For much of her career, Lindsey Wang has created subtly hypnotic, heady techno under her Polygonia alias. Through squishy, organic sound design and fluency with traditional instruments, the producer’s sound has evolved from loopy minimal to what RA has described as “deep techno that sounds nothing like deep techno.” Today, it would be a stretch to categorize her into a single genre. Her tracks often start by conjuring a feeling of whimsy, dread, or bliss, then expand outward in whatever form suits them, borrowing elements from IDM, drum & bass, ambient and techno. It’s becoming more and more clear that creative autonomy is paramount to Wang.
Her musical journey as both a fan and an artist treks through bass music, hip-hop, dub, psytrance, jazz, metal, ambient and trap.
Category: indie
There’s an ineffable sense of mystery to this collection of previously unreleased material from saxophonist John Surman and vocalist Karin Krog. Recorded over three days in 2013, abandoned when the theatre project it was commissioned for never came to fruition, and finally unearthed by Trunk Records, Electric Element sees the duo (along with Surman’s son Ben) abandon traditional jazz entirely in favour of a set of wonderfully weird vocal and electronic experiments.
Over nine tracks – five substantial compositions and four brief interstitials, which mainly act as codas to the longer pieces – Surman shirks his sax in favour of wind synth, bass and contrabass clarinet, plus various effects units. Krog, for her part, shrieks, growls, mutters, and…
Graham Hunt has an intuitive ability to carve out his own space within the long, confusing history of American pop music. The Wisconsin-based songwriter has spent the past four years hard at work building a trilogy of records that synthesize timeless guitar pop chops with a layered approach to production and a sly lyrical eye. His music balances the surreal with the quotidian, the melodic with the rhythmic, the cryptic with the triumphant–often proving that slacker playfulness and Heartland earnestness are not mutually exclusive. Timeless World Forever, the final entry in this trilogy and Hunt’s first release for Run for Cover, provides closure on a formidable body of songs while opening the gates for a new stage in the artist’s long, prolific career.
Something of an old-school electronica vibe is exuded by iota, Bryan Tewell Hughes’ second AeTopus release for Spotted Peccary Music, that enhances the recording’s appeal.
Gear details aren’t clarified on the album sleeve, but the aural evidence suggests he’s used analog devices as much as digital ones, resulting in tracks that are warm, slightly nostalgia-laden, and breathe humanity. Before committing himself to ambient and electronic music, he immersed himself in heavy metal, industrial, and punk, and even though such genres don’t surface on iota his time spent with them invariably factored into the music he’s creating now.
Hughes’ mini-bio indicates that he generates his material out of his Bellingham,…
As Grand River has chosen wind as her subject and Concepción Huerta has chosen fire, the Umor Rex label may be working toward an Elements series. El Sol de los Muertos (The Sun of the Dead) features a volcano on its cover, but the image is metaphorical as well as physical. Inspired by the writings of Eduardo Galeano, the album is a primal cry that erupts from the depths of the earth.
“Magma como la vena en el territorio” is as sorrowful as drone can sound, reminiscent of the recent work of Richard Skelton, who in similar fashion has also been addressing erased histories and recovered pasts. The press release references Visión de los vencidos (The Broken Spears), which contains the “account of the defeated,” a lost text rubbed from official histories.
Maiya Blaney calls Brooklyn, NY home, but hails from Montclair, NJ. R&B or vocal pop is deceptively her primary venture, but boxing her in seems like a grave disservice. The singer/songwriter/producer produces wildly imaginative, complex, and challenging music that never seems to settle in one given corner. While the skittering electronica forms the center of her sound, it’s clear that she’s a ‘90s baby, and she surrounds that core with well-executed excursions into indie rock, folk, shoegaze, and even metal. Creating a universe this eclectic rarely — if ever — works, but Blaney’s approach and lilting yet alternately powerful vocal tethers the experiment together.
