With Spring Flood, Mariam Wallentin and Vestnorsk Jazzensemble present a new collective work in which improvisation, poetry, and vivid imagery merge into a living, organic expression.
The album originates from Wallentin’s stay in Basel in the spring of 2023. There, with the Rhine as a constant sonic backdrop, a series of diary notes began to take shape. As Mariam recalls: “The Rhine flowed and murmured day and night outside the hotel, and the riverbank was covered with small flowers and trees already in bloom. And I encountered spring in a new place. I saw the green breaking through and the water rushing along, accompanied by entirely different scents and temperaments than at home. The familiar and the unknown hand in hand.
Category: art pop
A lot of people are making music influenced by trip-hop right now, and a lot of it is very good. But it typically skews towards the sultry meeting point of sexual danger and stoned paranoia with the razor-sharp aesthetic edges of the ’90s and ’00s internet. Bristol’s Tara Clerkin Trio are steeped in their hometown’s trip-hop tradition, but their approach is more folk-rock than the voluptuous blues associated with Tricky or Massive Attack. They make music for autumnal scenes with scarves and coffee rather than a time loop where you’re always ashing the same spliff. Car-stereo stuff like Dido and Beth Orton sometimes comes to mind. It’s almost twee.
Somehow, this approach makes their second album, Somewhere Good, sound slipperier and…
Back in 2024, La Grande Accumulation, the acclaimed first collaboration between Turkish sound artist and photographer Anadol (Gözen Atila) and French composer, musician and singer Marie Klock was compared with everything from folk to French chansons and even Krautrock, but what everyone agreed on was its eccentricity. On Manivelles that eccentricity persists, but the album feels less of a complete statement and more like a bunch of oddities and fragments, a collection of pebbles gathered on the seashore for their strange and evocative shapes. That difference might be ascribed to the very different ways the two albums came together. La Grande Accumulation was the fruition of a thrilling first encounter, an unexpected meeting of minds and talents.
Think about music, all the music that is available to hear, all the music that’s been made, especially in the past 80 years of popular styles. Where does it all go in your mind? How do you get from one thing to another?
These questions matter for this album, because Haruhi Kobayashi started off in the public eye as a J-Pop singer, putting out the 2017 album Inside Out on Sony. To be frank, it’s an undistinguished derivation of American soul and soft rock, the kind of imitation of styles that young musicians work through to find their own voice.
Well, Kobayashi has found that voice, and it’s not just orders of magnitude distant from the earlier album, but a remarkable journey from the universe of pop music into the kind of…
Country boy-in-the-Big Apple, Arthur Russell does folk fusion with his own, peerless verve on a remastered edition of his evergreen 2008 retrospective.
One of the most fascinating, multifaceted, greatest artists of the late C.20th, Arthur Russell is variously known as a disco auteur, virtuoso avant-pop cellist-composer, and bard of the highest order, but maybe less so as a country crooner. Compiled and issued in 2008, Love Is Overtaking Me most ideally framed this lesser-covered aspect of his work with 21 songs recorded under his own name and as part of The Flying Hearts (with Peter Zummo, Rhys Chatham, Jon Gibson, a.o.), plus in duo with Steven Hall as Turbo Sporty, The Flying Hearts, and Bright & Early.
Sometimes you might hear an artist described as a force of nature. It’s a figure of speech usually reserved for big or eccentric personalities, people whose artistic vision is put forward so confidently and with such power that it brooks no argument. This could be applied to the Swedish singer and musician Sara Parkman, whose fourth solo album Aster, atlas tackles the biggest themes: life, death, faith, grief, and the passage of time. But Parkman is a force of nature in another way. Her music has an inherent intensity that seems to be drawn from elemental sources. Listening to her singing and her highly original arrangements, we are constantly reminded of wild and unknown landscapes, and of our smallness within them, but also of our gardens, the things we cultivate,…
…“Embers Edition” features instrumental versions of all album tracks.
“I knew a girl who wrote ‘Silent All These Years’,” spits Tori Amos with startling venom, as ‘Shush’, the stentorian opener to her 18th album grinds to a close. “Where is she?” It’s a good question, since the Tori Amos who wrote ‘Silent All These Years’ all those years ago is in her sixties now and there are those who still favour its parent album, 1992’s magical Little Earthquakes.
