Born in early 1959 on the Venetian mainland to Italian and half-Austrian parents, Alessandro Pizzin (a.k.a Alieno deBootes) has always had a close relationship with music thanks to the passion shared between parents and siblings.
Starting with the situational improvisations in the second half of the 70s with the collective Fungus, followed by the foundations of the Ruins band, up to the complex multimedia realizations of the end of the 90s, his research path has always evolved in the awareness of the infinite combinations that sounds noises and images can organize to tell in turn new and ever changing creative illusions.
The Unconventional Residents project was actually conceived back in 1982 but due to different professional priority has been paused…
Category: indie
Imaginary Reflections is the third album by the fittingly named U.K. duo dreamcoaster, although, at the time of its release, the handle will be unfamiliar to most. Jane and Andrew Craig started making home-recorded jangly, reverb-heavy indie pop together in the late 2010s, then later leaned into murkier shoegaze on their COVID-informed second album, all under the moniker Dreams of Empire. Without changing their musical intent or resetting their release counters to zero, they debuted their new name on the eponymous Dreamcoaster E.P. in 2022. Further, the Craigs played together in the ’90s band Luminous, which delved into some of these textures while centering on a “modern rock” sound. So, while this is their first album as dreamcoaster, they bring a well-earned…
Akashaplexia is the culmination of Merzbow and John Wiese’s decades-long partnership, offering over three hours of new music across four CDs. Recorded together in Tokyo, the album balances Merzbow’s psychedelic intensity and Wiese’s meticulous sonic architecture, presenting a vast and intricately detailed landscape of noise, improvisation, and unpredictable dynamic shifts.
Akashaplexia stands as the first full-length studio collaboration between Merzbow and John Wiese, captured in December 2024 at Sound Studio Noah, Tokyo. This box set – designed by John Wiese and elegantly housed in a casewrap slipcase – is remarkable in both ambition and presentation, packing more than three hours of newly forged material on four separate discs.
The Maccabees are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their fourth and final album, Marks To Prove It, with a new reissue.
All but the single vinyl features the addition of B-sides, acoustic tracks, and a new version of the title track recorded during a session for BBC Radio 6 DJ Steve Lamacq. The 3-CD and digital formats also feature The Maccabees’ career-spanning set from Glastonbury 2015, which included a guest appearance from friend and fellow indie rock artist Jamie T on “Marks To Prove It.” The single-vinyl is crafted as a zoetrope disc (designed by Drew Tetz), while artwork for the double-vinyl and 3-CD formats was created by the band’s long-term designer, Matt De Jong, who also designed the original release. The album cover displays…
Chris Brokaw’s latest is a murky, moody affair, written quickly, according to the artist, on a 1960s Teisco Del Ray guitar. It’s far more solitary than Puritan, his last solo full-length, sheathed in echo and overtone, his voice shrouded in eerie, cloudy atmospherics. The guitar tone is more like what we heard in 2023’s all-instrumental Live at the Decommissioned Power Station than the clear, song-structured reveries in Puritan.
Brokaw describes his set-up with specificity, as designed by “Belgian luthier Flip Scipio with heavy gauge flat wound strings and an .80 gauge low E string tuned down to a low A, which reframes how you play the instrument.” But whatever the alignment of gear, the sound envelops the ear like a grey fog rolling in from the ocean,…
For a band with such a cheekily good name, Michael Cera Palin had comically bad timing. The first emo revival was dying down right as these upstarts arrived on Atlanta’s overlooked DIY scene in 2015. After a pair of promising EPs, the trio took a premature hiatus, only to return during a global pandemic. But now, finally, a decade after they started, Michael Cera Palin are back, this time with their debut album. And while there is still some growing pains, it was well worth the wait. We Could Be Brave shows not only how far this band, but the entire genre, have come.
