Otracami, the project of Brooklyn-based songwriter and composer Camila Ortiz, releases her album Runoff, via Figure & Ground.
Across the eleven tracks of Runoff, Otracami layers intricate vocals, field recordings, and samples into full-band arrangements that feel overfull with life, mirroring the album’s central tension between containment and overflow. “I was trying out leaving for the first time—people and jobs and situations with family,” reflects Ortiz. “It was real trial and error—sometimes that really worked and felt liberating and other times I had to turn around and go back. It was a period of big experimentation.”
On Runoff, Otracami draws from both the landscapes of her life in New York and her childhood in Northern California, which…
Category: indie
Formlessness comes in many forms. There is a loose category of music that seems to shift without any noticeable movement, that gathers in dark pools or drifts in gaseous clouds, and we tend to call that music ‘ambient’. But ambient covers a lot of ground these days: beatless music often displays psychedelic or folk influences, elements of musique concrete, field recording or free improvisation. It’s less a genre and more a kind of abstract moodboard, and as such its practitioners are sometimes guilty of a lack of focus, of throwing too much at the wall, or else too little.
But in the right hands, it can be incredibly potent. Gayle Brogan, the mastermind behind Pefkin, understands the fluidity and adaptability of ambient music better than most. A prolific…
…‘Death is real, someone’s there and then they’re not, and it’s not for singing about, it’s not for making into art,’ sang Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum on ‘Real Death’, one of a whole, heartbreaking album of songs recorded in the wake of his partner’s death from cancer. Personal grief is by its nature individual. We can never know exactly what someone else is feeling, even when they express themselves with eloquence or with complete rawness. But that doesn’t mean we can’t gain something from the experience. Elverum made art – eloquent and raw – whether he wanted to or not, and the same could be said for Joshua Burnside, who wrote and recorded It’s Not Going to Be Okay after and about the death of his best friend, the musician Dean Jendoubi.
There’s something transformational about the music of Ellie O’Neill. The Irish songwriter’s debut album Time of Fallow picks you up in one space, and deposits you in another – listening to it, you’re left feeling like a pebble in the current, pushed downstream to pastures new. A pared-back selection of alt folk minimalism, these sketch-like pieces are uniquely powerful, resulting in a debut album that leaves a palpable impact.
Music that discusses memory, grief, desire, and self-reckoning, the material on Time of Fallow was penned in the aftermath of the pandemic, a time when Ellie O’Neill was forced to return to her family home on a County Meath council estate. A period of personal change, the songs came to reflect her queer identity, while also looking…
You could count the number of intelligible words across IOWA on your fingers if you wanted to.
One of them is “January,” and another one is “snowstorm.” The new album from the Brooklyn-based artist Lia Ouyang Rusli, who records as OHYUNG, is both flush with the timbre of the human voice and almost completely empty of language. As OHYUNG’s first ambient album since 2022’s imagine naked!, IOWA joins a growing body of recent work — by more eaze, Lucy Liyou, even Ethel Cain on her more experimental ventures — that positions the voice not as an authoritative anchor at the center of a composition, but as a stray vapor trail daring listeners to draw meaning from its wisps.
Rusli, who lived in Iowa City from 2023 to…
Egyptian singer Abdullah Miniawy has spent the past decade lending his melismatic voice and Arabic classical maqam melodies to a fascinating range of experimental music, and. Alongside French trumpeter Erik Truffaz he released the 2023 jazz-inflected album Le Cri du Caire; in his ongoing collaboration with German trio Carl Gari, his vocals are paired with sparse electronic atmospherics; and his trio features two trombones playing through baroque-inspired compositions.
Since 2020, Miniawy has been working on a heavier, dancefloor-focused collaboration with French producer Simo Cell. Their debut EP, Kill Me Or Negotiate, employed snapping electronic percussion, thunderous trap bass and whispers of jazz horns, and the pair now delve…
Girl Scout tweak Scandi indie pop’s rich tradition to match the singularity of their stories. They do so by referencing the zenith of 90s jangle-pop and elements of the Cranberries’ cathartic output to engineer a scuzzy alt-rock coded exploration of ennui, parallel possibilities and existential longing amidst the flux of upbringing.
