Twenty-five years is a geologic age in terms of pop culture. For electronic music, it’s an eon, with whole genres, subgenres and movements living and dying faster than mayflies. For an electronic label to simply exist for a quarter century is a major accomplishment, worthy of accolades and great celebration. For an electronic label to be releasing some of their best, most exciting so far along is nothing short of miraculous.
25 Years Cocoon Recordings deserves a medal and a victory lap for that reason alone, as its 15 tracks of driving, relentless, hooky techno feels entirely of-the-moment while simultaneously serving as a weathervane, offering a hint of where electronic music may be heading in the next decade.
Even though it’s ostensibly a retrospective,…
Category: indie
Some combinations are so natural that, in retrospect, you have to ask, “What took them so long to get together?” C Joynes of Cambridgeshire, England and Mike Gangloff of Ironto, Va., have labored separately in substantially similar musical fields. Joynes is a guitarist whose work has drawn inspiration from African and American folk traditions, filtered through early-electric-blues amplification preferences. Gangloff has played fiddle and an armful of other stringed instruments in Pelt, Black Twig Pickers, Eight Point Star and Universal Light, traversing an arc that stretches from old-time mountain music to transcendental electric noise.
Since 2023, they’ve worked together as circumstances allow, touring England,…
Changsha, China post-rockers Summer Fades Awayreleased their first album in 2011 and their second in 2012, with an expansive sound that was often compared to that of MONO. But just as the quintet seemed ready to explode to the next level, they disappeared. Thirteen years later they have returned, having gained wisdom and experience while not missing a musical beat. Fittingly, their comeback album is titled Endless.
Much has happened in China in the last thirteen years. The nation has risen in power on the world’s stage, with an acceleration in trade, technology and growth, and the hosting of both the Summer and Winter Olympics. “Ne Jha 2” is the biggest film on earth this year, demonstrating the power of the arts. The phrase “the storms of…
The language we use always has weight to it, but especially when discussing places of contention. Take, for example, the stretch of land on the northern end of the isle of Ireland. While officially it’s known as Northern Ireland, simply using that term is a political statement in and of itself, tacitly accepting British rule over the six counties ceded by the Republic of Ireland just over a century ago in exchange for its independence. Some people call it the North, implying that the region is still a part of the nation of Ireland, only temporarily under the control of colonizers.
In press materials for their new album Days of Heaven, Belfast band Junk Drawer refer to their home as Ulster — a province that not only includes the six counties of Northern Ireland,…
Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California 1980-1992 assembles little-known sounds from California’s metaphysical underground. Each recording is stylistically different — dream pop, guitar soli, fourth world, avant-electronic — but they are held together by a regional ethos of the “visionary.” This is music that sees through the mind’s eye and conjures new worlds.
Some people say that California is where “the nuts stop rolling” — where those too eccentric to fit in elsewhere often find themselves. What was meant pejoratively is easily reclaimed as a celebration of the free-thinking and the freely-freaking. Until the turn of the millennium, all manner of seekers rolled westward until they hit the pacific. Stationed along this edge, music was a way to…
Philadelphia producer Eev Frances has covered a lot of ground in four years. A given Frances track might be built out of rave stabs, Memphis-style beats, or Merzbow-grade noise blasts, any one of them looped and compressed into a blunt-force instrument; her more elaborate productions have taken the form of brooding post-dubstep, yearning shoegaze gabber, and misty-eyed jungle. No matter the style, the common denominator has been an omnipresent patina of damage: blown out, bitcrushed, and bristling with distortion, as though her DAW were buckling beneath the surfeit of ideas.
Frances’ new release, Sometimes I Forget to Breathe, marks a shift. The outlines of her music are more vivid — the beats have sharper teeth; the melodies glint like the backs of dolphins.
Witch house — the spooky, internet-y electronic music microgenre that was conceived as a joke and had little to do with actual house music — seems to be enjoying a bit of a renaissance right now.
