There’s an affectation that courses through certain parts of the musical fringe, where an artist or group’s oft-used descriptors perfectly capture what the listener might be in for. In that, they mirror the best of kitschy B-movies. There’s little doubt what films with titles like Attack of the Crab Monsters or The Blob might give you. So it goes for Houston, Texas duo Ak’chamel, Giver of Illness. The group, who have never revealed their identity, have spent years building out one of the most singular catalogues in experimental music, a strange and enthralling fusion of found sound, psychedelia, neo-folk and the deepest, eeriest recesses of the avant-garde. And their tagline of “Fourth World post-colonial cultural cannibalism” is about as faithful as an indicator can get…
Category: alternative folk
The music of Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński and Slovenian multi-instrumentalist Iztok Koren (Širom) finds its fullest expression as a practice of attentive, high-resolution listening. In a world of overstimulation, Nocturnal Consolations operates through a logic of reduction. Intensification emerges at the point of sharpening. Every gesture, every vibration of a string, every resonant surface exists in suspension. Meanings arise only through the relations between sounds.
The idiom developed by Rogiński reaches an almost crystalline form here, best exemplified in ‘The Spirit Is Becoming a Desert’. His playing has long oscillated between reconstruction and erosion, drawing on traditions (Jewish nigunim, Middle Eastern music, and broadly…
In parts of Southern Italy, the separation between music and everyday life has only grown, as traditions have been flattened and “folklorized” into postcard versions of themselves. On their self-titled debut, Palermo collective Lero Lero push against that logic. Drawing from 20th-century Sicilian sound archives, they treat this material not as something to safeguard, but something to work through, asking what it means to inherit a tradition that has been interrupted or distorted.
Alessio Bondì, Donato Di Trapani, and Fabio Rizzo pull from agropastoral songs, laments, lullabies, and canti di sdegno, holding onto their emotional weight while driving them into new terrain. Though their process starts at the source — learning the songs, the shapes of the melodies,…
“Willie o’ Winsbury” is a traditional English folk ballad about a king who spares his daughter’s lover because said lover is a pretty man. But when Irish composer, sound designer, and performance artist Aoibhín Redmond, aka NIMF, borrowed a bit of the tune for her album Sirenoscape, she took it in a much darker, more nebulous direction.
The centuries-old melody makes a brief appearance as the album opens, played by a calling trumpet amongst howling winds and seafaring atmospherics — but then Redmond slowly but surely breaks apart every preexisting sonic element into stirring ambient layers that fold, morph, crystallize, and shatter across four distinct, extended musical “scenes.” The result is an album that feels almost defined like a narrative story…
Formlessness comes in many forms. There is a loose category of music that seems to shift without any noticeable movement, that gathers in dark pools or drifts in gaseous clouds, and we tend to call that music ‘ambient’. But ambient covers a lot of ground these days: beatless music often displays psychedelic or folk influences, elements of musique concrete, field recording or free improvisation. It’s less a genre and more a kind of abstract moodboard, and as such its practitioners are sometimes guilty of a lack of focus, of throwing too much at the wall, or else too little.
But in the right hands, it can be incredibly potent. Gayle Brogan, the mastermind behind Pefkin, understands the fluidity and adaptability of ambient music better than most. A prolific…
In January of last year, Dagmar Zuniga uploaded her debut album to YouTube. By the serendipitous workings of the algorithm-perhaps boosted by the cryptic title and album art in filth your mystery is kingdom/far smile peasant in yellow music took off with surprising speed; within months, she’d hit hundreds of thousands of views and was touring with Mount Eerie. Comment sections and message boards couldn’t contain her, and now in filth is seeing a much-deserved official release through experimental indie powerhouse AD 93.
Zuniga’s songs are alluring largely thanks to their otherworldly patina: simple compositions built around voice, guitar, and synth, filtered through tape hiss so they feel like alien transmissions. (In reality, the songs were captured between…
Gloom, glorious gloom, permeates the musical catalogue of singer-songwriter Fågelle (Klara Andersson), and new album Bränn min jord overflows with it. There are screams, cries, and field recordings. There is a sense throughout that we are swinging between mourning and desperation. Most importantly, there is Fågelle, coolly confident and unpredictable as a composer and performer. Even in the record’s most sedate moments, there is always something simmering within her. As Bränn min jord moves from start to finish, it’s thrilling to find out what those somethings are and how they burst forth from the depths of Fågelle’s mind to the sonic surface.
As the album begins, it is slow, stark. Beneath a sparse piano line and Fågelle’s tense…
Connor Armbruster excels at reinvention. The multi-instrumentalist based in Troy, New York, has released numerous albums over the past several years that tackle a wealth of styles and themes. Phonehenge (2019) was a folk concept album about technology. Masses (2022) consisted of a solo violin recorded in the sanctuary of an empty church. Can I Sit Here (2024) tackled distortion and noise rock. He even released an EP last year, Bednight Snack, consisting entirely of traditional songs he regularly sang to his daughter.
Now, with Half My House, Armbruster tackles traditional Irish music, a somewhat more conventional release, but still imbued with the grace and skill he’s known for.
Joining Armbruster (who sings, plays violin,…
Saputjiji, the new album from Tanya Tagaq, opens with a series of blood-curdling screams. “Fuck war,” she bellows, over and over, delivering each word with the seismic force of an Arctic cryoseism. Tagaq’s paroxysm of fury is brutally cathartic — a vicious rebuke to the widespread moral apathy and cowardice of our current moment, from tepid protest songs to mealy-mouthed pleas to keep politics out of art. As missiles rain death from the sky across the Middle East, her words are a galvanizing blast of icy wind, stinging our eyes and forcing them to adjust their focus.