So, yes, a good question, but not an entirely fair one and Amos is clearly irked by it. She’s moved on of course, but by the closing ’23 Peaks’, she’s admitting, “I need your help to change me back/Back into the woman I want to be”.
She remains a woman with a distinctive voice…
Ana Roxanne‘s second Kranky release is far more personal and emotionally direct than her previous recordings. While her earlier records could easily be categorized as ambient or perhaps new age, and had a certain element of playfulness along with their meditative qualities, Poem 1 is stark and unobscured, doing nothing to disguise Roxanne’s heartbreak and vulnerability. Nevertheless, her music is still highly hypnotic, and the arrangements draw the listener in and make it easier to focus on her lyrics.
On brief opener “The Age of Innocence,” she expresses the desire to travel and find home over glacial synths and mournful strings. The piano-based “Berceuse in A-flat Minor, Op. 45” is so intimate that it sounds like…
Until recently, Riya Mahesh’s biography nailed nearly every beat of all-American academic achievement, following a familiar arc from early piano lessons to being crowned prom queen, like Olivia Rodrigo’s well-adjusted Wario. But after hitting a snag and failing to get into Juilliard (happens…), the musician regrouped during the pandemic with a SoundCloud account, a trial run of Logic, and nothing to lose.
As Quiet Light, the Texas-born, Boston-based producer has gone on to release multiple albums of increasingly accomplished art pop, along the way nabbing opening spots for Nilüfer Yanya, Chanel Beads, Ana Roxanne, and Hovvdy. Naturally, she’s managed all this while also powering through medical school.
Fans of the darker side of modern musical forms, particularly Swans, have Jarboe somewhere in their minds and surely in their music collections. As a solo artist, Jarboe has made a series of career-defining recordings, 15 in all, before Sightings, her latest. Yet, it took her some eight years between The Cut of the Warrior (2018) and her latest offering, so what is there to expect?
Well, the musical direction is the one Jarboe followed from the beginning of her career, and in that respect, there’s nothing new to report. Yet, what did change is that the quality of her songwriting and performance has grown for the better as time passes. There is a sort of assurance that comes along with experience that exudes here, with practically no lapses in…
Florian T M Zeisig is one of contemporary ambient music’s preeminent shapeshifters. The Berlin-based producer first made waves in late 2020 with You Look So Serious, a compilation of Enya edits that distilled the singer’s voice down to a distant emanation. Since then, he’s set his talents to throbbing neurodrone, skunky spiritual jazz, West Mineral tropical unease, and a fantastic album about working at a nightclub that sounded like a party heard through the wall. His latest endeavor is a rotating collective with a name so florid it makes Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 seem like a perfectly modest moniker, and the theme this time is rock music, stripped of orthodoxy.
Zeisig assembled The Thinking of the World Began Pounding in Our Ears the Moment We Hit Shore…
Poetry and song are related, but they’re not kissin’ cousins, more first cousins at one remove. Composers of art song in the 19th and 20th centuries turned to poets for their song cycles, and rock-era lyrics have often been hailed as poetry, but what happens when a poet – a page poet, albeit adept at performance – combines with musicians and lyricists and adds his own voice to the mix; his reading voice, not a singing one.
In the case of Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate, former probation officer and resident poet with LYR, he’s fortunate in his collaborators, singer-songwriter Richard Walters, with his fine and distinctive lyrical vocals, and multi-instrumentalist and producer Patrick J Pearson, who with Armitage work up a broad palette of…
Wendy Eisenberg has evidently always been a fan of the rhetorical question, but perhaps never more so than on Wendy Eisenberg. “You are the oldest you’ve ever been,” they intone, sweet and clear, on the opening track: “Did you feel yourself change?” Whos, whats, wheres, whys, and hows abound: see “Who was I becoming?” (“Meaning Business”), “What gave me that idea?” and “Where was I when that happened?” (“The Ultraworld”), “Why did I try? Did I try?” (“Will You Dare”), “Is that how I wound up here?” (“Another Lifetime Floats Away”). But, as with all rhetorical questions, there are no answers expected. The asking — or, more specifically, the spacious, open silence that follows in the question’s wake — is the point. After all, absence is itself a kind of presence. Those gaps…
St. Vincent has released Live In London!, a new digital album capturing her acclaimed orchestral performance at Royal Albert Hall.