A Room with a Door That Closes is only Blainey’s second LP, but she already shows…
Brad Deschamps has released a generous amount of anthéne material on his Toronto-based Polar Seas Recordings imprint, but he’s also found a comfortable second home on Home Normal. This latest collaboration with cellist and fellow sound sculptor Simon McCorry — their fourth, after previous albums on whitelabrecs, Hidden Vibes, and Oscarson — follows on from Deschamps’ anthéne release frailty on HR and is as refined a collection of evocative ambient as one would anticipate from the two.
With “standing silent,” wellspring ushers in on a gentle wave of mellotron-like sonorities the duo build on with painterly washes of undisclosed origin. No instrument details are listed, but chances are McCorry’s cello and Deschamps’…
Ben Kelly, aka Aboutface, made his slow, arduous way through northern Peru, five hours on an off-road vehicle and four more on a boat up the Rio Santiago. His destination was Guayabal, a tiny village of the Wampís people of the Amazonas region. The Wampís were welcoming, but relations were initially tense; Kelly’s arrival was the result of months of discussions, but he was still not sure that granting him unprecedented access was a decision that was universally agreed upon within the community. However, Kelly had a secret. To demonstrate the sincerity of his intentions, he’d learned to play the quena, a traditional Peruvian flute. He played music deep into the night with his hosts, gradually building the rapport that would allow them to record the collaborative…
Man vs Machine. What once seemed like the work of science fiction has now become our reality. Whether it’s an ever-increasing AI-presence in all aspects of our daily lives, or the reliance and dominance of social media over our interactions with one another, the digital world continues to blur the lines with our own human nature. It’s a complicated relationship, one that forms the basis of the third album from Oxford DIY, electro-rock outfit, Low Island.
On their sophomore outing Life in Miniature, Low Island turned tragedy and new beginnings into a beautiful tapestry of intricately crafted indie pop. Now three years later on follow-up bird, they continue to further unravel life’s burdens – change, impermanence and loss – but this time through the lens of today’s increasingly…
“Who said being sad is not a crime?” Shura asks on I Got Too Sad for My Friends. Regardless of the phrase’s origins, the English singer-songwriter seems blithely unafraid of any carceral ramifications. In the album’s opening song, she relays “crying in the backseat of a taxi in Tokyo”; later, she’s “out here in America/And I’m so sad that I am.” She wonders if “maybe I got too sad for my friends,” then, on the very next song, comes to a conclusion: “I got too down around my friends.” Occasionally, she looks on the bright side: “If I die,” she sings, “at least I don’t have to pick out a shirt to wear.” (And though she likely meant the question rhetorically: For the record, it was Arthur Russell.)
Perhaps it wouldn’t surprise you, then, to learn that Shura wrote her third album in the midst…
The 2025 release Standard Stoppages marked the 20th anniversary of the Chicago-based Third Coast Percussion. As a result, it contains quite a mix of material, from that provided by the group’s longtime collaborators to pieces from composers outside its usual orbit. The mixed-bag effect common on anniversary releases can be a negative, but here, it works to showcase the range of influences that appear in the group’s work. The members reached out to various figures with whom they hadn’t collaborated in the past as a way of marking the occasion. One of those was the Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain, who died during the album’s production, and fans of his music may well want to hear the album for his two-movement Murmurs in Time alone.
Philippe Cohen Solal and Mike Lindsay have worked together to create a phenomenal concept album – Outsider – a musical and visual extrapolation of Henry Darger’s work, his obsession with the weather, his tormented Christian faith, deceptively naive paintings and lyrics to songs, that were never before set to music. The record has been 5 years in the making and is the brainchild of Philippe Cohen Solal, producer and composer who co-founded Gotan Project. Solal has been given exclusive, unprecedented access to Henry Darger’s estate comprising lyrics, poems and visual art and has brought together an epic collaboration with Mike Lindsay from acid folk group Tunng, Hannah Peel and the vocals of Adam Glover.