Since their inception six years ago, the Swedish trio have established a solid footing in alternative circles via a lauded debut EP, with Soccer Mommy producer Ali Chant on board, and a much-vaunted European tour with Canadian indie stalwarts Alvvays. Formed during their days as students of jazz at Stockholm’s Royal College of Music, lead vocalist and guitarist Emma Jansson alongside Per Lindberg, on drums, and…
Colleen’s music has long been praised for the way its reveals depth and beauty with almost imperceptible shifts. Her gift for building tiny melodies until they arrive somewhere profound remains intact on Libres antes del final, but the greatest shift is in Colleen’s attitude. On Le jour et la nuit du réel, she transformed the way light moves through a room over the course of a day into subtly gripping listening. Here, she pairs her brilliance at evoking and observing with dynamic action. After years of living near the Barcelona coast, Colleen confronted a long-standing phobia and resolved to swim in open water once again. With her trusty Moog Grandmother synth, she translates her battle between fear and freedom into pieces that are darker, and more propulsive,…
Danny George Wilson follows up the Danny & The Champions of the World album, You Are Not a Stranger Here, with a collection of introspective, powerful songs. The cosmic landscapes of You Are Not a Stranger Here give way to something more plaintive, rawer and earthier. It may or may not have been Wilson’s intention, but the two albums make wonderful companion pieces. Arcade seems to find Wilson at a crossroads: it feels retrospective and nostalgic, but, like Janus, also seems to look forward – although sometimes it feels as if Wilson is stumbling towards the future.
If Arcade finds Wilson in a moment of transition lyrically, this is not the case musically. Wilson has, for a long time, been a brilliant songwriter, singer and master performer. There is now…
The most exciting and terrifying parts of dreams (or nightmares) are the ones we recognize. Familiar fragments collide and reassemble into something strange. Things we thought we knew are turned upside down or ripped apart and sewn together backwards. That unnerving thrill – the shiver of recognition followed by disorientation – is at the core of Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1, the latest collection of covers from prolific music provocateurs Xiu Xiu. Jamie Stewart, Angela Seo and David Kendrick warp and distort classics spanning decades and genres – from 1950s rock n’ roll to new wave, Robyn to Throbbing Gristle.
Xiu Xiu are no strangers to interpretation. Since the group’s inception in 2002, they’ve regularly paid homage to artists they revere – from…
No stranger to a juxtaposition, Bangladeshi composer Teerath Majumder has previous in merging seemingly disparate forms to create something new. His 2023 EP Mouno Shonchar blended traditional Bangla sounds with more contemporary compositions, whilst a collaboration with Dhaka-based, electro-acoustic outfit Taraga resulted in spiky metal riffs butting heads with ambient soundscapes. And last year’s Do Not Feed the Robots participatory concert featured musical improvisations responding to toys and robots as a way of criticising the disenfranchising approach of “so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI)”.
On Dust to Dust, however, he’s upped the ante. Within the space of a single track, he takes us through a multitude of distinct and…
The Funkhaus complex in Berlin, originally built in the 1950s, was in Communist times the home of an East German radio station. After the fall of the Wall, it fell into disrepair and remained neglected until Nils Frahm oversaw a restoration of Studio 3 where he has subsequently recorded his own music during the last ten years or so.
The renovation has also brought back the distinctive acoustic of the original studio, and this is certainly a contributory factor in the success of this fine album by the multi-instrumentalist Ralph Markus Sieber (aka Aukai).
