It’s not often you’ll hear of an artist making the best work of their career by their eighth album. However, with Baxter Dury, this couldn’t be truer.
Allbarone’s dancier feel excels due to producer Paul Epworth’s (Adele, Florence + the Machine) touches in the studio. A fortuitous meeting at Glastonbury last year brought the pair together, and their partnership here results in Dury pushing himself to go against the sonic familiarity of his more typically minimal approaches.
His Fred again.. collaboration (‘Baxter (these are my friends)’) back in 2021 offered the first signal of where Dury’s sound could travel with some dance-ready tunes thrown into the mix. Now, he has fully embraced them and penned a nine-track tour de force laden with biting…
Category: indie
KontaktAudio presents the first-ever official release of the ultra rare and sought after B-Semi Live 24/5/1984 cassette, a rare and explosive document capturing a crucial moment in Japan’s underground noise and industrial music scene. Recorded at the legendary B-Semi venue in Tokyo, this performance brings together three pioneers – Merzbow, Null (K.K. Null), and Nord – delivering a raw, unfiltered onslaught of early Japanese noise music in its most intense form.
This historic recording showcases the primitive power and experimental spirit that defined the early Japanese noise music scene, sitting alongside the abrasive intensity of Whitehouse, the industrial ritualism of SPK, and the mechanical destruction of Throbbing Gristle.
Who says you only live twice? After languishing for decades as the nearly men of post-punk, Manchester’s Chameleons are now in their third incarnation. And this time, undoubtedly, they’re living their best life.
Time has taken its toll on the original line-up, remembered for their three genre-defining 1980s albums and their short-lived early 2000s reformation. However, vocalist, lyricist and bass player Vox (Mark Burgess) remains at the helm, still accompanied by guitarist Reg Smithies. Second guitarist Stephen Rice, drummer Todd Demma and keyboardist Danny Ashberry complete the squad.
Once they started gigging again in 2021, Chameleons quickly outgrew their cult status and found a new, younger audience.
Followers of Gruff Rhys will know that Welsh language albums inherit a special place in his discography – and so it is with Dim Probs. Given the world climate it is brave to be releasing an album whose translated title is No Probs, but Gruff’s revelation that it was written at a low personal ebb shows the underlying positivity that continues to run through his music.
It is clear that Dim Probs was not made with a pillow over its head, nor with fingers stuck in its ears. The ironic title gives Rhys licence to work wonders with songs like ‘Taro #1 + #2’, where the former Super Furry Animals singer addresses death. A seemingly routine verse, rich with FM rock possibilities, unexpectedly cuts to a chorus where Gavin Fitzjohn’s saxophone…
Belgian composer and multi-instrumentalist Ward Dhoore has been touring globally for over a decade in numerous projects, including string trio Northern Resonance, and in the duo Siger, alongside his brother Hartwin.
For this solo release, Ward is joined by an eclectic group of international musicians, including Louis Favre (drums), Seraphine Stragier (cello), Daniel Herskedal (tuba), Oscar Beerten (violin) and Esther Coorevits (viola).
This is fusion folk/jazz music created with love and a modern edge. Favre’s drums lend a vibrant and subtle rhythmic power on bracing opener ‘Angela’ which builds from delicate piano to a warm and breezy affair. ‘Balloon House’ unwinds from graceful, unadorned lines into…
Uncoiling and recoiling around an ever-shifting rhythmic core, listening to Guck feels like attending a show where you’re the sole audience member. The band’s exquisite chemistry is matched only by their sonic density. Through synths, drums, bass, guitars, and vocals, the band seems to chart the entire history of noise rock. From the junkyard space punk of Pere Ubu, MX80 Sound, and Chrome to the squealing intensity of sasscore, and crushing grooves of post-hardcore. Yet tracing the forebearers only hints at glints of what Guck are doing. Glimpses of recognisable sights are swallowed into the ever-engulfing mass of the band’s whirring hurricane. Oh yes, listening to Guck makes you feel like you’re at a one-man show. Their synth-heavy post-whatever…
As naïve or as idealistic as the notion might seem to some amid the current circumstances and fractures in the world, there’s thankfully still no real telling what might happen when inspiration strikes. Each of us can, of course, navigate the world with the ready list of influences or factors in our head, primed to make cool conversations and good impressions; but at that critical moment when things become more than the sum of their collective parts, there’s nothing else for it, but to simply pursue that impulse.
