The ousting of Bassvictim from Berghain feels like a Biblical prophecy: Of course these electroclash expats, who fucked around and crystallized a fried twee-pop resurgence, would be banished from the Garden of Eden. Just two years ago, Maria Manow and Ike Clateman were heirs apparent to “indie sleaze,” a catch-all whose constraints, musically and aesthetically, boiled down to “kinda Crystal Castles coded.” Here was a photogenic boy-girl duo with two wonderfully wubby albums, a vague air of disaffected cool, and a very active Instagram account. “I’m not joking/I’m being hella serious,” Manow had drawled on “Air on a G String,” their silly-sexy breakout hit. Even with the explicit clarification, the canon they seemed to be entering — sleaze first, sincerity second…
Category: indie
After topping the U.K. dance charts with his first two albums and garnering Brit Award nominations, Barry Can’t Swim presented a volume of the Late Night Tales mix series, showcasing music he’s fond of but wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate for him to drop in a club. While there’s a little of the type of lush, organic house that he produces, much of the mix is more downtempo, often exploring Balearic chillout territory, but also venturing into a few other directions.
Loket’s cosmic trip-hop number “Afternoon at Barenquell” is an early highlight, working up a jazzy groove before clearing out for a lovely string-based coda. Following a short excerpt of Superpitcher’s 20-minute, harp-based chugger “Yves,” a handful of introspective pieces…
In 2017, in two batches of five, Another Timbre released ten albums of music by eight Canadian composers (two of the composers, Linda Catlin Smith and Cassandra Miller, each had a couple of albums among the ten) accompanied by a booklet about the composers. The intention was to improve Canadian composers’ reputations, one which was soon achieved. As well as Catlin Smith and Miller, with the help of Another Timbre, Canadian composers such as Mark Sabat and Martin Arnold gained in popularity.
Although Eldritch Priest is Associate Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and writes on sonic culture and experimental aesthetics, he is also a composer and improviser. He has a relatively…
In the five years that they’ve been active, it sometimes seems as if Purelink are dissolving right before our eyes. They’ve never again released anything quite as corporeal or propulsive as their debut EP, which paired visceral dub techno with rolling drum’n’bass.
On their 2023 debut album, Signs, glitchy drums crackled in a pastel haze, and last year’s Faith was even more ethereal; the trio’s individual identities melted together under cover of amorphous arrangements that suggested fogbanks, blizzards, and other zero-visibility conditions.
Anyone who has seen Purelink live, however, knows how much physical heft they’re capable of conjuring — a bold, bassy throb that sets bodies in motion even in the absence of obvious…
Humanity’s future — or so we are told — is dependent on technological advances, powered by millions upon millions of computer chips, the primary components of which can be found only in rare-earth deposits. Brazil is among the most important chess pieces in the globalist metagame; it’s home to nearly a quarter of the world’s rare-earth reserves, with next to no regulation (but plenty of corruption and deforestation).
No Ritmo da Terra, the brilliant new album from São Paulo producer and sound designer Antropoceno, is a musical projection of this future, constructed in part as a warning and, mostly, as a statement of Latin American resilience in the face of colonialism. By bridging Brazilian folk and Amazonian field recordings with…
“Willie o’ Winsbury” is a traditional English folk ballad about a king who spares his daughter’s lover because said lover is a pretty man. But when Irish composer, sound designer, and performance artist Aoibhín Redmond, aka NIMF, borrowed a bit of the tune for her album Sirenoscape, she took it in a much darker, more nebulous direction.