When artists like SALEM, White Ring, and Ritualz were gathering buzz in the early 2010s, witch house was a loosely applied term referring to just about anything that was dark, mysterious, and made on a synthesizer.
By the time a cohesive aesthetic started to emerge, derived from the graininess of the early digital era and the collective taste of extremely online horror subcultures, the would-be genre had already jumped the shark. When Deftones’s Chino Moreno got in on the action with his ††† (Crosses) project, the whole thing felt vaguely embarrassing.
Hailing from an altogether different type of Newcastle (down under) are an exciting new Australian outfit called dust. Their visceral brand of cathartic, confrontational guitar music not only picks up on the coattails of post-punk’s resurgence in recent years, but the four-piece also offer an acute lens of self-inquiry through their lyrics, honed by co-vocalists and guitarists Justin Teale and Gabriel Stove. Their live show pedigree speaks volumes having toured with Interpol globally as well as Slowdive and Bloc Party back home. Now after a string of releases, the band have put to record their most full-bodied material yet in the form of their debut album Sky Is Falling.
The essence of dust’s energetic roots is vibrant from the offset of their debut. Opening track…
Cover the Mirrors, the seventh album from power pop auteur Ben Kweller, is an expression of crushing grief delivered with unbelievable levels of hope and optimism. These songs are Kweller’s first creations since the tragic sudden loss of his son Dorian Zev, who died in 2023 in a car accident at age 16. This kind of world-rattling pain has often historically served as a catalyst for an artist either disappearing from the public eye, or returning to their art as a place to process overwhelming emotions. Cover the Mirrors, while by no means happy, finds Kweller facing all of the heartache and existential confusion related to the death of his son in songs that are honest, vulnerable, and often far more joyful than they are sad. “Don’t Cave” serves as a fairly direct mission…
…limited edition bonus CD featuring 4 demo versions of album songs – ‘The Mirror Still’ and ‘Stay Out of Place’ from the writing/demo sessions at Post Electric studios in Edinburgh, and ‘It’s Not the First Time’ and ‘Like I Had Before’ from the writing/demo sessions in Iona Library last summer.
Idlewild breach dreary themes, such as one’s sense of self and heartbreak, across their self-titled album. All the while the melody on each song, especially ‘Like I Had Before’, creates a juxtaposition of danceability. The diversity of feeling pushes for a cathartic release of the song’s sombre lyrics onto the dancefloor. On the same track, Idlewild’s lyricism captures how our perception of self is shaped by what we witness in the media before we’re able to…
Trust a man whose ideal compositional form is the palindrome to reckon with this axiom: Everything comes back to where you started, then you start over again. 2023’s American Landscapes, the last record by Dutch lutenist/multi-instrumentalist Jozef Van Wissem and American guitarist/filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, ground their sound down to the essentials of pealing feedback and patiently cycling lute melodies, then let it sprawl, taking up all available space. After that, what can you do but build things back up?
That’s one gambit that they employ on their new LP. The quivering, e-bowed guitar tones that Jarmusch wraps around gradual progress on The Day The Angels Cried opener “Concerning Celestial Hierarchy” blossom like a chorus of…
“Oak Parks” is an entropic blues, its sweet, heart-tugging hook corroded by murk and echo, the slash and clamor of guitars paced by a slack-gaited drum machine. Fuzzy, sleepy, faintly dissonant vocals slip and slide over the melody.
Consider it an acoustic, home-spun version of Bardo Pond’s most shamanic moments, or a Linda Smith cassette left to warp in the afternoon sun.
This new collaboration between Miranda Spatula and her West Coast sometime bandmate Lila Jarzombek is beautifully, dizzyingly unstrung.
Miranda Spatula is much loved around here for her rough but charming work with The Spatulas. Lila Jarzombek sometimes plays guitar in Spatulas, but her primary project is Nowhere Flower, a low-fi guitar and beat machine ditties.
