24 inside documents collaborations between Zhao Cong and Kevin Corcoran when the two were in Beijing to perform at a series run by Aloe Records. After the show, the two spent an evening recording outside in an underpass below a major bridge on the northeastern stretch of Beijing’s 3rd Ring Road. Then later, they spent an afternoon recording in a studio often used to present shows. Both of these musicians focus on the materiality of sound and the processes of sound creation, delving in to the tiniest detailed textures and timbres of objects they utilize. Zhao is credited with “rotating mobile phone stand, karaoke light, tape recorder, etc.” and Corcoran with “snare drum, objects, and feedback.” But both Zhao and Corcoran are also keenly interested in…
On her latest album, Delphine Dora is concerned with temporality, its pace and pressures it produces. L’ineluctable pulsation du temps finds the French pianist, composer and improviser summoning a gentle collection of piano cycles with drone undertows. The record took shape during a time of intense touring, while Dora was simultaneously busy engaging with writings on acceleration and alienation by Hartmut Rosa, a “sociologist of speed”.
According to Rosa, capitalist societies are programmed for constant economic growth, which forces us into a rat race, approaching the world instrumentally and as a competition. It may sound too esoteric for a German sociologist, but Rosa proposes a different mode of…
The release of Mitski’s concert film The Land and its accompanying live album last autumn consolidated her status as a kind of art-school Taylor Swift: glancingly elusive but still capable of grand emotional spectacle.
Recorded with her live band, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me showcases Mitski’s gift for cutting vintage musical theatre stylings and half-lit Americana with acerbic art-pop, the jaunty list-song ‘Rules’ or the chaotic evil ‘Where’s My Phone?’ almost sharing a theatrical moment with current-day David Byrne.
‘That White Cat’ simmers with jarring anger at parasitic forces who seek to commodify and consume while ‘Dead Women’s disturbing Lana Del Cohen transmission features the lyric…
A project established by two veterans of the Stockholm indie scene to delve into (circa) 1980s inspirations like post-punk, new wave, jangle pop, and indie pop, Salt Lake Alley combined these styles while favoring post-punk on their 2020 full-length debut. While they leaned more heavily into jangle and indie pop with the follow-up, their third album, Always Out of Time, finds them expanding their lineup to four and committing almost fully to a giddy, bittersweet indie pop veiled in shimmer and echo. Members Gustav Tranback, Mikael Carlsson, and later personnel Fredrik Jalker and Thomas Aherne hail from like-minded and not-quite-as-like-minded Swedish acts such as the Honeydrips, the Garlands, and Paper Hearts, among several others.
Until recently, Riya Mahesh’s biography nailed nearly every beat of all-American academic achievement, following a familiar arc from early piano lessons to being crowned prom queen, like Olivia Rodrigo’s well-adjusted Wario. But after hitting a snag and failing to get into Juilliard (happens…), the musician regrouped during the pandemic with a SoundCloud account, a trial run of Logic, and nothing to lose.
As Quiet Light, the Texas-born, Boston-based producer has gone on to release multiple albums of increasingly accomplished art pop, along the way nabbing opening spots for Nilüfer Yanya, Chanel Beads, Ana Roxanne, and Hovvdy. Naturally, she’s managed all this while also powering through medical school.
Having honed his live chops over many years not only as a solo artist, but also with the celebrated groups The Frames and The Swell Season, Glen Hansard is rightly regarded as a masterful live performer. Recorded over two nights last year in Berlin’s Funkhaus – an historic former radio facility – Don’t Settle (Vol 1, Transmissions East) draws from all stages of the singer’s storied career, making for a powerful and spellbinding listen.
The record kicks off with the title track, which builds from atmospheric ballad to stirring rocker, with a notably streak of defiance: “When they pin you to the corner / Pay no need to their dronin’ on”.
Filled with apocalyptic imagery, ‘Down On Our Knees’ is a driving, intense number with echoes of Joy Division, while the haunting…
With their breakthrough hit ‘Into The Valley’ in 1979, Dunfermline, Scotland’s premier export Skids quickly rose to become one of the most respected and popular bands to emerge from the UK punk and new wave era. Founding members Richard Jobson (vocals) and Stuart Adamson (guitars) were a dynamic combination up front (Adamson went on to even greater commercial success when he later founded Big Country) while the band’s tight, taut sound was grounded by William Simpson on bass and first Tom Kellichan and later Mike Baillie on drums.
Always considered up there with the greatest among their peers – The Jam, Siouxsie And The Banshees, and The Stranglers, for example – both singles and albums showcased…
Is there more than mere semantics to the difference between remodeled and remixed? A remix takes the components of an original track, breaks them down and puts them back in a different order. A remodel may also include new components. AGATE is a set of “material refined through repeated performance.” The more Meitei performed pieces from his Kofū trilogy, the more he refined their sound, a process akin to the formation of agate. Three pieces survive the transition from Kofū; one crosses over from Kofū II; and two are remodeled from Kofū III, only six out of thirty-four tracks, plus a new piece that launches the set. The final product extends the discussion on whether there is ever a definitive version of a track; for Meitei, the music evolves with the performer.
