a sad song for A. brings together Stefano Gentile, Giulia Dal Vecchio, Gigi Masin, Fabio Orsi, Anacleto Vitolo, and the multimedia project Hiseka to explore emotional states through music, text and photography. Originating from an informal conversation about anxiety, the project evolved into a creative dialogue in which inner experience became shared expression.
Structured around four stages we may recognise – Panic, Anxiety, Light and Dream – each contributor shaped one phase in their own language. Gentile provided imagery, Dal Vecchio translated feelings into words, and the musicians responded with original works reflecting each emotional shift. The result is a thoughtful constellation of perspectives that invites listeners to…
Category: indie
ātamōn, the first full-length release from Swedish composer Amina Hocine, was born from a foghorn organ built by the composer herself, made from everyday objects taken from hardware stores. Listening to ātamōn without any context, it would not be immediately apparent that the music was made utilizing any acoustic instruments, let alone one so rudimentary.
The most immediately noticeable aspect of ātamōn is how icy and synthetic its drones sound, almost feeling like a digital condensation of Harry Bertoia’s sound sculptures.
ātamōn was recorded in an abandoned iron mine in rural Sweden, a process reminiscent of Pauline Oliveros’ cistern experiments, but the record doesn’t sound anything like her…
…features a collection of reimagined acoustic tracks known as the “Londinium Versions”, which were recorded in West London with a heavy emphasis on string arrangements.
Technically, ‘Whiplash’ is bôa’s third full-length, but the discography and narrative of the London-based band is a little more complicated than that.
Formed in 1993 as a funk outfit, their first album is technically 1998’s ‘The Race of a Thousand Camels’, though due to label issues it was subsequently re-released as ‘Twilight’ in 2001.
There was also an unreleased full-length, ‘Acton Live’, that preceded it, which was subsequently uploaded and made available online in 2010.
And while 2005’s second record ‘Get There’ is officially ‘Whiplash’’s predecessor, there…
…it is no exaggeration when Zane Mclaughlin of Oldstar, a band from Panama City Beach in Florida’s panhandle, sings, “Let’s pray for my tires / So they don’t spread like wings.” Florida tires need prayers, especially when they have to live through all the driving that happens on Oldstar’s latest project, Of the Highway, a focused, heartfelt country rock record about, mostly, the highway. Oldstar’s first few projects, while showing hints of this album’s country inflections, drew more on a kind of post-Alex G bedroom — slowcore that continues to pervade alternative music — not an uncommon breeding ground for a contemporary alt-country band. But rather than translating that genre’s songwriting norms into the sonic language of major chords, pedal steel, harmonica,…
…doesn’t it seem like lovers with hubris, short-sightedness, and a lack of sentimentality are the ones most likely to get divorced — or, if you prefer, the quickest to get divorced? And yet, whatever the circumstances were in that scenario, fictional or otherwise — centrifugal force Mary Claire proves on their debut that they are an outlier. The musician also makes the very convincing points that the power of love is much, much stronger than statistical data; far more precious than the way we carelessly bandy about the word in our degraded and thus devalued lexicon.
Slake have carved out a wry sub-sub-subgenre called “lesbian doom folk.” The indie band hails from somewhere in the Bay Area, but it’s unclear exactly where, since Slake’s…
The Worm Moon is the fifth full length LP from New Hampshire’s Footings, home to the songs of underground music lifer Eric Gagne. Out now on Feeding Tube records, The Worm Moon is an immersive set of brief skeletal folk-rock missives and instrumental interludes that rewards repeated through-listens. Thematically The Worm Moon deals with attempts to find peace and growth within spaces of decay and stagnation, reflecting its title which refers to a full moon in March. A time when the worms start moving again, and all the new possibilities of spring are just around the corner – but we are also reminded of all that living tissue which fell the previous Autumn, upon which the worms feast. Like many works of art surfacing at this point in history, this…
Kelby Clark is an LA-by-way-of-Georgia banjo player who blends divergent styles and approaches to forge his own novel direction for the instrument. Over a series of mostly self-released home-spun recordings from the past five or so years, he has honed his approach, expanding the traditions of his point of origin in the American south to include free improvisation and eastern modalities — an alchemy familiar to Sandy Bull, a fellow stretcher of the vocabulary of the banjo and of the concept of “folk” and the traditional. His sparse and appropriately fiery new LP Language of the Torch represents a significant milestone in his development of his own science of the banjo, a statement of intent for his artistic practice.
…Across the seven searching pieces that…
According to Roland Barthes, the event of grief gives way to an absence that paradoxically fills us. “We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.” The oxymoron of becoming full with emptiness. The hollows fill with more empty space. When Richard Skelton lost his wife in 2004, he began to process the tragedy by composing music. He filled the empty spaces with sound. At that time he also returned to his parents’ home in Wigan, where, in his own words, he was “reconnecting with a sense of that childhood wonder, completely refracted through the prism of grief”.
Born in the UK and most recently based in Ireland, Skelton is a multidisciplinary artist: a musician, poet, filmmaker, and writer. He resolves to bury his ghosts and then exhume them,…
…featuring exclusive bonus CD with four additional tracks.
