At nearly 40 years old Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders) remains one of Coil’s trippiest and most ludic sets, beloved for its febrile fusion of field recordings (a drunken brass band in Mexico; a Muay Thai boxing arena) with a malfunctioning Fairlight synth and the pair’s homoerotic, eccentric energies. In the grand scheme of their catalogue ‘Gold…’ marks a line in the sand between their earliest work and the new decade advance of ‘Love’s Secret Domain’, a groundbreaking LP and huge influence on everyone from Æ to NIN, Surgeon and the electronic music at large. In key with a slew of posthumous Coil releases over the past decade, the remastered versions now better backlight the vastness of their sound, revealing ‘Gold…’ among their sexiest and most seductive.
Category: experimental
There are few more distinctive artists in contemporary music than Kali Malone. She is a conservatoire-trained composer whose work pushes the edges of electroacoustics, drone, and minimalism — the kind of music that feels most naturally at home in the lofty institutions of high culture. And yet she has achieved a type of crossover success that few art music figures have managed in the 21st century, winning fans among the indie and experimental rock communities on top of the more traditional constituencies of such uncompromising composition.
This diverse audience has not been attracted by film soundtracks, media placements, or glitzy celebrity commissions, the familiar routes to wider exposure for many contemporary…
Prolific musical collaborator and tireless rhythm generator Valentina Magaletti rarely seems to rest. But, even for her, this has been a particularly busy month. No doubt as much due to the logistical necessities of release schedules as the movement of the stars or artistic intention, October has already seen new albums from two of Magaletti’s other projects: Vanishing Twin (Archives) and Holy Tongue (Basilikum). Hard on their heels Parallel Commutator is the latest from CZN, a team-up with Portuguese percussionist, sculptor and gong-maker João Pais Filipe.
Potentially this release could be a little over- shadowed by the others. In their individual ways Holy Tongue and Vanishing Twin both head outwards into their soundworlds from roots…
Michael Gordon‘s Field of Vision transforms percussion into an expansive study of resonance, rhythm, and spatial perception. Written in 2022 for 36 percussionists and commissioned by the Caramoor Center for the Arts, the work uses specially constructed tuned instruments alongside industrial metals, wood, gongs, bass drums, and 24 brake drums. Performed by the University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble under Doug Perkins, this world-premiere recording captures a composition in which the physical arrangement of the players is as important to the musical experience as the sounds they produce.
The opening section establishes Gordon’s approach gradually, with sustained resonances, low-frequency pulses, and bright tones…
Three hours of music about water is an audacious proposition. But not, perhaps, for Slovak label Mappa, which for the past decade has made a habit of asking listeners to slow down and pay attention, releasing records that move between field recording, electronics, and idiosyncratic folk. Synthetic Water Music might be Mappa’s most expansive undertaking yet. The second installment in the label’s Synthetic series, following a 2023 collection dedicated to birds, it brings together several dozen artists whose contributions founder Jakub Juhás has arranged in a multi-layered journey through liquid states, aquatic environments, and drifting visions.
While Synthetic Bird Music focused on animals and their sounds, both real and imagined,…
Back in the year 2000, The Stooges’ proto-punk classic Fun House was given the seven-disc 30th-anniversary box-set treatment. However, 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions wasn’t your typical canonization project. There was no treasure trove of previously unreleased songs, no alternate arrangements to give us insight into the band’s creative process, no unearthed live recordings to transport us back to that particular moment. 1970 effectively locked you in the studio with The Stooges as they burned through, say, 15 consecutive takes of “Down on the Street,” gradually beating the song into fighting shape as if they were enrolled in some merciless rock ‘n’ roll bootcamp. After listening to the song over and over for the better part of an hour…
Another week, another tech bro triumphantly declaring music solved, with hyper-individualisation via AI just around the corner. This obnoxious class of talentless grifters is obsessed with optimising everything, art included, and misses the point entirely. We want – no, need! – art to be messy, incomplete, and flawed.
Take Institut für Feinmotorik, originally from Germany’s Black Forest. The collective have spent years paring their sound down to squeaking, sparse forms that sound like mechanical contraptions in their death throes, indebted to both post-Cagean traditions and the Profan school of minimal techno. Their main medium? The Octogrammoticum – an orchestra of eight recordless turntables augmented by the scraps…
Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, Lucy enters Narnia through the back of a wardrobe, and Dorothy gets whisked away in a tornado to the Land of Oz. Literary theorist Joseph Campbell would define each of those moments as a “call to adventure,” the first step of the hero’s journey that underlies all storytelling.
Now we can add one more such odyssey to the list: Marina Herlop follows her muse into the world of Dja Dja.
After two relatively unadorned albums of piano and voice, Herlop made her name with the expansive Pripyat and the daring Nekkuja. For her follow-up to the pair, she wanted to put restrictions on her creative process — an effort, given her seemingly boundless energy,…
As a common element of science fiction stories, transmissions from space often spell doom for recipients on Earth. The recent streaming series Pluribus is an example of this plot, with an RNA sequence communicated through a radio signal from space. Once replicated, it leads to a virus that creates a hive mind among humans and resulting chaos and breakdowns. The Sirens, the new album from Animal Collective’s Geologist (Brian Weitz) and artist/printmaker Kyle Simon, is informed by this type of story to the degree that the composition process yields to the undeniable and, in some ways, inscrutable power of its source.
In this recording of an experiment/capture/ performance that occurred in October 2024, human musicians are not the primary initiators.