The centuries-old melody makes a brief appearance as the album opens, played by a calling trumpet amongst howling winds and seafaring atmospherics — but then Redmond slowly but surely breaks apart every preexisting sonic element into stirring ambient layers that fold, morph, crystallize, and shatter across four distinct, extended musical “scenes.” The result is an album that feels almost defined like a narrative story…
Why it’s volume two from the Rotting Tapes series that’s being given a vinyl reissue, rather than volumes one, three or four is anybody’s guess, but why not? All four tapes contained two tracks each, all were recorded live in Tokyo in the first half of 1982, and all feature the duo Michio Kadotani (1959-1990, vocals/guitar) and Nanjo Asahito (bass), this time joined by an uncredited drummer. The group was well-named; although the music at times seems like impenetrable, formless sludge, there’s often a real beauty and poetry to it, too. When Rotting Telepathies performed together, there was, perhaps fitfully, a unique alchemy, and when it works, it’s glorious, presaging the more fully formed music of noisy, doomy Japanese bands like Gallhammer, but it’s also…
For Footballhead’s Weight of the Truth, a “post-grunge revival” is hard to claim. There have consistently been new bands popping up that play the style, while Nickelback and Three Days Grace have never stopped being discussed. Perhaps “post-grunge reassessment” is a better wording.
What in the 2000s was viewed as a gravel-throated cyst on the carcass of mainstream rock, by 2026 is “real music” with a tongue planted firmly in your cheek. The likes of Pierce the Veil and Cane Hill pushed their sound closer to it during the 2020s, and today, post-Jeris Johnson Generation Z solo artists Violent Vira, Leah Barrientos and Alexis Munroe rule TikTok. At some point this decade, Gen Z did what Gen Z did and made the term “post-grunge” fall out of favour,…
The second act of The Julies has been one of the most surprising and unlikely comebacks in recent memory, but then “surprising and unlikely” is kind of the group’s whole M.O.
Hailing from the storied rock ‘n’ roll town of…Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and with a sound heavily indebted to Britpop, the Julies’ most beloved work is an EP that was released in 1996 after they’d broken up, and which steadily amassed a cult following. It was a reissue of that EP, called Lovelife, in 2020 by the label Lost in Ohio that spurred the group back into action. And if their 2023 album Always & Always sounded, to these ears, tentative in some places — the sound of a band cranking the gears back up to see what they could do — Cherisher is big, loud, and…
Witch Post are magically split down the middle. The duo — Dylan Fraser and Alaska Reid — sing together in every song, latticing their contrasting vocals to create rough yet engaging texture. They also bring their own spirit to the project: Fraser, who hails from Scotland, carves a ramshackle rock energy to each track, letting the songs build out into needling guitar solos, booming drums, and a cracking voice on the verge of a breakdown. Reid, on the other hand, flickers with alt country flair, bringing the sparse, cold atmosphere of her home state of Montana to the recording studio. Together, they pieced together Butterfly, their sophomore EP that’s a satisfactory blend of momentous alt rock and meditative gothic folk.
The Butterfly EP is both solid and pretty, even…
As this fourth release from electronic ambient-rock collaborators Craig Padilla and Marvin Allen plays, connections to two electronic legends suggest themselves. When Allen’s blistering guitar roars against his partner’s pulsating synthesizer-generated backdrops, those moments where Edgard Froese took up guitar to wail alongside his Tangerine Dream cohorts come to mind, and though the music Padilla and Allen create in no way resembles Kraftwerk’s, one can’t help think that the band’s “power plant” name applies when the two generate an epic force-field of electronic sound. But to be clear, the sonic identity fashioned by Padilla and Allen shares little with the personae associated with their precursors; as Unfolding Skies once again argues, the two…
…Jakob Ullmann was born in July 1958, in Freiberg, Saxony, East Germany, the son of theologian and politician Wolfgang Ullmann. After Jakob refused to serve military service in East Germany, he worked as a groundskeeper, boilerman and house painter in Dresden from 1978 to 1982. From 1979 to 1982, he studied church music in Saxony. He was denied official enrolment in Berlin’s Academy of Fine Arts and so he studied composition privately with Friedrich Goldmann until 1984. Since the early eighties, Ullmann has been working as a freelance composer and author of self-published writings, also teaching classes at different universities on New Music, mediaeval music, history of Byzantine music as well as music philosophy. His works have ben performed at festivals of…
Sacred Lodge is the side project of Paris-based producer/sound artist Matthieu Ruben N’Dongo. Rooted in his ethnomusicological research, which explores the role of music in ritual contexts and his own Equatoguinean heritage, the results are unsettling but compelling, characterised by heady percussion and swarming electronics.
