A debut can be tricky; it can also be exhilarating. Gideon Broshy keeps things fresh but also weird with Nest. With a mind toward the future, the pianist and composer blends an eerie convergence of beauty and chaos. The traditional classical style is upended in this release by electronic sounds and effects; these distort and disturb the conventionally pretty soundscape that Broshy also creates. One would think that such a young artist would not have the maturity or technical skills to pull off such a balancing act. Ye, he succeeds in many ways — often wonderfully alarming ones.
A song with a name like “Stutter” gives off a certain air, a certain preconception of what it’ll be about. Broshy, smartly, plays with this idea and delves into an Asian-meets-techno composition.
Category: indie
After a recorded absence of over 20 years, Liverpudlian duo China Crisis release Autumn in the Neighbourhood, their first album since 1994’s ‘Warped By Success’ which was issued on their own Stardumb imprint.
Although Gary Daly and Eddie Lundon have maintained a continued live presence since that time, other than a cover of Michael Halliday’s ‘Starry Eyed’ for the ‘Liverpool Number Ones’ charity album in 2007 which also featured Omd, new material has been notable by its absence.
But ‘Autumn In The Neighbourhood’ sees the return of the melodically inventive pair who have seen elements of their sound re-emerge in acts such as Mirrors and Sin Cos Tan. From the synth friendly leanings of ‘Christian’, ‘Wishful Thinking’…
There are a handful of bands who’re on the cusp of hitting it big that you know they would nail it when the time comes. Swim School is one of those bands. They’ve always been known as an act with an undeniable sound, and a presence that has grown over the years.
Comprising guitarist-vocalist Alice Johnson, guitarist Lewis Bunting, bassist Lee Brown and drummer Billy McMahon, the Edinburgh band’s sound is a potent blend of shoegaze noise and heady melody — we caught up with them to chatting about everything from the brutality of the music industry to blending genres and touring in a cold van.
… Frontwoman Alice Johnson has spoken candidly about her experiences of sexism…
…include two songs that were not initially released on digital streaming platforms.
Hayley Williams has always been bold — from her brightly-hued hair dye to her kickass attitude as the lead singer of Paramore. When it comes to music, the singer is equally unafraid. She belts her heart out and spits brutally honest lyrics across the band’s discography and her own solo albums, 2020’s Petals for Armor and 2021’s Flowers for Vases/Descansos. But never has Williams sounded as brave as she does on her third album, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party. “I’ll be the biggest star at this fucking karaoke bar,” she declares on the moody title track. The song’s chorus repeats one line over and over again (“Can only go up from here”) as Williams gives up on shooting…
For their third collaborative album, Ruth Mascelli & Mary Hanson Scott have come up with an intriguing title – Esoteric Lounge Music Now, presenting a sort of dilemma for the listeners – what should esoteric lounge music sound like now?
Well, what Mascelli and Scott seem to have in mind is their take on all things noir in music – from a vision of jazz noir soundtracks of fifties and sixties combined with the dark touches that could be found on the prime trip-hop of second part of the nineties, neatly combined and meshed into dark late night tone sculptures that combine Mascelli’s deep, darkened vocals with Scott’s, often FX-blasted reeds and other electronic embellishments. The duo draws both on their previous musical experiences (Mascelli as a part of…
…featuring 7 previously unheard tracks.
On caroline‘s self-titled 2022 debut, the eight-piece UK collective unveiled material that flirted with deliberateness and silences, crafting quietly intricate post-folk puzzles, full of strings and breath, to tantalize the patient listener. The follow-up, aptly titled caroline 2, sees the group occasionally accelerate to gear-grinding velocity, though the path to their destination is still not always a straight line.
