XEXA’s debut album, Vibrações de Prata, was an anomaly for Príncipe. The Lisbon label made its name releasing batida, a percussive strain of dance music that rewires Angolan styles like kuduro and kizomba with jagged synths and samples. But you probably wouldn’t dance to Vibrações de Prata. Album closer “Clarinet Mood,” with its field recordings of squawking seagulls and splashing water, transports you to a haunted space — imagine Brighton pier shrouded in Silent Hill 2’s impenetrable fog. The track has more in common with the moody improv sets you’d expect from a midweek night at London’s artsy Cafe OTO than Lisbon’s raucous MusicBox. In fact, XEXA made “Clarinet Mood” in London as part of her course at Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
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Solar Eyes are an indie dance two-piece from Birmingham’s Hall Green. With a sound that binds together psychedelic guitars, foot stomping beats and trippy lyrics, their sophomore album Live Freaky! Die Freaky! exudes a wild-eyed exuberance that echoes the 90s’ marrying of electronic dance music and floppy-haired indie tunes.
Their opening salvo of singles may hark back to a time when indie kids finally plucked up the courage to get onto the dancefloor and shake a tailfeather, but they are tasty and engaging with a spirit of their own. “Time Waits for No One” and “Set the Night on Fire” are especially intoxicating and aim straight for the hips. “Murdering Hippies” is, likewise lively and hypnotic and is obviously much indebted to the shadow of Charles Manson’s…
In the two years since their debut album KILLJOY, Coach Party has been rather busy. On the heels of their moody, brash exploration of the mid-twenties’ blues, the Isle of Wight quartet went on their first international tour, performed at South by Southwest and Glastonbury, and opened for Queens of the Stone Age and Wet Leg. Their second record, Caramel, is a breakup album — though the post-mortem analysis is happening in a dingy, punky bar, and who (or what) exactly frontwoman Jess Eastwood has been torn asunder from remains pleasantly vague.
The record maintains a joyous, party-rocking vibe not in spite of but alongside this upset. Coach Party explores the peaks and nadirs of a fuzzily-defined, oft-drunken life with touching…
There was an almost unnerving promise displayed on Once Now, Then Again, the breakthrough EP from Vermont based singer-songwriter Lutalo. A hushed confidence accompanied their intricate – at times lo-fi – arrangements that displayed a seasoned approach to composition far beyond their years. Off-kilter folk rubbed up against plaintive indie ruminations as Lutalo tested and found their voice.
And the intervening couple of years have merely served to embolden the artist who now returns with their debut LP The Academy, an eclectic and immediate affair stripped of any past insecurities. Named after their former school The Academy, is an intricate exploration of young adolescence set against the backdrop of a frightful and…
Expanded reissue of the 1988 EP Hammer now includes a newly compiled “Echo” side of lost recordings. Out on vinyl, CD and digital with liner notes by Tom Cheek, and rare archival material. In 1988, Athens, Georgia’s Kilkenny Cats released Hammer, a fierce and atmospheric EP that captured the moody heart of the late-’80s Southern underground. More than three decades later, this cult classic returns in expanded form as Hammer + Echo. Remastered and featuring unreleased recordings, unseen photos, and liner notes that reframe the story of a band that never quite fit the mold. Out September on Propeller Sound Recordings, Hammer + Echo includes the original six-track Hammer EP one side, remastered from the original tapes, and a newly assembled…
Modular synth-based music, once the domain of acid-fried German hippies, and, later, burnt-out basement noise freaks, has morphed into something unrecognizable.
In a context in which background music for studying and sleeping holds the most streaming capital, and yuppies are increasingly seeking new-agey balms to protect themselves from the ravages of internet culture, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that synth music has become yet another cog in the content mill, a test run for artists to shill gear or soundtrack Stranger Things rip-offs. In other words, it’s a peculiar time for Sam Prekop to transition into the modular synth world.
Prekop, best known as the vocalist and guitarist for Chicago indie rock stalwarts…
…year to year, the air is growing swiftly warmer around the world. This is the impetus for forms of minutiae‘s Ice Series, produced in association with UNESCO & WMO’s Art for Glaciers Preservation. Now in its fourth (of five) installments, the series continues to underline both the beauty of glacial sounds and the threat of their extinction.
Cheryl E. Leonard has been involved in climate issues for years; much of this album stems from a residency in Svalbard in 2011. The difference between this and prior entries in the series is the human element; Leonard shares not only field recordings, but the percussion of found objects such as bones and driftwood, as well as samples and scrapes from saws, boats, beakers and more.
