Compilation albums in the experimental ambient genre are a staple of many labels, often serving as platforms for standout contributions. While some compilations are thematically anchored in non-musical concepts, such as literature, film, or horror motifs, Echoes of the Hollow Earth sets itself apart by unifying its tracks through the use of guitar-based textures and drones.
In these recordings, the guitar eschews its conventional spotlight role. Rather than acting as a solo or rhythmic focal point, it functions in a layered or processed manner to enhance the spatial and tonal character of the compositions. Its interplay with synths, field recordings, and sparse percussion often renders it in a shadowy form, indistinguishable from its surroundings,…
Category: indie
Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s 1926 novel The Time of Man told the story of Ellen Chesser, an itinerant young farm worker tending the fields in rural Kentucky in the early 20th century. The book made Roberts a literary sensation and earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In 1951, the story was adapted into a radio play starring the actor Joan Lorring; that recording in turn found its way into the orbit of Geir Aule Jenssen, aka Biosphere. His amorphous, textural strain of ambient music has traditionally gone hand-in-hand with snippets of dialogue; so it is with The Way of Time, which slips fragments of Lorring’s girlish Southern twang in amongst pale synth washes and the implacable tick of drum machines.
On paper, it’s an unlikely pairing.
Drew Lustman may be electronic music’s most restless experimentalist. Since he first burst onto the scene with 2009’s Love Is a Liability in the first flush of the post-dubstep implosion, he’s worked in everything from big room house anthems to steely glam post-punk over the last 16 years. His restless, relentless innovation means there’s simply no telling what a FaltyDL record will sound like, other than that it’ll be impeccably stylish and carefully produced. While this may have prevented FaltyDL from developing a cult following, as each release can sound dramatically different from the next, it has established Lustman as a reliable weathervane to let you know which way the winds are blowing in electronic music.
This time around, Lustman finds himself…
Some albums you look forward to at the joy they’ll give. Others with trepidation. OSMIUM’s self-titled debut album is the latter. The group consists of Oscar-winning Icelandic composer and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, James Ginzburg (emptyset, Subtext), Rully Shabara (Senyawa), and Grammy-winning producer and sound designer Sam Slater, a rogue’s gallery whose collective back catalogue has some of the finest experimental credentials working in music today. The group is more than the sum of its parts though. Individually they can take us to the breaking point, but together – oh wow, they can do something else entirely.
‘OSMIUM 0’ kicks things off and opens the album with the, what sounds like double bass, and sporadic, yet aggressive, percussion;…
The extended Rock Family Tree for Glasgow grows another branch with the release of Water Machine’s debut LP, a propulsive, addictive set of tunes which showcases a diverse range of styles and influences. There’s the DIY noise of Huggy Bear, the energy of X-Ray Spex, and the lyrical fun of The Vaselines. This is not a relentless ride though – there are tender moments of reflection (notably Jimmy’s Waltz) which show a softer, more vulnerable side to the band.
It’s a record which you feel could only have been made in Glasgow. ‘Tiffany’ is pure Orange Juice, while ‘Hot Real Estate’ muses on the merits of different sides of the city; Water Machine feel like one of those great Glasgow bands like V-Twin, 1990s, or Lung Leg, who are much…
Steve Queralt’s solo debut, Swallow, arrives not with a bang, but with a textured, atmospheric hum. The Ride bassist, known for his foundational rhythms, stepped forward to craft a collection of songs that feels ambitious in nature and cinematic in scope. It’s a varied sonic landscape — at times poignant, vibrant, and melancholic — that occasionally suggests the updated ethereal shoegaze of later Slowdive, or Ride’s own recent output, yet with a distinctively introspective hue.