Such is the case of Irish experimental trio Throwing Shapes, a project initiated by jazzman, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Gareth Quinn-Redmond reaching out to percussionist Ross Chaney and harpist Méabh McKenna after…
Buck Curran’s latest record celebrates craft of all types. The craft of melody, of musicianship, of tone, of capturing and shaping sounds; of building the instruments themselves. A one-of-a-kind acoustic guitar, the 30-year-old, hand-built Butterfly, is presented in lush vistas, layered with stabs of counterpoint, gentle shades of reverb and the soft scrape of fingers on strings. Buck came up in the same freak folk circles as Jack Rose, and he is the guardian of Robbie Basho’s guitar. Despite these potent influences, Buck has found his own voice in steel string centered instrumental music. His playing is patient and pristine, but these assemblies of blended guitar owe as much to classic rock as they do to any other guitar soli tradition. The melodicism and…
1. Friendship – Betty Ford
2. Case Oats – Bitter Root Lake
3. Eve Adams – Death Valley Forever
4. Horsebath – Hard to Love
5. Souled American – Sorry State
6. Eli Winter – Black Iris On a Burning Quilt
7. Slow Motion Cowboys – Invisible Stars
8. Anna Tivel – Airplane to Nowhere
9. Wednesday – Pick Up That Knife
10. Shrunken Elvis – An Old Outlet
11. Julianna Riolino – Seed
12. Florry – Big Something
13. Sally Anne Morgan – Eye Is the First
14. Jeffrey Martin – Edge of Lost
15. Joseph Decosimo – Glory in the Meetinghouse
As genres mutate and multiply, the etymologists of electronica delve deeper into the arcana of minute differences and emerge with hair-split explanations of the latest viruses inflecting the worlds of club and home listening.
Different Circles co-founder Mumdance and his cohort of DJ’s, producers and beat scientists have alighted on “Ping.” Not, Mumdance stresses, perhaps with tongue slightly lodged in cheek, a genre, more a feeling based on freedom from the tyranny of the kick drum. Back in the day we may have pointed to the Clicks & Cuts compilations, to Oval, Microstoria, Pole and other adventurers in scrape, float and bleep and declared them new, liberated from structure. Now “Ping” and what to make of it.
…Alexei Shishkin is a glutton for punishment. Good Times is his 11th album in an eight-year recording career. 2024 alone saw three releases. His DIY work ethic makes this possible, but there has to be some kind of creative drive there too, some intense need to populate a void with words and music. And while he is most definitely a DIY artist (the album went from absolute zero to twelve fully realised tracks in the space of four days), Good Times sees him add a layer or two of expertise to his working methods. Recorded at Big Nice Studio with Bradford Krieger, these songs are chaotic and whimsical and loose, but they are also richly detailed, layered, and thematically varied.
Lead single ‘Disco Elysium’ is a paean to the cult video game of the same name, and also…
Newcastle-based singer, musician and disability activist Ruth Lyon‘s Poems & Non-Fiction is a stonking slice of indie-folk, layered with lush echoes of ’70s introspective folk-rock and modern-day funk. Produced by John Parish, who has previously worked with the likes of PJ Harvey, Lyon’s debut is in palpably atmospheric hands. Throughout, the album carries the ghostly vibe of classic ’70s folk and jazz, especially on the guitar-led ‘Caeser’. That mood resurfaces in the dreamy ‘Wickerman’ – all sultry spirituals and funky percussion – and in ‘Books’, with its haunting, swirling vocals and trippy synth. There’s also the pop-inflected ‘Perfect’, a sarcastic and impish response to the superficiality of modern life. A sense of otherness permeates…
Irish singer, composer, performance artist and puppeteer, Branwen Kavanagh‘s Mirrormouth shepherds us through a pensive, wistful landscape. Surrealism – both thematically and in the album art – is a key influence here.