The first single from the album, “Total euphoria,” resembles a slightly deconstructed Broken Social Scene, with twin guitars chugging out repetitive and asynchronous downstrokes and a drum thump that trips into and out of the fray. Euphoria is achieved with a kind of drunken side-step that…
With over fifteen years of shaping and propelling the global techno scene, Belgian DJ and producer Charlotte de Witte has reached a defining moment in her career with the release of her debut self-titled LP, Charlotte de Witte. Crowned the world’s number one techno DJ for six consecutive years, she stands as one of the genre’s most influential figures, and this album is the statement and clear expression of who she is as an artist. Spanning eleven tracks and just over an hour, the record distils the core of her sound – acid-driven, propulsive, and sharply refined while uncovering a more personal dimension beneath its precision.
The album opens with ‘The Realm’, a track that immediately signals intent with spiralling acid lines and steady pulsating percussion…
Saul Adamczewski, co-founder of Fat White Family and frontman of Insecure Men, endured a harrowing personal collapse in 2024, spending months in a cupboard in Tulse Hill amid severe psychosis and opioid addiction. After calling his mother and undergoing withdrawal, he began rebuilding his life, reconnecting with family and bandmates. This recovery led to A Man For All Seasons, the second Insecure Men album and a creative rebirth.
Recorded in the spring of 2025, at Ray Davis’ Konk Studios in Hornsey, North London with producer Raf Rundell, the album reflects Adamczewski’s shift toward collaboration, with a band lineup including Marley Mackay, Victor Jakeman, Fat White Family’s Alex White and Steely Dan Monte.
Animal, Surrender! returns with mathy, complicated grooves. The core duo of Peter Kerlin and Rob Smith continues to concoct oddly rhythmed but intoxicating reveries, but this time adds pipe organist Curt Sydnor to the sinuous mix. This second album continues in that vein, caging ruminative, bass-toned dream sequences in prickly post-modern architectures.
Despite the new member, Animal, Surrender! still sounds like a duo. The give-and-take between Kerlin and Smith continues to define this outfit’s lurch and stutter and sway. Sydnor, though, hovers in the margins, unleashing long, spooky tremulous tones that heighten the band’s aura of surreality.
The title track, for instance, unspools long, lucid phrases from the higher strings on…
The Tao Te Ching tells us that “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” It starts from a central point, and can go anywhere. And that’s the feeling when you press play on yaz lancaster’s new album, AFTER.
The thing about journeys is that there’s no requirement they follow a straight line; they aren’t sequential, nor do they even hold to the same destination throughout. Music works that way too, and lancaster puts so many steps into AFTER — some small, some sublime leaps, many unexpected. All of this is held together by their musical personality, their sense of sound and the logic of memories made along the way.
So this is an experimental electronic album that springs off lancaster’s violin strings with…
…featuring the previously unreleased bonus track “SEC FOUR (Demo)”. Remastered by Sebastian Komor.
Imagine an electronic industrial act putting together a release that was a collection of songs, each and every one carefully constructed to be destined for a dancefloor. Full electro sounds, driving beats, and most tracks with the beats-per-minute turned up. That release is Serenity Is the Devil. Icon of Coil has distilled the dance industrial experience with this release, in ways that peers such as Apoptygma Bezerk and Convenant have not before. Each track drives its way forward, through tracks destined for club longevity, such as “Shallow Nation,” “Former Self,” and “Floorkiller,” with just enough variety to stop the whole album…
Tangerine Dream are unquestionably one of the most influential electronic groups of all time. Their music has made an immeasurable impact on ambient, new age, techno, trance, and progressive rock, as well as modern film score composition.
On August 1, 1987, Tangerine Dream performed a landmark open-air concert in front of the Reichstag in Berlin, celebrating the city’s 750th anniversary. Held at the Platz der Republik and drawing over 100,000 attendees, the event unfolded near the Berlin Wall – a powerful symbol of Germany’s division at the time. The band’s signature electronic sound, paired with stunning visuals and fireworks, made for an unforgettable experience. It’s even said that the music could be heard across the border in East Berlin.
