This second album from the Belgian violinist and composer introduces haunted shreds of voice. Unlike her more cerebral debut Picture a Frame, Chronotopia threads soft wordless lullabies among the plucking, gliding, thumping improvised string tones. It plays with time, as the title suggests, but also with memory and perception.
This is subtle, unobtrusive music, coming at you out of dead quiet and forcing you to lean in to catch it. The cascading violin notes of “Off Day On” swirl vertiginously but lightly; you might imagine that a mad, frantic orchestra plays several rooms away.
Drones build up like storm clouds in these looming, brooding pieces. “Night Bites” emerges out of a sustained hum of overtones, a sound that vibrates with inchoate possibility.
Category: indie
Close your eyes. Imagine the dawning of the earth: the sun rising slowly through a soft mist, spreading warmth, light and hope across an undulating landscape of jagged mountains, lush foliage, free-flowing rivers… Then conjure a soundtrack. The morning ragas of Indian classical music, perhaps. Or indeed, Nilam, the second album by celebrated New York City-born, South India-raised singer, experimentalist and multi-instrumentalist ganavya, the owner of a voice so profound, so intimate and spiritual, that it seems double as a reminder of why we are here.
Technically speaking (although to do so is to detract from the beauty), ganavya’s melodic manoeuvres are to be marvelled at. The inclusion of the ancient, formerly extinct Tamil harp,…
The album was originally recorded in 1979 with sessions taking place for an intended follow up album by Bill’s recently formed group Red Noise. However, EMI Records, Bill’s then record label, declined to release the recordings and the material remained unreleased. Four recordings appeared as the ‘Do You Dream in Colour’ EP on his Cocteau label in 1980. The following year Bill licensed the original stereo mixes of the album to Mercury Records who issued the album in the Spring of 1981. A ground-breaking record, Quit Dreaming and Get On the Beam reached a peak of number seven on the UK charts and is to date Bill’s most commercially successful album.
This limited and expanded edition boxed set features a newly remastered version of…
Producer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and PC Music founder A.G. Cook shatters the boundaries between mainstream pop and experimental electronic music. In the process, he has shaped the look and sound of the 2010s and 2020s. With the PC Music label and collective, he embraced the growing role of technology in music-making, as well as the personalities of the people using that technology.
A. G. Cook’s 7D is a collection of seven demos from his 2018-2020 period, released via PC Music Bandcamp. These demos are specifically from the era of his debut album, “7G”, and were previously unreleased. The tracks were mixed and mastered using the same equipment as the original “7G” album. The artwork for “7D” was created…
This is FB’s second album after Old Codes, New Chaos and for me, it is one of the most beautifully crafted albums I have ever experienced. From the very start the sounds cocoon you in their warmth and take you on a journey. Jazzy cords reverberate and repeat creating a slow trance-like effect as soothing “dubby” basslines perfectly complemented by ingenius percussion drive the tunes along. The late great Bill Hicks’s tirade against the advertising world is used to great effect in the middle of the album just before Fila Brazilia kick in with a folk-trance barnstormer. Starsky and Hutch era pure funk pumps up in later tunes, bubbling beneath the surface of exotica. Don’t expect anything fast, hard or intricate-just look forward to the fact that their brilliance lies in an uncomplicated…
The American percussionist, composer, and songwriter David Van Tieghem (b. 1955) is something like a musical equivalent to astronomy’s “hypothetical astronomical object”: while evidence of an irresistible gravitational pull can be felt in deep reaches of the cosmos, its source is enshrouded in darkness, revealing glimpses of celestial power to astute observers.
For David Van Tieghem, these observers include a dizzyingly impressive cast of landmark musicians with whom he has composed and performed. David Byrne, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Arthur Russell, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich, Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, Debbie Harry are just a few from an exhaustive (and ongoing) list. He has also composed music for Pulitzer and Tony-winning dance…
Reliquary proposes the idea of an album as a “living archive,” both tomb and shrine: a sonic snapshot of the artist when the final masters are created. In the old days, months or even years might pass between recording and distribution; in the new era, both can occur the same day.