Recorded during last year’s BBC Proms, the album documents a unique collaboration between Annie Clark and conductor Jules Buckley, backed by a 60-piece orchestra. The performance saw St. Vincent reimagine material from across her career, transforming fan favourites and deeper cuts into sweeping, cinematic arrangements.
Spanning 19 tracks, Live In London! draws from a catalogue that stretches from her 2007 debut Marry Me through to 2024’s All Born Screaming, showcasing the evolution of one of modern music’s most inventive artists. Songs including Digital Witness, Los Ageless and Slow Disco are given…
Following no floor, a remarkable instrumental collaboration with claire rousay that focused on pastoral electro-acoustic soundscapes, more eaze remained with Thrill Jockey for her vocal-based solo effort sentence structure in the country. The album’s lyrics, often delivered through Auto-Tune but occasionally left unaltered, explore intimate moments and frustrating situations, reflecting on jealousy, apathy, and the difficulties of trying to succeed as a musician.
Fragile vocals and bubbling, twinkling synthesizers adorn the patient opener “leave (again),” while ambient pop gem “bad friend” is propelled by a gently blipping pulse and softly crying steel guitar. Another of the record’s more accessible tunes, “the producer,” also contains…
When the London jazz festival ran online only in 2020, an enthralling livestreamed performance by Swiss harpist Julie Campiche’s avant-jazz ensemble was a startling highlight, introducing UK audiences to a virtuoso instrumentalist and composer who was already turning heads in Europe. Campiche plucked guitar, zither and east Asian-style sounds from the harp, mingled with vocal loops, classical music, Nordic ambient jazz and more. You might call her soundscape magical or otherworldly if it didn’t coexist with a campaigner’s political urgency on environmental and social issues. But Campiche is too much of a visionary to overwhelm the eloquence of pure sound with polemic, as her new album, the unaccompanied Unspoken, confirms more than ever.
Gloom, glorious gloom, permeates the musical catalogue of singer-songwriter Fågelle (Klara Andersson), and new album Bränn min jord overflows with it. There are screams, cries, and field recordings. There is a sense throughout that we are swinging between mourning and desperation. Most importantly, there is Fågelle, coolly confident and unpredictable as a composer and performer. Even in the record’s most sedate moments, there is always something simmering within her. As Bränn min jord moves from start to finish, it’s thrilling to find out what those somethings are and how they burst forth from the depths of Fågelle’s mind to the sonic surface.
As the album begins, it is slow, stark. Beneath a sparse piano line and Fågelle’s tense…
Nate Mendelsohn’s skills in the studio are legendary in New York’s indie music world. The multi-instrumentalist, producer and engineer has collaborated with the likes of Yaeji, Frankie Cosmos, Phony Ppl, Dougie Poole, Office Culture, Adeline Hotel, and many more. For more than a decade, he’s also been releasing his own music under the moniker Market. His style is eclectic and often beautifully bizarre, but always seems anchored, sometimes tenuously, to sophisticated pop structures. As idiosyncratic as his latest Market project can get, Cleanliness 2: Gorgeous Technologies has something to offer everyone, even as it travels along its own unique path.
The press materials for Market explain that Mendelsohn was influenced by hip-hop…
Being a composer in a modern sense of the term has gone way past a singular artist sitting down (or standing up) next to their main composing instrument and music staff paper, writing down the notes. The creative process is, these days, enriched by so many other tools available to music creators that enable them to go beyond what was possible in previous centuries, decades, even days. At the same time, the composing process doesn’t limit itself to what is considered classical music as such, but moves into other musical genres, as far as the imagination of the author can take them.
Take the example we have here – Claire Dickson and her third album Balance. A Metropolis Ensemble commissioned composer, Dickson is working mainly as a vocalist and…
The lyrics for Diagonale des Yeux’s debut album were written in the style of an exquisite corpse game, with members Laurène Exposito and Théo Delaunay taking it in turns to patch together ephemeral thoughts and themes in a mix of French, German, English and Spanish. The bizarre, multilingual stories that emerged match the French duo’s ramshackle, home-recorded sound, which features everything from toybox percussion to farmyard sound effects.
Their whimsical approach is anchored in the outsider pop and post-punk of ’80s Europe, which embraced discordant instrumentation and disaffected vocals. These 12 tracks are charmingly lo-fi, built around rudimentary synth and guitar melodies that often careen into…