…Darger’s visual art has been much celebrated.
Long ago, the music industry decreed that no band should make more than one album every two years, and no album should exceed ten to 12 tracks, unless said tracks were very short, in which case, up to 14 were acceptable. That is, if you’re playing along at home, one new song every two months, tops, with penalties for overachievement. But then the music industry died, and here we are. Ryan Walsh, for the last couple of decades the chief creative force behind Hallelujah the Hills, presents a four-part concept album with 52 songs, featuring his core band plus an assortment of New England musical legends. It’s too much to absorb to in one sitting or one day or maybe even one week, given the knotty lyrics and well-constructed melodies, but Walsh is okay with that.
Swiss electro-rockers, Young Gods have been around for 40 years, but this in no way should suggest that they’ve gone soft in their old age. These days, vocalist Franz Treichler looks like the psychopathic Bob from David Lynch’s original Twin Peaks TV series and still exudes a certain malevolence – which is more than reflected in their new album Appear Disappear.
The Young Gods’ influence has been readily acknowledged over the years by the likes of David Bowie, Mike Patton and even U2, to name just a few. Their sound draws from the same sonic seam as industrial metalheads Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, as well as the proto-techno of Front 242, while they have also incorporated a broad range of other musical genres into their dark and…
The debut full length from long-time sonic adventurers James Holden and Waclaw Zimpel is a set of focused improvisations striking out for the cosmic zone, for inner space, the weightlessness of trance. Holden & Zimpel are explorers, chasing the ego death, when the music starts to make itself, melting time. This transcendental impulse reaches beyond language, making it tricky to write about. Consider how the word trance feels worn down and sticky. The Universe Will Take Care of You is a helpful signpost of a title, its music calls for colours and nature metaphors, animal spirits and the movement of the heavens.
The first track is called ‘You Are Gods’. Off we go. It shimmers and glimmers, bass bubbles up to become rhythm. Nothing is settled in this…
The career of Christine Newby, recording under her Mozart-derived pseudonym Cosey Fanni Tutti, has rarely been anything other than compelling. Yet it is only in recent years that the artist, in her 70s and with a 40-year career in music already established, has had anything approaching full creative respect and freedom.
Having helped in the acknowledgement of pioneers such as Delia Derbyshire through The Myths and the Legendary Tapes soundtrack and the Re-Sisters book, Newby has deservedly received acclaim for Cosey Fanni Tutti – with a biopic from Andrew Hulme still to come. Yet it says much for 2t2, her first artist album in five years, that it would register strongly on the electronica wants list if it was a debut album.
On Egg & Dart, Murder by Death says good-bye after twenty-five years. As their farewell tour gets off the ground, the band from Bloomington by way of Louisville will release their eleventh studio album. It is a rhinestone shining darkly as Adam Turla and Sarah Balliet, who have been in the band since its earliest days as Little Joe Gould, reach out one more time with his voice and her cello arising from rich, haunted, and complex Americana songs.
Along with Turla and Balliet, Murder by Death is Tyler Morse, Emma Tiemann, David Fountain, and Dagon Thogerson. They have joined forces once again with producer Kevin Ratterman to make a record with facets that, however you turn it, yield cutting reflections on good-byes and whether they’re any good.
The Circles, one of the defining bands of the mod revival movement, proudly unveil Anthology, a career-spanning double LP celebrating 5 decades of recordings. Featuring iconic tracks such as “Opening Up”, “Billy”, “Mr Suburbia”, “Better Days” and “Angry Voices” alongside two brand new songs, Anthology showcases the band’s evolution while staying true to their roots.
Emerging from the West Midlands in the late 70’s, The Circles fused mod aesthetics with punk energy, quickly earning a devoted following whilst remaining accessible to fans. Despite the passage of time, their music has remained a staple of the mod revival scene, with Mick Walker’s songs as relevant and strong today as when written over 40 years ago.