Reid Willis‘ advantage is that his music is genre fluid. As a pianist, he uses the form of modern composition to write electronic tracks, which lends them a certain gravitas. His work is a perfect match for Max Cooper’s Mesh imprint, which is always eager to experiment.
The album itself is friendly, beginning with its first word: “Welcome.” Drones establish a base pattern before receding to ambience, from which electronic patterns emerge. This all happens…
Sophia Djebel Rose first started singing in her early twenties while she was living in Lyon studying philosophy. A night of impromptu singing under a bridge with strangers coaxed the performer out of her, while a move to the bucolic pastures and volcanic mountains of Auvergne soon inspired the songwriter in her. Her second solo album Sécheresse, meaning ‘drought’ in French, is an accomplished and often moving avant-folk album that rummages in the soil of France in search of clues from lost generations.
Perhaps most extraordinary is her version of the traditional folk song ‘La blanche biche’ (‘the white doe’) a haunting and unsettling tale with its origins in medieval Brittany, with themes of transmutation, sibling abuse and cannibalism.
Chris Staples has always possessed a knack for finding profundity in the mundane, but his latest offering, Don’t Worry, elevates this skill to new heights. Settled into the stillness of Richmond, VA, Staples transmutes domestic tranquillity into a sprawling yet intimate landscape, a reflection born from a rare opportunity for deeper introspection.
The ten-track collection, recorded and produced in a small studio behind his house in Richmond. Bringing in friends from across state lines like Kyle Crane (on drums), Alan Parker (whose pedal steel holds us close across several of the record’s songs), Daniel Walker (providing piano, most notably for the record’s clearest moment of autobiography in “Talk About Your Day”), and Kylie Dailey (whose harmony on the title track reminds…
Suite of Rooms is the spellbinding new album by French musician, producer and songwriter Julienne Dessagne, aka Fantastic Twins. Based on the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and reworked from her composition for a contemporary dance piece ‘Méandres,’ ‘Suite of Rooms’ is a mesmerizing odyssey of leftfield techno, exquisite kosmische, and vintage soundtrack atmospheres.
…Opener “The Ship of Theseus” has constantly switching tones (maybe alluding to the various replaced parts of the titular ship?) while Dessagne’s witchy chants abruptly switch register to fit the cubist style. Centrepiece “Labyrinths” creates high drama with rolling percussion in a way that you might call Zimmer-ish if Hans Zimmer hadn’t cheapened his own style so badly.
Tellingly, the dozen productions on Lemon Borealis, KILN‘s first album for A Strangely Isolated Place, are credited to their creators, Kevin Hayes, Kirk Marrison, and Clark Rehberg III, as not tracks, songs, or compositions but “soundforms.” Such a choice makes sense when each piece is a meticulously constructed sonic entity that wholly engulfs the listener for three minutes before handing off to the next intoxicating creation. Other band’s songs have hooks; for KILN, the entire track is a hook. It’s sound design that’s critical, in other words, with melody, texture, rhythm, and production equally integral to the result.
All of which makes Lemon Borealis a classic headphones listen. To describe the listening experience as panoramic doesn’t do…
In 2022, Welcome Strawberry released their eponymous debut full-length, which bursts with vibrant, fuzzy dream pop tinged with psychedelia. desperate flower, the sophomore album is ostensibly a concept piece about olfactory memory. It’s also the kind of record that’s so exciting, it makes you want to text all of your friends.
…This Oakland group makes kinda jangly, kinda gazey, very pretty dream pop built around songs rather than just shit tons of atmosphere, though there is plenty of that, too, on lovely latest release desperate flower. A record that balances noise and experimentation with a more eccentric, patchwork style of psychedelia, the overall vibe on desperate flower is a bit more energetic than the usual slowcore-kissed fare from this…
Good news, everyone: Guitar music is cool again — or at least a reasonably cool coterie of yoofs are making it, which is the same thing as far as middled-aged people who hang out on Substack and read Stereogum are concerned.