Michael Cera Palin haven’t forgotten their roots in Midwest emo. We Could Be Brave opens with a familiar twinkle, but those wistful arpeggios are the closest this album comes to the night sky…
Laments presents four pieces of griefwork that sing connection. Delivered through solo voice and fiddle and rooted in the functional music of lamentation, these wailing songs of few words are not themselves live grief ritual work, but prepared compositions that echo sounds found by the maker performing such rites on herself.
…Following Golden Loam (2021), Laurel Premo’s third solo release bears further evolution of her singular voice in experimental roots, bringing American and Nordic lineages through her own compositions with phenomenal intonation sculpture, her hands and body crafting resonance that physically shakes.
Independent vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and somatic healer Laurel Premo offers a quietly…
Undergoing an experience not unlike how Brian Eno came to his own experiments with ambient music, finding himself deaf in one ear and now hearing sound differently before, not to mention suffering auditory hallucinations, Jon DeRosa experimented with making music in an attempt to make sense of these disconcerting experiences. In that creative and therapeutic place No Solace in Sleep was born. Twenty-five years on from this extraordinary, in the very real sense of the word, debut album, it has been remastered by ambient/electronic pioneer Taylor Deupree a process which has unlocked an even brighter, deeper, broader, and stunning sonic experience.
As the name he chose for the project suggests, this this is an album that creates a tonal…
Neo-disco artist Prins Thomas followed his two numerically titled 2022 albums with a full-length bearing his given name. Thomas Moen Hermansen is an apt title for a record which essentially sounds like the artist being himself and doing what he does best. Basically functioning as a one man band, he lays down steady rhythms with shuffling drums and chugging basslines, splashing them with sunny synth melodies. It’s usually pretty easygoing and carefree, but there is a touch of melancholy to these tracks.
The first one is called “Heartbreak,” and even though its brisk stroll doesn’t sound dramatic or devastated, it’s not bursting at the seams with joy either, and sounds like it could be music for a long walk while one is dealing with pain.
With a name like Binary Algorithms, you might expect the Colombian artist to make pitch-black techno that sounds like sheet metal wobbling in a freeway underpass. But Andrés Ávila’s approach to dance music is bold and saturated, with drums and synths blown up into big, skeuomorphic shapes. Ávila’s records have an ambitious conceptual bent to match their sounds. Previous EPs have been themed around René Descartes’ thought applied to a “cyber-network environment,” or a Drexciya-referencing underwater civilization called Tunja from the year 2499, accompanied by political screeds about the whitewashing of electronic music or the moral quandaries of AI. On Reminiscencias, his debut album, Ávila looks away from sci-fi and toward his own life and…
The British collective Snorkel likes to tout a review that once called them the “missing link between krautrock and Lee Scratch Perry.” Sure, why not? Endorsements like that are always a bit tongue-in-cheek. Throughout the 83 minutes and 19 tracks of Past Still Present Tense, it often sounds like someone in the band might be winking at you. These are serious beats, but not too serious.
With this latest release, Snorkel is making up for lost time. The group garnered its first attention with 2008’s Glass Darkly, then followed it up with another acclaimed disc, 2011’s Stop Machine. Fourteen years later, they call Past Still a “retrospective collection” of sorts, implying that it fills the gap on their CV and brings us back up to date.
Moundabout, the duo consisting of Gnod’s Paddy Shine and Phil Langero (of Los Langeros, Damp Howl and Bisect) release their third album, Goat Skull Table, being a spell for passing between worlds. The album opens with a spectacturaly intense invocation, chanted by Langero, against a background of disturbed electronics which sound like the kind of noises ghost hunters wish they could record: the throbbing of a psychic helicopter, string glitches from the other side, lurching music propelled against its will by malign forces. Langero summons dark spirits in a voice haunted by strange elisions and sudden emphases, as though he’s not in control of what he says. “Come back goat, to this rotting crooown!” he leers. It’s truly terrifying – which is quite an achievement,…
…featuring the 2024 remix by Mike Kennerty as well as the original mix (remastered).