Songs such as “Lonely Town” and “Swiss Air” featuring Emma Anderson of Lush, shimmer with a familiar warmth, her vocals drifting over Queralt’s layered guitars and synthesizers. Other tracks offer a more blithe vibe whose arrangements have surreal qualities that add up to…
As a producer, BAMBII’s flaming-hot club cocktails are deeply entwined with her long-standing party JERK: a queer Black global dance music love-in tied to the Jamaican-Canadian artist’s Caribbean roots. In a buzzing city that’s home to Caribana, North America’s largest Caribbean carnival, and where immigrants make up nearly half of the population, JERK has planted a welcome flag in the landscape of Toronto nightlife, championing sounds from the Caribbean diaspora since 2013. It’s a space where jungle, techno, reggaeton, dancehall, and more converge — sprinkled with a little pop sugar, and washed down with the jerk chicken BAMBII famously makes herself for party-goers.
“To me, everything in Toronto is informed by Caribbean people coming here in the ‘80s…
The 2020s have proven to be fruitful years for the continuing deconstruction of the electric guitar. Musicians such as Ava Mendoza, Chuck Roth, Wendy Eisenberg and others have emerged from various different corners of the music world, each offering their own perspective on the question of what role the fabled instrument plays in an ever-changing landscape.
Does analogue guitar sorcery still hold any water in a laptop-driven experimental music world? Has non-idiomatic guitar playing simply become another idiom unto itself? Nina Garcia’s Bye Bye Bird presents an unassuming, but potent, approach to these questions.
Hailing from Paris, Garcia has been recording music for a decade under the name Mariachi,…
For a band named after a fictional organization featured in a young-adult fantasy series (Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials if you didn’t catch it), The Royal Arctic Institute have a fairly adult sound — not to be condescending toward Pullman’s work, which deals with heavy themes and morally complex situations. But the music of The Royal Arctic Institute has little of the epic sweep or mythopoetic grandeur of the kind of music that’s usually inspired by heroic sagas – prog rock, in other words (or Led Zeppelin). Instead, RAI traffic in something more laid-back, crafting cool, limber and amiable instrumentals with a heavy focus on melody and color instead of velocity and complexity. It’s not otherworldly, but it does carry a mystical charge, however homespun.
Haven’t heard of The Dare? Well, if you’ve had a ‘Brat Summer’ there’s a good chance you probably have. The suit-clad New York-based artist and producer is the epitome of cool at the minute. From producing Charli xcx and Billie Eilish’s sultry chart-topper Guess to spearheading NYC’s electroclash revival scene with his Freakquencies club nights – or even nostalgically bringing it back to 2007 and sparking up a cig behind the decks – everyone wants a piece of Harrison Patrick Smith.
So, what better time for The Dare to share his debut album than now? Following on from his debut Sex EP, released last year, What’s Wrong with New York? oozes confidence and sex appeal. Beginning with ‘Open Up’, Smith’s snarling vocal immediately takes hold. ‘Free your mind and…
…Twenty-seven minutes long, yet it felt like it had just started playing a few moments before. GULP packs a lot of ideas into its seven tracks, but surely that couldn’t be it? In the world of dance music LPs, individual tracks usually run between six and eight minutes. GULP felt different, lasting about as long as fizzy water stays bubbly and fresh in the glass. But after a few more listens, that turned out to be its strength. There are no moments wasted, no tracks that wear out their welcome with one too many loops, no flab to speak of. GULP is bite-sized house music, making a statement with memorable hooks and bold basslines, and then making way for the next idea to take over.
GULP lands on Wisdom Teeth, the label Facta runs with fellow Londoner K-LONE. Over time,…
Eternal Night Radio, the third effort from Caldon Glover on the Cryo Chamber label, evokes large, empty human-made spaces, such as abandoned buildings, hulls of seagoing vessels, and underground caverns. Echoing percussion, as well as creaking, popping, and groaning, accompany undulating yet assertive waves of synth.
Whether or not Glover intended such imagery, it is difficult to hear the album without envisioning structures under pressure, groaning with age and flexing with thermal shifts. But the strength of Eternal Night Radio lies in its sonic breadth. The seven tracks embody not only dereliction, but also a pervasive sense of peril and awe.
