The latest album from Spencer Doran, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Visible Cloaks, bills itself as an ensemble work — but what a strangely nebulous and numerous group it is. On the album opener, “Block,” we hear three prepared pianos and a chamber ensemble; on another track, the credits list four guitars, five cellos, a clarinet, an oboe, and a bowed piano. Moreover, these performances seem to possess the super-charged cadence of a computer: the trilling piano flurries of “Block” accelerate with non-human speed; the notes have a pointillist quality, like scattershot dots across a DAW — until serene woodwind breathes calm into the composition. The point is that no human ensemble could ever play this music, not even one comprised of virtuosos. But that…
Category: indie
…deluxe anniversary reissue features 11 new tracks, including unreleased demos and remixes with artists Cody Votolato (The Blood Brothers), Youth Code and Kerry McCoy (Deafheaven).
On the second track of Touché Amoré‘s emotional and complicated fourth effort Stage Four, vocalist Jeremy Bolm addresses his late mother — as he does throughout the album, written out of grief, guilt and regret over her passing due to cancer two years ago — and tells her, “I haven’t found the courage to listen to your last message to me.”
The album is a passionately written and deeply moving meditation on loss, and Touché Amoré have never been better as a band. Bolm’s throat-shredding yell tears through most of these lines, reminding us that although…
Straddling the fringe of melancholy and optimism, Irish singer-songwriter A.S. Fanning’s fourth and latest record Take Me Back to Nowhere is awash with an abundance of solemn introspection, journeys into fractured belief systems and ever-evolving, conflicting realities.
Born from traditional Irish literary works and folk tales, Fanning’s sonic playground both swings skyward into interstellar textures and frolics between pillars of grounded, wistful lyricism. Bearing witness to a battalion of contradictions, he toils between conflicting concepts, questions solutions to the modern world, and grapples with the turmoil and tenderness of love.
Take Me Back to Nowhere is a raw, unfiltered foray into creative freedom and an ode to…
Since she started making music with a Buchla synthesizer in 1968 — an obsession that landed her a job actually manufacturing the machines, soldering iron in hand, until she saved up enough money to buy her own — Suzanne Ciani has embodied electronic music’s spirit of limitless possibility. Instead of imitating other instruments and conforming to conventional musical ideas, Buchla (and Ciani) set out to create a paradigm based on harnessing the flow of electricity itself. Ciani’s method with the Buchla is a way of taming electrical currents and shaping them into pathways, rather than composing music traditionally. She would later become known as a prominent new-age artist and a composer of commercial music for brands like Coca-Cola, but in…
There was a time when Djax-Up-Beats was spoken of in the same breath as Tresor, R&S, Soma and Peacefrog: a cohort of labels that shaped the sound of European techno. Founded in 1989 by Saskia Slegers, AKA Miss Djax, the Eindhoven label operated as a vital transatlantic conduit, connecting sounds from Chicago and Detroit with a rapidly expanding rave infrastructure in Europe. The cultural exchange went both ways, as US producers found eager audiences while Dutch and Belgian artists pushed that raw machine funk into harder and faster territories.
This storied legacy isn’t at risk of erasure — Dekmantel reissued Djax-Up-Beats material as recently as 2019, after all. But a new retrospective compilation series from another…
On his fourth album as Broken Chanter, Glaswegian singer-songwriter David MacGregor takes the title and thematic inspiration from Arpita Singh’s striking turquoise-blue etching of the same name, exploring and comparing an idealised world view (depicted by Singh) against the looming shadow of our increasingly dystopian reality.
On album opener ‘This Future Is Bright and I Don’t Want It’, grumbling bass, punchy drums, and drilling, intertwining guitars (from regular collaborators Charlotte Printer, Martin Johnstone, and Bartholemew Owl) create a mid-tempo post-punk backdrop for MacGregor’s emotive Scottish brogue – a must-listen for fans of Frightened Rabbit.