The new record from Kayo Dot begins with an achy drone – think a tea-kettle whistle as filtered through the pump organ of some long-abandoned Gothic cathedral. “Day to night to following night,” frontman/primary songwriter Toby Driver growls at the record’s dawn, his voice alternately tortured and torturing as the drone glacially shifts. “I sit quietly, contemptuously/ Stalking myself.” And, later in the same song, the 11-minute-long affair that opens the group’s Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason LP, that sense of darkness and dread spreads like a stain: “Rusty garden shears cut through the weeds/ Growing over the grave,” Driver bellows, his consciously “evil”…
Omnivore Recordings and The International Pop Overthrow Music Festival are proud to present International Pop Overthrow: Vol. 26, a three-disc compilation featuring 66 tracks by artists from all over the world who have played the International Pop Overthrow (IPO) festival, along with some who haven’t — at least, not yet! The IPO compilations go back as far as the festival, to 1998 when Vol. 1 was a single disc. Since then, the collection expanded to two discs the following year, and then three discs in 2002 for Vol. 5, and it has remained a three-a set since. International Pop Overthrow: Vol. 26 showcases artists from across the globe, doing just about every sub-genre of pop music, including power pop, pop/rock, folk/pop, psychedelic pop, garage, indie-rock, modern…
There are albums that, because of their seeming fragility, don’t make a great first impression. The debut offering from White Magic for Lovers is a case in point. Come to The Book of Lies half-attentive in the midst of a busy day and don’t be surprised if it seems to spiral away and get lost in the ether, all too easily overwhelmed by distractions as prosaic as the pinging of an email arriving or the whistling of a boiling kettle.
But persevere because the wispiness here is deceptive. Second and third listens reveal intention, playfulness (for all the prettiness of its melodies, the LP rather ominously shares a title with a book by occultist Aleister Crowley) and a far wider sonic palette than you might initially have realised. To adapt a phrase popularised by…
…remastered by Rashad Becker with previously unheard bonus track exclusive to this edition.
In 2010, Matthew Barnes emerged from The Wirral with an almost album-length EP, Dagger Paths. It immediately caught the attention of the music press with its strange, blurry mixture of psychedelic pop and languid dubstep. Engravings follows the same vein, but with Dagger Paths‘ rougher edges honed into a series of enigmatic spectral half-songs that swirl and bite in successive layers of oblique, occasionally abstract, textures.
To record Engravings, Barnes made the audacious choice of mixing his tracks outdoors, immersing himself in the supposedly spiritually-charged environment of the Wirral peninsula. As such, even if his music descends from…
Red Bull Records and AWOLNATION present the limited edition of Run, celebrating the 10th Anniversary of this album. Remastered for this release, the Anniversary edition includes the original Run album, and a bonus songs of previously unreleased material.
Run is an ambitious and impressive project. AWOLNATION’s sophomore album was written, performed, and produced entirely by lead singer Aaron Bruno. The album features 14 new songs that go in many different directions, offering softer, more acoustic sounds, energetic almost-punk-like sounds, and everything in between. The album starts off strong with “Run,” with its heavy beat and eerie lyrics like the repeated “I am a human being/capable of doing things”…
…features five new tracks, including her recent singles, “Elton John,” and “Mid July,” the original demo of “Erotica,” and “LTTL”, a new version of “Light Through the Linen,” feat. Chrome Sparks.
Returning for her third full-length outing, with Erotica Veronica Miya Folick has delivered a record that’s equal parts haunting, spectral folk-pop and anthemic, guitar-drenched heft.
A cathartic sonic exorcism, it duels between the melancholy and the empowering, showcasing Miya’s ability to switch from tender and serene to grungy power pop.
Take the saccharine opener ‘Erotica’, which serpentines between indie rock and folk; the synthpop richness of ‘La Da Da’; or the impassioned war cry of ‘The Fist’.
Souvlaki is Slowdive’s second studio album, originally released in 1993.
Though not as big and swirling as Just for a Day, there’s more of an attempt to put advanced song structure and melody in place rather than just craft infinitely appealing, occasionally thunderous mood music. Everything is simplified, as if Brian Eno’s presence on two songs – he contributes keyboards and treatments and co-wrote one tune after turning down the band’s invitation to produce – hammered home the better aspects of “ambient” music. This is no Music for Airports though.
On the opening “Alison,” the largely uplifting “When the Sun Hits,” and the darkly blissful “Machine Gun,” Slowdive are still capable of mouth-opening, spine-tingling flourishes.
Before Chat Pile took on sold-out tours and widespread critical acclaim, they played Roadburn 2023-their biggest show to date, in front of a packed room of 3,000 on the festival’s main stage. Fresh off the release of God’s Country, the Oklahoma quartet brought their suffocating, sludgy noise rock to Tilburg for their first-ever European performance, delivering a set that felt like a milestone. The bleakness, the anguish, the raw absurdity-it all scaled up effortlessly, proving that Chat Pile’s chaos could consume any audience, no matter the size.
The set was recorded by the Roadburn staff and later remixed by the band’s longtime engineer, Jared Stimpfl, capturing the full weight of the performance. The result is something both…
Taking their name from the mining byproducts that litter their home state of Oklahoma, American four-piece Chat Pile attempt to make sense of a crumbling world through their sludgy strain of noise rock. After finding online viral success with their 2019 debut EP, This Dungeon Earth, the group built their tense sound across the 2020s with acclaimed albums like God’s Country (2022), Cool World (2024), and In the Earth Again, a collaborative album with guitarist Hayden Pedigo.
Blood at Night: This release contains the entire collection of manipulated tape loops recorded during the making of Cool World. Sections of most of these tracks were dissected and subtly woven into the final version of the record. All the original cassettes used on this collection were sourced…
…Only a few months ago, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith released GUSH, a vocal synth set packed with perky, romantic, danceable club cuts, with an undercurrent of social commentary. On Thoughts on the Future, the artist returns to the instrumental realm, offering three extended ambient-electronic meditations. The first single, “I Miss the Way You Swim,” is rife with melancholy, easing the way into the new year. Bubbling at the center, the nearly ten-minute piece blossoms into a gorgeous glockenspiel suite. As the orchestral elements enter, one takes a breath and whispers, “Maybe the new year won’t be so bad after all.”
The title track is peaceful and melodic, with percussive textures increasing in density, relaying a feeling of forward movement. Wordless voice…