My Brain Hurts is the third studio album by the Chicago-based punk rock band Screeching Weasel originally released in September 1991 through Lookout Records. It was the group’s first album on Lookout as well as the only release with bassist Dave Naked and the first with drummer Dan Panic, the latter of which would go on to appear on several of the band’s albums.
The album marked a very distinct stylistic shift for the group, fully moving toward a Ramones-inspired sound and completely abandoning their previous hardcore punk influences as a condition made by vocalist Ben Weasel when reforming the band after a brief break-up.
For The Unutterable, Mark E. Smith settled in with the (mostly) new lineup that debuted on 1999’s The Marshall Suite and recorded yet another gorgeous, rambunctious, only occasionally scrutable masterpiece. Though it’s not overly chocked with new ideas (especially for those already well-versed in the Fall canon), The Unutterable benefits from excellent songwriting and the crisp production of soundman extraordinaire Grant Showbiz, on loan from Billy Bragg.
The far-too-short opener “Cyber Insekt” immediately launches the listener into a dense, chaotic sound world that’s only amplified throughout the album. The heavy rockabilly guitars and pummeling drums heard on The Marshall Suite are practically overwhelmed…
At a time when violently distorted, nearly atonal rage rap can scratch the mainstream while avant-garde jazz artists fuse traditional band arrangements with the unearthly sound design of club music’s vanguard, it’s no small feat that WRENS’ “Charlie Parker” manages to be one of the year’s strangest singles in either genre.
As drummer Jason Nazary sets the Brooklyn band’s wounded gait slightly ahead of plucky synths and a flute in hysterics, frontman and trumpeter Ryan Easter starts kicking a verse that recontextualizes boilerplate trap and drill lines into the jazz world. He’s pointing Smith & Wessons at the opps; whipping chickens on the stove like they’re the roadkill the track’s titular saxophonist ate on the day he earned his famous…
On her most significant outing to date, Dorothy Carlos conveys a distinct sense of surreality with this invitation to her secretive, perceptive inscapes. As her fifth and most substantial release since Curio (2021), the eight parts of Ear World arrest the keener observer of avant glitch-based composition to what the label aptly describe as “a take on digital form that is flirtatious and fleeting.”
Its eight bits flit in fits and hiccupping saccades from fractured folk and jazz resemblance in ‘My Buddy (Miss You in Ear World)’ to the beguiling bigger picture that emerges from multiple, scurrying and coiled sounds tabulated in the pointillist gunk of ‘Alter, Alter’.
A main section is made up of her quadraphonic installation ‘My Ideal is Windy’, a three-part…
Norway has a thriving and intriguing experimental folk scene, and multi-instrumentalist Kenneth Lien is one of its key exponents.
…For his latest offering, Norwegian Electronic Folk Music, he has teamed up yet again with DJ and electronic music producer Jørgen Sissyfus, otherwise known as Center of the Universe, for an album that does exactly what it says in the title. Lien plays Hardanger fiddle, jaw harp and willow flute, while Jørgen adds propulsive beats and effects for a high-energy set that promises to have people in Scandinavian clubs dancing to folk music in no time.
It starts with ‘Fanitullen’, a well-known Norwegian tune that in this iteration begins with a stomping electronic beat before the rousing…
The debut album from Lloyd and the Leftovers joins the recent wave of Australian-flavoured Americana. Hailing from Walyalup on the west coast, their sound leans as much towards indie-tinged folk as it does any strand of country. Opener ‘Fruit and Wine’ is the closest the record gets to a strumming singalong, while ‘Kaarta Koomba’ is as near as it comes to a rocker – though neither track quite sets the tone for what follows.
The heart of the album is more whimsical, its frequent tempo changes sometimes unsettling the flow when a little more of that early crunch might have been welcome. Lead single ‘Tried It on Tuesday’ is a case in point: “I say it with a grin, I say it with a smile / Mumble my way through it, wiping tears out of my eyes” as the singer…