This is, of course, completely on brand for Taqag, a multidisciplinary Inuk artist whose work has always been grounded in radical politics, and whose art has always coursed with…
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…
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…
Athens, Georgia, guitarist Shane Parish isn’t one to shy away from a challenge (he transcribed the whole of Bill Orcutt’s Music for Four Guitars and plays as one of the Orcutt quartet), and his output is always something special, as 2024’s Repertoire, another album demanding some serious arrangement work, demonstrated. However, for his latest album, Autechre Guitar, he takes on the music of English electronic duo Autechre, an outfit known for its unconventional time signatures and experimental approach, which is a tricky task, to say the least.
Seemingly unwilling to disappoint his wife, who is a big fan of Autechre’s music, Shane set out to re-imagine and arrange ten of the band’s songs, all taken from their 1990s output.
Divided by Dusk is a mysterious, otherworldly album that sounds like a folktale and feels like walking into the forest just as the sun is setting, not knowing what wonders may await. Will one encounter enchanting creatures, gypsy caravans, a traveling circus ~ or the simple magic of fox and bear, moonlight and stream?
Inspired by trips to Japan yet informed by her native Poland, Magda Drozd casts her spell with violin, field recordings, electronics and voice, with Japanese flutist Rai Tateishi entering the forest as the sun disappears behind the trees, merging both sonic worlds.
The violin’s opening notes are already reverberant, echoes wafting through the pines, caught in a strange vortex. A hum falls…
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…
Imagine you were a collector of folk songs in 1970s Kyiv, a student at the Conservatory, and a member of the Leninist Youth League (obligatory if you wanted easier access to higher ed). Coming back from weekend expeditions to rural villages, you would deposit your field recordings in the archive, but not before you edited them — excising references to gods, Christian or otherwise, or songs too tragic for the Communist Party, which expected optimism from the folk. Composers in the Conservatory might draw from your collections and adapt them for the saccharine folklore ensembles sponsored by the Soviet state.
Imagine you wanted to sing like the women you heard in the village, with the full gritty materiality of your body, even though…
You might think you’re busy, but are you busy like Arnold de Boer of Zea? In addition to being the Ex’s mouthpiece for the past decade and a half, he’s been the singer, guitarist, songwriter, booker, driver, etc., of Zea for 31 years. Throughout that time, the project has continually morphed, operating as a one-man show, a stylistically chameleonic ensemble and a multi-continental, collaborative endeavor that often projects its messages in more than one tongue.
In Lichem Fol Beloften (“a body filled with promises”) is sung entirely in Frisian, the language spoken in de Boer’s northern Netherlands neck of the woods. He wrote some of the lyrics, taking others from poems translated into the dialect. If you get the CD or LP editions,…
Ten years ago, La Tène released their first record, then as a trio with Cyril Bondi, d’Incise, and Alexis Degrenier. A decade, four albums, and multiple collaborations later, the group returns with Moreïne/Déclives — an album that feels as much like a celebration as it does an upheaval. True to its identity, La Tène continues to explore the cracks between tradition and experimentation, between hypnotic drone and repeated gestures, but this time they choose to move onto new ground: the hurdy-gurdy, the group’s emblematic instrument since the very beginning, disappears in favor of a stripped-down setup centered on two electronic percussions and live dub work.
It proves very difficult to tell what is electronic and what isn’t on La Tène’s cavernous and…
Greet, the songwriting project of Matthew Broadley, seems to have a direct line to the weird and the uncanny. Broadley is based in Leeds, a city of half a million people that has developed a reputation for producing musicians with an affinity for desolate and wild landscapes (see also Phil and Layla Legard’s projects, Hawthonn and Xenis Emputae Travelling Band). I Know How to Die is Greet’s debut, and as its title suggests, it is primarily concerned with the darker, doomier corners of traditional music. The album cover’s typeface hints at some kind of pagan darkwave or celtic black metal, and the photography carries the tang of Gallows Pole-style folk horror, and there are elements of all of these things contained within, but the most prominent feature…
If you thought Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal evoked the feeling of deepest winter, you should check out this beautifully odd and solitary project from Arkansas-based multi-instrumentalist Chaz Knapp to hear how it’s really done. Chaz is a traditional instrumentalist and field recorder, whose Microfolk series highlighted him as a musical collagist. Winter Music contrasts Microfolk (which was recorded in the summer heat) in that Chaz took his instruments to various locations in the rugged terrain of Northwest Arkansas in the depths of winter, recording with tape loops and improvisations while his fingers froze and his nylon string guitar neck shrank in the cold.
The result is something of a remote and isolated audio diary, as much documenting…
Kelby Clark is an LA-by-way-of-Georgia banjo player who blends divergent styles and approaches to forge his own novel direction for the instrument. Over a series of mostly self-released home-spun recordings from the past five or so years, he has honed his approach, expanding the traditions of his point of origin in the American south to include free improvisation and eastern modalities — an alchemy familiar to Sandy Bull, a fellow stretcher of the vocabulary of the banjo and of the concept of “folk” and the traditional. His sparse and appropriately fiery new LP Language of the Torch represents a significant milestone in his development of his own science of the banjo, a statement of intent for his artistic practice.
…Across the seven searching pieces that…