Riding in on the train that has (so far) brought us Sharp Pins, Lifeguard, Horsegirl, Feeble Little Horse, recent Carpark signees good flying birds, and the entire Crafted Sounds roster, Golomb from the college football-themed town of Columbus, Ohio follow up 2024’s self-released Love — a mellow and drone-kissed mix of Low and the Velvets jamming in a midwestern garage — with full-length The Beat Goes On on No Quarter Records. In a series of tightly composed and considered indie rock songs, the trio take…
Patricia Wolf‘s second Balmat album is the soundtrack to experimental filmmaker Edward Pack Davee’s feature-length documentary ‘Hrafnamynd’, and mixes field recordings with AFX-esque lullaby themes, tape-mangled instrumental vamps and VHS-burn’d analog pads.
There’s something oddly soothing about ‘Hrafnamynd’, and without seeing the documentary it’s hard to know exactly why. Using film and digital, Davee recounts his childhood in Iceland through the volcanic island’s ravens, exploring the landscape and folklore while scraping his own nostalgia. And Wolf’s score attempts to mimic the surreal fusion of old and new by using her UDO Super 6, a powerful binaural analog-hybrid synth, to bring the past towards the present.
There’s a recurring sound on “Crude Soil,” at the very start of Amulets’s Not Around But Through, that welcomes the listener in. It’s a grand effect, somewhere between a hum and a squeal: a distant cousin to air-raid sirens, an orchestra warming up, or that big THX whoosh at the start of a summer blockbuster. Its first appearance is right about where a pop music aficionado might expect to find a drop — but in its place, they find a lift: a subtly alarming musical suggestion that what happens next is going to demand your undivided attention.
It’s a tricky sound to put your finger on. Randall Taylor’s process — which relies largely on tape loops, samples, and his own guitar playing — creates such a rich sonic collage that the mystery is often the main attraction.
For a number of years after the turn of the millennium, you need only say one word to invoke the spirit of Berlin’s thriving, techno-led electronic scene: Berghain.
Founded in the wake of Ostgut’s closing in 2003, Europe’s most famous power plant this side of Chernobyl cultivated a clique of influential DJs and dedicated partiers, as well as a record label and mix series named in honor of the original club, to the point that a German court officially designated the place a cultural institution in 2016.
Like a lot of other venues, however, the pandemic forced a rethink, and the label was temporarily shuttered following the 2021 compilation Fünfzehn + 1. Four years on, Klubnacht 01 attempts to regain some footing amid an evolved…
For the song that is both the titular track and the spiritual heart of her second album, which will be along soon, there is something suitably subversive about it, and gently so. And that is the power of Mary Strand’s music. Let others scream from the rooftops, argue, get wrapped up in histrionics and rabid, rabble-rousing debate, this is about delivering a message and letting others make of it what they will.
Her style reminds people that living our lives honestly and uniquely, and not being afraid to show who we truly are, changes the world much more decisively than sonic punch-ups and forcing our opinions down other people’s throats. Her ideas and sentiments enter the cultural landscape like a Trojan horse rather than the barbarians…
Freshly remastered as part of Lo Recordings’ long overdue campaign to reissue all the releases on Susumu Yokota‘s Skintone label, Magic Thread is the first in a series of 14 individual albums. And honestly, we’d forgotten exactly how this one sounded. Yokota was a great producer – maybe one of THE greats – but he released a lot and it’s been easy to fixate on the biggies. But listening back now, it’s fair to say that Magic Thread has been overlooked for too long. It’s not as immediately satisfying as ‘Grinning Cat’, but its textures and techniques are just as impressive. Just check the pitch-bent loops on opening track ‘Weave’, or ‘Unravel’ with its layers of crunchy, evocative noise.
And Yokota isn’t completely operating in the ambient zone. On ‘Circular’, he drowns out…