The main instruments here are classical guitar and charango (ten-stringed, lute-like, Andean), but these are delightfully supplemented and complemented by, among other…
In January of last year, Dagmar Zuniga uploaded her debut album to YouTube. By the serendipitous workings of the algorithm-perhaps boosted by the cryptic title and album art in filth your mystery is kingdom/far smile peasant in yellow music took off with surprising speed; within months, she’d hit hundreds of thousands of views and was touring with Mount Eerie. Comment sections and message boards couldn’t contain her, and now in filth is seeing a much-deserved official release through experimental indie powerhouse AD 93.
Zuniga’s songs are alluring largely thanks to their otherworldly patina: simple compositions built around voice, guitar, and synth, filtered through tape hiss so they feel like alien transmissions. (In reality, the songs were captured between…
Two albums in, Special Friend‘s brand of gentle indie rock keeps getting better, more interesting, and more emotionally satisfying. This time are drummer/vocalist Guillaume Siracusa and guitarist/vocalist Erica Ashleson took a little more time to record — seven days in the isolated countryside — and made use of a slightly wider range of instruments along the way.
The result on “Clipping” is one of a band firmly in control of their sound and presentation. The basics of drum and guitar with their lovely, subtle vocals on top sounds extra good when the synths come in, acoustic guitars weave a warm musical bed, and they gently mess around with song structure. At its core Clipping bolls down the best things about indie rock — the simplicity of…
Damaged Bug started off as a place for John Dwyer to experiment with synths and songs didn’t quite fit in with what the Osees were doing at the time. Over the years, the project inched closer to the Osees, by the time of 2026’s ZUZAX it was hard to tell the two groups apart. The only real difference is the use of synths as the main driver of sound instead of guitars, but really songs like “Double Yolks” or wouldn’t sound out of place on an Osees album. Some of the more outré tracks like “Mozzy Rooves & More” do travel some distance from the norm, but as long as Dwyer is behind the mic and is going bonkers in that fascinating way he has, this will all be instantly recognizable to fans of his work. That’s a wordy way of saying this is prime Dwyer made up of songs that were never…
The pressures an artist or band faces when releasing a debut album have been discussed in countless articles. Still, when it comes to young shoegaze hopefuls Ringing and their Julia’s War Recordings-released LP Another Cycle in the Cosmic Wash, there are even more layers of stress for the band to deal with. What started as a noisy solo project built on experimenting with the limits of the middle ground between alt-rock and shoegaze has blossomed into a youthful, promising trio. Although for Colton Walker, Marcos Rocha, and Josh Matthews, the mission has stayed the same since Ringing uploaded their first songs to Bandcamp in 2020: leave their mark on what is slowly becoming a contemporary shoegaze revival.
This is not only Ringing’s debut album…
Almost three years after the release of É Soul Cultura, Vol. 2, Luke Una harvests another unmixed crop of deep dancefloor truffles that spans decades, genres, and continents. The well-traveled U.K. underground club institution asserts his intent with track one, “Spread Love” – impelling disco-funk from Harris & Orr, a duo on the same wavelength as Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson.
The ’90s and 2020s are each represented with two cuts, including DJ Harvey’s aloft and beatless mix of DJ Food’s “Peace” and a shadowy downtempo gem from Fatdog. All else dates from the latter half of the ’70s through the late ’80s, and though there’s wide variety even among what was made within close proximity, a dialogue of sorts occurs from track to track.
The Draft was recorded by Trent Bell at Bell Labs in Norman, OK in October 2010 and originally released by Count Your Lucky Stars (#26) and strictly no capital letters (#25) in March 2011.The 15th Anniversary Edition was remixed by J. Robbins at the Magpie Cage Recording Studio in Baltimore, MD and remastered by Dan Coutant at Sunroom Audio, Cornwall, NY in September 2025.
For a genre that seems to have a stigma attached that it’s “girly,” emo has a surprising lack of women in the genre. This fact alone automatically sets Football, etc. apart because they have not one, but two females in the band. Football, etc. are a three piece emo band based out of Houston, Texas that play a refreshing blend of the highs and lows of the genre. While most emo bands set out to…