The album’s title was inspired by a dream Branwen had about Tom Waits, and echoes of Waits can be faintly sensed throughout. The hazy ‘Morning Star’, with its distorted, muffled vocals, stumbles forward on a meditative, repetitive synth percussion. ‘Hares Breath’ pulses gently with a tranquil rhythm reminiscent of a Japanese shishi-odoshi, while ‘Laying Low’ plays with a heady, grinding guitar – deep and vibrating as if our very bones could feel it resonate. Mirrormouth closes with ‘Derelict’, which hypnotises us fully into…
Hot on the heels of that ace blink-and-you’ll-miss-it electroacoustic set Turn Liquid Into Dust, Home dissolves Ziúr‘s paradigm yet again. If you’re expecting an extension of 2023’s Hakuna Kulala-released jazz-punk explosion Eyeroll, you’ll be surprised – Ziúr brings back Iceboy Violet and Elvin Brandhi, but that’s really where the similarities end. As the title suggests, it’s an exploration of the meaning of “home”, and for Ziúr that’s Germany, a country she’s had a tense relationship since she was a teenager, obfuscating her connection for years. Singing, sneering and vocalizing over almost every track, she opens up fully, choosing to use English mostly, but also writing lyrics in German for the first time, which is the real revelation. If you’ve been following her material…
Renowned for her formidable and boundary-pushing cello improvisations, including free jazz, improvised noise and experimental electronics, South Korean artist Okkyung Lee is taking a surprising turn with her new album, Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music for Your Mundane Activities. The album marks a significant departure for the composer as she sets aside her cello for the first time to explore the realms of ambient and minimalist music. The lead single, the charmingly titled “good morning, harrison, it’s time to go,” offers a first glimpse into this new, intentionally understated sound world.
For over two decades, Lee has been a towering figure in experimental music, renowned for her creative rigour and emotive depth.
The cover of Riccardo La Foresta’s ZERO, 999… depicts an impossibly tall spiral tower vanishing into the sky, an aptly disorienting visual metaphor for an album that dismantles traditional notions of drumming. Here, drums are not rhythmic anchors but vessels for breath, sustain, and drone — gestural yet devoid of traditional pulse, animated by instability and flux. La Foresta’s practice centers around the drummophone, an instrument of his own invention he began developing in 2015, when he first experimented with blowing air through a cymbal attached to a drum. Forged from a decade of research expanding his process — through live performance, improvisation, and installation — ZERO, 999… is a conceptually focused and compositionally sophisticated…
Performing on various lever and pedal harps, Brazilian composer Marina Mello rethinks the instrument’s logic on her debut album, using guitar pedals, preparations, experimental processes and xenharmonic tuning methods to deviate from tradition.
Another belter from the Buh Records stable, Deságua introduces Zurich-based harpist Mello, whose unconventional approach to her instrument makes the album captivating from beginning to end. Mello teaches the Celtic and concert harp, but doesn’t let her experience prevent her from pushing against tradition, approaching the instrument with her unique “extended technique” to disrupt the stereotypes and expectations that surround it. On opening track…
Kimatika, the 3rd album by the Slovenian audio-visual trio Etceteral, consisting of Boštjan Simon, baritone sax and electronics; Marek Fakuč, drums; and Lina Rica, visuals, is a visceral plunge into the raw undercurrents of futuristic jazz, motoric propulsion, free improv and elastic compositions.
…As often happens with instrumental music, especially jazz-based, the lead is taken by the sax which fills any void left by the absence of vocals. While jazz of a futuristic and improvisatory bent is part of their charm, it is modernised by the presence of motorik rhythms and blasts of techno, all making for an energising concoction. More than on their previous two albums, Kimatika has an emphasis on composition so that while the playing still has a wonderfully freeform feel,..