The album also features vocals on a pair of these tracks. Tabitha Celani adds ethereal singing…
Burning bright and turning to ashes just in time to join the 27 Club is liable to cement your legacy forever, or at least for a while. Chances are, though, that that’s not the path any particular musician is on (and all the better for them, however appealing it might seem on a Sunday night when the alarm awaits maliciously, ready to inaugurate another week of mundane work). And so, time flies, here comes middle age and its new perspectives. Bicentennial Drug Lord has put together an album that revolves around this less-sung-about period, and it’s a feel-good, alternatingly touching and funny tribute to all those rockers who survived the turbulent youth exalted in the annals of music history.
Bicentennial Drug Lord is made up of long-time…
Headspinning, full-throttle, and with absolutely no breaks, UNIVERSITY launch headfirst into a symphony of clashing sounds and melodies on debut record, McCartney, It’ll Be OK.
Post-punk in places, straight aggro in others, this chaotic and cluttered yet malleable record throws caution to the wind as the quartet use their instruments to push their sonic boundaries and find beauty within the chaos they create.
Their pursuit of sheer and utter sonic annihilation is soundtracked by pinch harmonics, chugging riffs, thudding snare drums, and guttural screaming. It’s intense, with the band showing no mercy as they push through.
Sure, a more laid back approach is taken on ‘GTA Online’ and ‘Diamond Song’, but even…
Even on paper, this is such an interesting trio. Ava Mendoza is a brilliant and versatile guitarist who feels comfortable playing heavy rock, blues, jazz, improv, and experimental music. One could say the same about violinist gabby fluke-mogul, though she is centered more in the improv / experimental space. Carolina Pérez, on the other hand is a death metal drummer. Sounds good, right?
Mama Killa is the type of album that you might expect someone like John Zorn to put together. Get a bunch of accomplished musicians together in a room, and unleash them. Indeed, you cannot help but think of Zorn’s Simulacrum (Matt Hollenberg, John Medeski, and Kenny Grohowski) or unrecorded trio Bladerunner (Zorn, BIll Laswell, and Dave Lombardo) when considering…
Nathan Salsburg’s latest is a long piece full of silences. It runs on for 39 minutes, alternating cascades and rambles of acoustic folk picking with ruminative caesuras, the negative space as much a voice as the exquisitely clear string tones.
You might know Salsburg from his sprightly duets with James Elkington, his sung and picked folk blues adventures, his life and artistic partnership with Joan Shelley, or his explorations of Jewish mystical traditions through the Landwerk series and the 2021 recording Psalms. Ipsa Corpora takes from all of these endeavors, leaning musically on the Takoma-style blues elements of his work, while bringing in the searching spirituality of the music he grounds in faith.
The phrase “Ipsa Corpora” means “the bodies…
Little Mazarn works in the intersection between nature and magic, bending quiet, lightly harmonized melodies into luminous shapes, while describing ordinary things in a way that makes them shimmer with spiritual resonance.
The Austin-based trio, now on album number three, centers around sometime cello teacher and Patti Griffin collaborator Lindsey Verrill, the owner of that fragile, plain-but-mysterious voice. Jeff Johnston, an occasional member of Bill Callahan’s band and ex of Austin country eccentrics Lil Cap’n Travis, supports her on a variety of instruments, including an eerie singing saw. And Carolina Chauffe, who records prolifically as hemlock, lends her voice and other instruments to Little Mazarn’s soft, stirring compositions.
Harry the Nightgown is in every way an intriguing proposition. From the band’s name to its West Coast, East Coast band combination (now a trio) to its idea of what modern (avant) pop should sound like. With a previous album and an EP under their belt, the original members Spencer Hartling — producer and founder of Wiggle World studio — and singer Sami Perez — of The She’s and Jerry Paper, have now been joined by, as their PR claims, east coast basement DIY harmonic theory whiz Luke Macdonald for their second album simply titled Ugh.
Frankly put, though, there is nothing really simple about this album, and all in the right way. On a base of spliced-up rhythms and beats, they add a set of both acoustic and electronic…