Across the rest of the record, the collective…
There are debut albums that arrive with intent, and there are debut albums that arrive like a pneumatic drill through drywall. GNAT, the first full-length from Manchester’s drummer-fronted psych-punk quartet Wax Head – recorded with long-term collaborator Borja Regueira at Manchester’s GLUE Studio and mastered by Melbourne’s Joe Carra – is emphatically the latter: sub-thirty minutes and zero patience for anything resembling restraint.
The title track opens as both decree and detonation: a blitzing, subterranean riff-storm whose fretboard acrobatics would make Dillinger Escape Plan’s Ben Weinman raise an eyebrow. At 90 seconds, it doesn’t so much announce the album as ambush it. ‘Bug Doctor’ follows with equal ferocity, the rhythmic convulsions and…
…What makes ‘Rare & Deadly’ truly unprecedented is that every format tells a different story. The CD, cassette, vinyl, and digital editions each feature their own unique tracklisting, a fractured release strategy that is almost unheard of. No single version contains the “complete” album.
A Place to Bury Strangers return with Rare and Deadly, a collection of ‘B-sides, abandoned experiments and forgotten fragments’, pulled from front man Oliver Ackerman’s “personal archive of late night recordings, blown out tapes and half finished sessions”.
It is their first full-length release since 2024’s Synthesizer, and given the consistency of the sound and the fluency of the songwriting on the digital version, it is easy to listen to it as…
Ferdinand Schwarz studied jazz trumpet in Cologne before his compositional interests took off during the pandemic, when he became “obsessed with the music of John Cage, Éliane Radigue and Morton Feldman, but also Jon Gibson and Arthur Russell.” He was drawn to “music that allowed me to dissolve in it, whether listening or playing… a sort of creative perceiving, as a tool to grow, transcend, to lose ego.” During his free master studies in Oslo, he became “more specifically fascinated with the act of listening and its creative potential,” engaging with sound art, instrument building, intonation systems, and listening-based music territories.
Listening Time is a 45-minute work developed collaboratively with AREPO – Madara Eleonora Mežale (clarinet), Marco Slaviero…
“Nothing is impossible.” That was Susan Alcorn’s assessment of the potential of the pedal steel guitar, the peculiar instrument that she made her own. Alcorn passed away at 71 in January 2025 as possibly the world’s pre-eminent pedal steel player, driven by a vision to bring as much out of it as possible and, in doing so, to gracefully apprehend and interpret whatever music caught her interest. In her final years, Alcorn joined forces with Nomad War Machine, the Philadelphia duo of drummer Julius Masri and guitarist James Reichard; Contra Madre is her first posthumous release, and her first documented foray into metal-adjacent spheres after a lifetime playing country, jazz, and free improv. Her first album with “these metal guys from Philly” is an unconventional…
Inspired by the writings of Mark Fisher, Present Tense is about “mourning an imagined future.” xor (Asheville, North Carolina’s Matthew Boman) cites “old space age photos” as a prime example, lamenting that “there used to be so much optimism about what humans were going to achieve.” The feeling is common, as a seemingly unending barrage of bad news has caused a worldwide malaise. And yet, Boman ~ who saw his own community flooded during Hurricane Helene, but was also part of the rebuilding ~ does more than lament; he also plunges forward in hope. Building a community around the album, he commissions seven different filmmakers to produce videos for the tracks, underlining the value of collaboration and the possibility that things…
May the spring of amazing music sourced from the original UK DIY scene never run dry. Similar to other widespread, years-long U.S. macro-scene equivalents like mid-’60s garage rock or early 1980s hardcore punk, the well of UK DIY seems to be an inexhaustible resource. We owe a debt of gratitude to labels like Minimum Table Stacks, whose first foray into archiving UK DIY yielded a superb EP from long-lost Welsh group Violin Sect. It’s not an easy process tracking down band members, securing the rights, digging up unheard material, remastering the audio and presenting it with just the right amount of reverence — but not too much. After all, this cheeky, arch music was made by a generation that grew up watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus and…
Although she slightly narrows the eclectic range of influences exhibited over the years by colorful Elephant 6 affiliate Dressy Bessy, fans of the long-running band won’t want to miss the solo debut of their leader, Tammy Ealom, now operating under the moniker the Tammy Shine. Landing on a freewheeling indie pop injected with the spirits of strutting glam, punk, and outsiders in general, the 12-track OK Shine OK was written, recorded, and mixed entirely by Ealom, who also D.I.Y.’d the artwork, and promotional material like music videos and portrait photography.