Joseph Branciforte & Jozef Dumoulin are kindred spirits, with their musical inclinations leaning towards improvisation, experimentation, and the testing of the limits of musical forms.
Branciforte, based in New York, constructs and produces process-based music – often implementing electronic keyboards – through his prolific label greyfade. Dumoulin, from Belgium, is recognized for his role in redefining the Fender Rhodes electric piano as a 21st-century instrument through extensive electronic manipulation. A chance meeting more than a decade ago led to the two of them recording what would become ITERAE, a record that brings together their passion for imbuing the Rhodes with electronics and processing.
…Alongside an acoustic rendition of album standout “Surviving You,” ‘Nested in Tangles (Deluxe)’ features an extended dance mix of “A Body, A Map,” Mary Lattimore on the newly expanded “Beholden to the Birds Murmuring Above,” as well as a voice and trombone rework of its title track.
Following her critically acclaimed 2024 album Keeper of the Shepherd, composer, vocalist, guitarist, and poet Hannah Frances returns with Nested in Tangles.
…In her winding constructions and gleefully lush arrangements, once again assembled with close collaborator Kevin Copeland, the Vermont-based singer-songwriter evokes many generations of proggy, jazzy indie rock far too sophisticated…
On their self-titled album (and their first recordings for the Thrill Jockey label) North Carolina group Setting takes rustic acoustic sounds into deep space, sitting around a cosmic campfire and creating a group sound that’s naturalistically beautiful and mysterious. The trio of Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund work in both improvisation and composition with stringed instruments, synthesizers, and percussion, landing in a place that’s partially informed by traditional Appalachia, part droning fields of synthesis, and part meditative Krautrock repetition. All of these aspects of Setting’s sound are in play on the album’s opening track “Heard a Bubble.” The nearly nine-minute piece opens with a lonely banjo line, and is quickly joined…
With members from various groups in the Melbourne indie rock underground on board, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that Season 2’s first album, Power of Now, would be a low-key, off-kilter delight. The band – which features drummer Carolyn Hawkins (Parsnip, School Damage, and Chook Race), bassist Charlotte Zarb (the Snakes, Phil & the Tiles), guitarist Matt Powell (also Phil & the Tiles), keyboardist Claudia Serfaty (Stroppies), and guitarist Freya McLeod (herself) – whip through a half-hour of jangling indie pop gems, angular post-punk mood pieces, and jittery bedroom punk rockers along the way to making a record that stands with the best work of the groups they are associated with. The songs are all quite catchy, sometimes in a sideways…
The third solo album by New Orleans D.I.Y. musician Urq (Spllit, W-9), This Dismal Village marks his Exploding in Sound label debut.
It’s his first to be recorded entirely on a four-track cassette Portastudio, almost ditching any digital elements in the process (although some chords from a phone app were looped into “Kings in Bed,” for instance). A dingy, lo-fi blend of playful prog-pop, druggy psychedelia, angular punk, and alternate tunings, it’s a dystopia-themed concept album that travels through time with stops in the Dark Ages, the 1950s, and the present, and each track represents a location in the village. While not recommended for those in a dour or earnest mood, cynicism is welcome.
Inspired by Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have…
The seven-piece psych-rock outfit Evolfo returns with the most relaxed, mind-expanding album of their career, Of Love. The Ridgewood, Queens-based players sifted through hundreds of hours of jams developed in their new studio to piece together the thirteen swirling tracks presented here.
The group, Ben Adams – Guitar, Synthesizer, Vocals, Matthew Gibbs – Guitar, Vocals, Ronnie Lanzilotta – Bass, Dave Palazola – Drums, Kai Sorensen – 12-String Guitar, Rafferty Swink – Keyboards, Sound Manipulation, Vocals, and Jared Yee – Saxophone, took the last few years to build a studio and work out their relaxed, hive mind jamming style. Produced, engineered, and mixed by Swink, Evolfo took full…
Newly remastered version of Oren Ambarchi’s long out-of-print classic Hubris originally released on Editions Mego in 2016. Expertly remastered by audio wizard Joe Talia who worked with the original mixes, highlighting the myriad details of the audio with forensic precision, previously unheard up until now.
Hubris continues the exploration of relentless, driving rhythms heard on Ambarchi’s Sagittarian Domain (2012) and Quixotism (2014). Where those records looked to Krautrock and techno for their starting points, the sidelong opening track here begins from the perhaps unlikely inspirations of disco and new wave, drawing particularly from Ambarchi’s love of Wang Chung’s soundtrack to William Friedkin’s…
Browse the live listings in Tokyo long enough and you’ll inevitably stumble across a party themed around modular synthesizers. Whether it’s an annual event at a multi-level nightclub (Festival Of Modular) or an intimate set at a cozy neighborhood venue (Modular Wednesday at Shibuya Otto), the itinerary remains the same-artists plugging away in the moment, tinkering ad hoc for a live audience.
Ephemeral & Fleeting: Modular Music of Japan celebrates the transient nature of the country’s contemporary modular scene. Curated by accomplished modular artist Yumi Iwaki, these 10 songs are a chronicle of the diverse sonic approaches taken by synthesizer aficionados, and the creative rewards that await those steadfast enough to master…