The latest shapeshifting move by Wicca Phase Springs Eternal (aka Adam Andrzejewski, née McIlwee) sees this singular artist trade emo rap for country-folk, while losing little — if any — of the gothic atmosphere of his previous incarnation’s trap-heavy oeuvre.
Andrzejewski has experience when it comes to challenging preconceptions. Until 2013, he was co-founder and a pivotal member of emo mainstays Tigers Jaw. Reborn as Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, he’s since elevated Soundcloud rap from bedroom dalliance to sell out shows, guesting on tracks by — and forming close bonds with — artists as diverse as Lil Peep and Ethel Cain. Although previous Wicca Phase releases have certainly featured acoustic guitar numbers, fans who…
Swiss Wandelweiser master reimagined by virtuoso flutist Manuel Zurria in stunning solo interpretations. Jürg Frey’s String Quartet No. 3 and four Extended Circular Music pieces (originally for various chamber ensembles) are transformed into ethereal soundscapes through Zurria’s conceptual approach inspired by Japanese Kintsugi art. Interweaving minimalism with radical experimentalism, these recordings draw startling scope from minimal material means – breath-length utterances dance among complex harmonic clusters, provoking suspensions of time.
…The completed work represents a “conjunction of these two artists” that has “activated a transformative form of experimentalism.” These renderings “dance with an airy…
Over the course of the year, Manja Ristić has been releasing a triptych of intertwined albums, starting with Purpurna vresišta on wabi-sabi tapes, followed by Sargassum aeterna on Rakem Records and ending with Into Your Eyes on LINE.
The first addresses “the trauma imprinted on landscapes,” while the second imagines a dystopian future in which every social and environmental catastrophe has come to pass. The third is divided into three pieces: the warning, the potential horror, and – although the dream seems unattainable – an alternate, peaceful future in which (depending on one’s interpretation) either humanity has come to its senses or has destroyed itself, leaving infinite space in which the rest of the world might recover and regrow.
Keiji Haino detests the frivolous. As a teenager in the late ’60s, the songs he heard about love and peace seemed facile, like they didn’t contain a genuine message. “What I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it was totally different from The Beatles and their ilk,” he said in 1997.
Central to his self-described outsider status was something beyond adolescent edginess: a craving for something new. Years later, he explained that his artistic endeavors and lifestyle are one and the same: “I want to live each and every moment at its best and to the fullest. And I think that to regret is to repeat.” It can be odd to hear about such mutability, as the Japanese avant-rock and free-improv maestro has a vast back catalogue that can be consistently described as…
VA – Jazz Dispensary Presents: Dream a Dream with Studio G: Cratedigger’s Archive (1970-2009) (2025)
Established by John Gale in London in 1966, Studio G produced a wide range of genres and styles, geared toward local TV, sports programming and adverts. As Ryan Jebavy, producer of Dream a Dream, explains in his liner notes, it unleashed “pastoral folk, maniacal horror, funk-spat jazz, quixotic pop, alluring electro and the usual novelty side spells of national anthems, children’s music and whatever other utilitarian cues society demanded of the moment” upon the commercial space. Even as more sizable outfits such as KPM, Bruton, De Wolfe and Chappell consumed the majority of the marketplace, Studio G offered a truly fetching alternative-sleek, hip art not previously seen on mostly unremarkable album covers released by neighboring companies…
North London Line continues Jah Wobble’s fascination with London’s hidden currents and forgotten spaces, inviting listeners to experience familiar territory through fresh ears. It’s a meditative ride through neighborhoods constantly in flux, powered by a bass that resonates with the rumble of passing trains and centuries of stories beneath the tracks.
The album North London Line (Mildmay) is an interesting concept to me, with the spoken word poetry it has a John Cooper Clarke feel to it, it’s almost a love letter to that area of North to West London. Where did this idea come from what drew you to writing about that and how did you come up with it? John: Well, I’m used to North London over the years, I call it the old North London Line…