Dis Fig, producer and vocalist Felicia Chen, embraces every facet of heaviness. Chen is driven by a desire to express deeper emotions through meticulously crafted, innovative production and expressive vocals. On acclaimed collaborations with The Bug, The Body, and Asian Dope Boys, Chen’s sound is indelible.
Her solo work utilizes electronic, industrial, and bass-forward music as filters for sonic plentitudes, unbounded and wholly her own. Every granule of sound is in service of alchemizing intense emotion and vulnerability. What To Make Of These Mortal Hands is an ambitious widening of Dis Fig’s scope, traversing tectonic dynamic shifts and heartrending arrangements in a filmic study of humanity’s capacity to create both beauty and devastation.
“Creative inspiration is often like vapor, appearing and dissipating quickly” says Vicky Mettler, aka Kee Avil, an artist who has already made waves with her first two albums (Crease from 2022 and Spine from 2024), and whose two-year release tempo seems to continue with this year’s Vapor.
The idea of inspiration as vapour might be the reason Mettler decided to originally release her new album song by song, as a form of a sonic diary – essentially, capture the moment the idea appears and recorded; it disappears. Yet, instead of making this album a collection of disparate ideas that came at the spur of the moment, there is a backbone here, a basic concept/idea that becomes audible when Vapor got its release as a collection of songs/compositions.
Released in 1974, Zuckerzeit marks a clear turning point in Cluster’s work, introducing shorter formats and a more defined rhythmic framework. The increased use of drum machines and structured sequencing sets it apart from the duo’s earlier, more diffuse recordings, while maintaining a focus on texture and tone. Developed in close proximity to Michael Rother and under increasingly independent production conditions, the album establishes a more direct and accessible approach without simplifying its underlying ideas. This standard edition makes the album available again on CD and vinyl following the previous limited anniversary release. A key recording in Cluster’s catalogue, capturing a pivotal moment of transition and refinement.
Colin Stetson and Brìghde Chaimbeul make for one of those collaborations that, now that they’ve joined up, feels like it was inevitable.
It was not: Apart from living on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean and working within (nominally, at least) different musical traditions, both Stetson and Chaimbeul manage just fine as solo artists. All the light in the world is their first fully co-written effort.
This unlikely marriage of saxophone and Scottish smallpipes flips what you might expect from a sax-and-pipes duet: Traditional highland bagpipes could provide a drone backdrop to a soaring saxophone. (There’s some of that in Sonny Rollins’s unjustifiably little-known 1974 duet with piper Rufus Harley.)
This unusual pairing of two veterans from different genres is a welcome reminder that musicianship speaks a common language regardless of categorical metadata. Lustmord is the long-running project of Welsh musician Brian Williams, widely regarded as a pioneer of dark ambient music for his slow-moving soundscapes built from deep drones, field recordings, and subterranean textures. Dave Lombardo is best known as a founding member of Slayer, whose speed and double-bass technique influenced generations of thrash metal drummers, and who has more recently branched out in experimental directions. On The Pulse of Atoms, neither strays far from his individual roots – Lustmord provides the drones and Lombardo the drumming – but the amalgam…
Canadian writer Anne Carson, whom Jules Reidy has cited as their favorite essayist, recently penned an intriguing review of a Rosalía concert. It’s a fish-out-of-water debrief from a critic skeptical of the singer’s use of spectacular “pop-song procedure” to upscale the emotions of flamenco. But her critique is not in bad faith: Carson rigorously investigates how the Catalan singer’s stage presence — as a hyper-stylized, quasi-religious vessel for ecstatic attention — commands her audience. The essay evaluates an artist’s methodology for contacting and channeling the divine, and a similar curiosity can be found in Reidy’s work. The Berlin-based guitarist seems to anatomize their own music, using complex tuning systems and a patient, cerebral…
At what point does a song stop being a song? Strip away the beat, harmony and narrative; leave behind a voice, a melody, a few repeated words, the hiss of a phone recording. Merryn Jeann’s Fear of the Beauty Parlour seems fascinated by precisely that threshold.
Jeann has never been particularly interested in conventional singer-songwriting. In the Australian artist’s music, the voice can transform into an instrument, a simple melody can suddenly break off, and an intimate story can give way to a field recording, a strange synth sound or a seemingly random noise. On Dog Beach, producer Rob Ellis helped her organise these eccentric ideas; on her second album, Jeann takes control of the production herself.
For almost a decade now, South London artist Klein has been a compelling figure at the very vanguard of British avant-garde music.
Ever since Tommy, her scrambled, glitching breakthrough EP released on Hyperdub in 2017, her fractious sound collages – tapestries of steely, shuddering textures and disembodied vocals – have earmarked her as an artist who really gets the paranoia and neuroses of the age in which she is working. Meanwhile, her prankster tendencies have ensured that you simply never know what she’s going to get up to next.
But in spite of the many accolades her music has won her, the legions of famous fans and collaborators she’s accrued – Arca, MIKE, and The Avalanches, to name a few – Klein’s…
As a duo, Ka Baird and Chris Ryan Williams present a study in contrasts. Baird, a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, favors density and percussive force, while Williams, a trumpeter, tends to work in subliminal textures and blurred, dissolving tones. They have a lot in common, too: Both use electronics to manipulate their sounds past the point of recognition, and both make music that has a spooky interiority, like a network of gradually constricting tunnels or a slowly flooding grotto. The two previously worked together on Baird’s Bearings: Soundtrack for the Bardos, an ultra-Bairdean work of uncompromising spiritual menace from 2024. Enthalpy, on which Williams receives co-billing, takes a more equitable approach. Though we get plenty of Baird’s…