The resulting album sounds like it was all a lot of fun as she kicks things off with the clap-along tune “Shaky Shaky” and the spoken sentiment “Hey, it’s springtime, let’s go.” The hooky riffs,…
It is hard to believe that Oxis, the marine-based electronic singer/songwriter/producer, only started her series of self-titled releases three years ago. Her music reaches a level of intimacy and vulnerable storytelling that makes listening to it feel like a chat with an old, prophetic friend, someone you never forget but can never pin down for too long. All this, despite her production percolating with alien-like textures derived from nimble drum patterns and palpable ambiance. Oxis’s pop-tinted, experimental approach has been stretched out across seven projects so far, and the next installment is finally here.
Oxis 8, the latest addition to the multi-hyphenate’s beloved album series, is another quick yet potent and fun exploration into…
Under myriad monikers and as part of other bands since the late ‘80s, Düsseldorf-based musician Stefan Schwander has followed his nose for finest blends of Pan-African and Mid-Eastern rhythm threaded thru the lens of Ruhr region machine music minimalism.
His 9th LP proper as Harmonious Thelonious, Grumpy Pieces naturally continues his custom-built trade with no major alteration to the formula; just eight tracks of infectiously hypnotic swing, shuffle and parry for dancers who like to get right into it, either physically or in their own heads, where they’re the greatest dancer you’ve never seen (or is that just us?).
The pure pleasure of syncopated subtlety guides the groove, alliterating lop-sided loops…
Bands are like the people in them; they tend to get set in their ways. But not Cleared. The sole fixed part of their method is that guitarist/electronic musician Michael Vallera (Luggage, Maar, numerous solo recordings and a swell duo with Lee Ranaldo) and drummer/electronic musician Steven Hess (RLYR, Haptic, Locrian, Slow Bell Trio) are both involved. They have the potential to like an instrumental rock combo and have often done so on previous recordings. But Lustres, their first for the Australian Room40 label, continues a process of ping-ponging material into diffusion.
One of the musicians collects, plays or synthesizes some audio, then sends it to the other. He works on it, adding and subtracting and atomizing the sound, then sends it back. The work gets…
…The anniversary edition expands the original 11-track record with three bonus tracks.
Portland rockers Summer Cannibals step up their game on Full of It, their label debut for Kill Rock Stars. A solid pair of self-released LPs and countless touring miles have earned them plenty of respect in the Northwest and beyond, and they make the most of their heightened exposure by delivering their tightest outing yet. Led by singer/guitarist Jessica Boudreaux, the group sports a streamlined new sound courtesy of both producer Chris Woodhouse (Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees) and a retooled lineup that features bassist Jenny Logan and drummer Devon Shirley alongside longtime guitar man Marc Swart. There are certainly elements of fuzzy garage pop in…
There is a pervasive scepticism that shadows any artist whose rise is catalyzed by the weirdly unforgiving, blistering algorithms of social media. When someone builds an audience through 60-second clips of virtuosic bedroom playing, the industry immediately asks: “Can they write a song, or can they just play the instrument?”
With the release of her debut full-length, Evening Star, Emma Harner doesn’t just answer the question; she completely dismantles it. Arriving in the wake of her breakout 2025 EP Taking My Side and a string of sold-out international dates, Harner‘s debut is a masterclass in tension and release, proving her to be one of the most formidable architects of modern folk and math rock working today.