But while his 2019 debut Hijos Del Sol was made up of murky downtempo instrumentals, N’Dongo’s follow-up amps up the intensity almost beyond recognition, with a collection of sludgy, abrasive tracks.
One of the starkest differences is the use of vocals, which have previously only featured as echoey background textures. On Ambam, N’Dongo makes full use of his voice. Inspired by…
Minneapolis’ VIAL magically met each other through a Tinder post in 2019, brought together by a shared love of 90’s punk, indie, and grunge. Launching into their home scene with their debut Grow Up they quickly became local favorites with everyone from The Current to Music In Minnesota. Signing to LA’s Get Better Records in 2021, their follow up full length, LOUDMOUTH, was an evolution of their indie-pop and alt-rock beginnings but began to hint at other leanings, especially in the tracks “Ego Death” and the fan-favorite “Piss Punk.” A little less reflection on the past and a little more anger at the future.
Even though their third release, burnout, retained the whimsy, the fiercer side of things kept creeping in. Tales of betrayal and teen drama were…
One of the clearest examples of an album that crafts a strange and beautiful world not quite like any other is Rocketship’s 1996 full-length debut A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness. Even upon arrival, this was an experience unto itself, and 30 years later, these eight songs of bittersweet bliss still feel new.
Rocketship spiked their deliciously melodic indiepop with buzzing organs, spacey interstitials and motorik repetition, aligning them with mid-90s peers like Stereolab and Unrest. “A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness” is an album of unrepentantly vulnerable melodies, unusual seventh chords, lingering ambient interludes, and soft sentiments released at a time when unfriendly, self-conscious punk rock was the order of the day…
On his sixth LP In Another, Toronto-based, Japanese-born, musician and composer Masahiro Takahashi (髙橋 政宏) continues the collaborative expansion of his sonic universe that listeners witness on his 2023 release, Humid Sun. Here he enlists a rotating ensemble of ten guest artists from Toronto’s vibrant music community, including his labelmate Joseph Shabason, who also serves as the album’s co-producer and engineer.
Spurred by his longtime admiration for chamber pop spanning the High Llamas and Free Design to the Beach Boys, Takahashi deviates from the underlying processes of his past two outings, trading Ableton sequences for lead sheets, focusing on creating robust melodic and harmonic foundations first.
If we’re going with the Our Band Could Be Your Life framing, then Boston’s Black Beach are something like this installment’s Big Black-sinister, heavy and pummeling, steeped in industrial menace as much as punk or hardcore.
At times their abrasive post-punk reminds of Bambara’s more belligerent moments, but what’s so fascinating about their aesthetic is how much it shares in common with the early pioneers of noise rock-Scratch Acid, Jesus Lizard and the like-without going full-blown metal in their low-end or distortion boost.
Every searing and scalding guitar riff is made to draw blood, but still carries a vintage jangle to it-Black Beach are relatively restrained when it comes to actual noise, which is, frankly, pretty refreshing.
This woozy, wandering album 8Men from Isa Gordon sees the Ayrshire musical magpie presenting four interpretations of trad folk tracks, alongside four eclectic covers. It’s an intense, otherworldly experience that rewards repeated listens. Vocoder laments twist through ambient soundscapes, never losing the melody at the heart of each track, like Laurie Anderson’s O Superman battling it out with the more introverted end of The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World.
The covers are a clever hook that showcase just how versatile Gordon can be. If you weren’t expecting to hear a trad ambient version of War Pigs by Black Sabbath, then today is your lucky day. This has clearly been a labour of love, choosing songs that, despite their diverse heritage…