Radiance Opposition is the tenth album by Julie’s Haircut, one of Italy’s most enduring independent musical outfits: a band that has developed a genuine sonic catalogue through the years and which makes a renewal move with this record, their first full length since 2019.
With a title taking inspiration from the I Ching book of divination, and a six piece lineup introducing new singer and songwriter Anna Bassy joining the consolidated team formed by Nicola Caleffi, Luca Giovanardi, Andrea Rovacchi, Andrea Scarfone and Ulisse Tramalloni, Radiance Opposition collates an eight tracks cycle that generates a consistent yet multifaceted musical journey, combining psychedelia, electronica and polyrhythms – all blended together thanks to a syncretic…
Lara Agar and Louis d’Heudières are both from East Anglia and, although neither live there now, it lives loud in their imaginations. Their first release together as Monasunne is a landscape-driven conjuring of the region’s ancient history. Inspired by the lingering Anglo-Saxon presence in Suffolk, they have produced a writhing, expressive soundscape that is equal parts Laura Cannell and M.R. James.
The two are composers and performers. Agar’s experimental composition includes a piece based on the writings of Rachel Carson, an EP (Solstice), and work for dance and visual arts. D’Heudières, based in Hamburg, is a researcher and composer, with an eclectic track record that includes a sound installation on the history of copper…
This is an accomplished, confident new album from Denver guitarist D. West, who leans more towards the ‘new age’ instrumental guitar stylings of Wiliam Ackerman’s Windham Hill imprint than John Fahey’s American Primitive-defining Takoma.
Rather than the heavily syncopated thumbed technique of Fahey, West’s music often has a playful nature (‘Cult of the Celestial’) and a real sense of technical beauty (‘The Transpacific International Causeway’).
With busy guitar lines showcasing West’s obvious affinity with his instrument and his discovery of the expansive sound of the 12-string, the music often has echoes of Chuck Johnson’s acoustic work, albeit with a tendency towards a free, experimental style in places.
Time felt a little different for Australian indie band Boy & Bear when they were working on their sixth studio album Tripping Over Time. The band got to record in their own studio for the first time, which gave them the freedom to be free of the pressure to perform on costly hired studio time and slow things down, to the extent that the line between writing and recording became blurred and, to quote frontman Dave Hosking, it gave the band a new “experimental spirit”.
Experimental is a keyword to remember with the album, especially if you’re hoping to box it neatly into the – admittedly wide – spectrum that is americana. The title track, for example, feels like a piece of dreamy new wave escapism as Hosking sings that he’s “Wandering ‘round in the sun”…
Blood Cultures have always thrived in the shadows-anonymous figures cloaked in hoods, channeling psychedelic pop through the haze of Bollywood samples, bedroom electronics, and the uneasy glow of 1970s horror cinema. Now, the project is stepping into an entirely new arena: video games. The group’s fourth studio album also serves as the official soundtrack to Skate Story, the long-anticipated PlayStation title from developer Sam Eng.
It’s a natural collision. Eng’s surreal skateboarding odyssey-equal parts myth, motion, and melancholy-finds its mirror in Blood Cultures’ kaleidoscopic sound design. Across previous albums (Happy Birthday, Oh Uncertainty! A Universe Despairs, and LUNO), Blood Cultures…
Osees have released their new live album, Live at the Broad Museum via Deathgod Records. Album captures a dynamic live performance at The Broad museum in Los Angeles. The record features extended tracks that highlight the band’s improvisational energy, including a standout 22-minute jam, “I Got a Lot.” Unlike their tightly structured studio recordings, this album explores krautrock-inspired grooves, hypnotic rhythms, and experimental soundscapes, showcasing the band’s versatility and adventurous live presence.
The album is mixed by frontman John Dwyer and mastered by JJ Golden, emphasizing the raw, immersive quality of the performance. Critics praise it as a document of Osees’ live power, capturing moments of spontaneous creativity…