We can imagine David Rothenberg relating to…
The post-rock supergroup Speed of the Stars has released their long-awaited second album. The band features Steve Kilbey of Australian psych pioneers The Church; Frank Kearns of Irish alt-rockers Cactus World News; singer-songwriter Hugo Race, and Barton Price of 80s Aussie chart stars Models.
Recorded at Puccini Floating Music Academy near Pisa, and produced by Race, While Italy Dreamed…. through Summers of Haze comes nine years after the band’s debut, which was initially a collaboration between Kilbey and Kearns, who had met while touring the US in the mid-80s.
“A few years back I read Hugo Race’s most excellent memoir Road Series about his adventures touring and making music all around…
This album is the full award-winning Edinburgh Fringe live show recorded at the Jazz Bar. Running to almost an hour, it includes all the chat and banter and all the jokes. The other CD and the LP focus on the music with a couple of bootlegs involved, but this is the core live show.
58 Fordwych Road (Flat 5) was the home of Roy and Mocy Harper in swingin’ 60s London. It was an open house for many a waif and stray and a hang out for budding musicians of the day. They would come round and play games and swap songs and spliffs. What they learnt from each other – at the start of their own voyages of discovery – led to so many treasures. When I think about this I realise that for such a humble little two room home, it had an outsize impact on the music scene in London…
Sooner or later, everyone who loves dub techno becomes acquainted with the gossamer tenor of Paul St. Hilaire. His voice gets stretched and pulled across so many of the greatest records in the genre, from his early collabs with Basic Channel’s Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald to his rousing appearance on Intrusion’s late-period benchmark The Seduction of Silence in 2009. As befits a style whose exponents obscure themselves behind stark record sleeves and inscrutable aliases, the artist formerly known as Tikiman — born on the Caribbean island of Dominica but based in Berlin — has been modest about his importance. “I prefer to say a little ting and stay out of the light,” he told Resident Advisor’s Richard Akingbehin in a 2021 feature, but since striking up…
The best ambient music has two distinct ways of pulling you in. On one hand, the genre’s purpose is to wash over you or to pass you by. The clue is in the name: ambient music is in the ether, it is furniture, made for semi-conscious immersion rather than immediate connection. But it can connect. There are those rare albums that achieve a second way, albums that, despite their slowness or their beatlessness, somehow become utterly engaging or even transcendent.
Eno at his best fits the bill; so too does Inoyamaland’s Danzindan-Pojidon. And so did M. Sage’s 2023 collaboration with Zander Raymond, Parayellowgram, four ten-minute compositions of lush, blissful complexity.
Also in 2023, Sage released a solo album,…
Music is by its very nature a mysterious phenomenon. The question of what drives people to make it (and what drives people to listen to it) has occupied philosophers, anthropologists and scientists for centuries. And it raises other questions, such as why do different people like different music? Why does one of my children like vaporwave while the other one likes Yann Tiersen? How is it that some artists become immensely popular while other similarly talented ones remain in relative obscurity?
Why, for example, aren’t The Little Unsaid as famous as Nick Cave or Radiohead? That question isn’t necessarily as flippant as it sounds. The band’s frontman, John Elliott, has a voice full of spine-tingling high notes and lovelorn eeriness…
After two albums under her belt, Berlin-based harmonica player Ariel Bart debuts an unusual bass-less, drum-less trio — active for the past three years — with cellist Talia Erdal and pianist Arseny Rykov, narrating heartfelt stories with uncanny musical empathy.
In After Silence, she invites us to explore what lies beneath the surface, urging attention to detail and to what’s often hidden.
The title track, “After Silence”, sets the tone as a melancholy opening statement. “Wind from the North” leans on tastefully supportive piano anchored in a relentless odd-metered pulse, with Bart’s solo radiating emotional resonance at every turn. The whole piece carries a mesmerizing poignancy.
Trio of Bloom is the first studio meeting between pianist/keyboardist Craig Taborn, guitarist Nels Cline, and drummer Marcus Gilmore. It was facilitated by producer David Breskin, who, in the mid-’80s, brought together guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. All admired one another despite different approaches to jazz. That idea yielded the 1987 one-off Strange Meeting by Power Tools. Breskin has produced Decoding Society dates, several Frisell recordings, and has worked with Cline since 2010.
Set opener “Nightwhistler” was composed by Jackson, and it appropriately begins with an intensely lyrical and poetic drum solo from Gilmore. A minute in, Cline starts delivering…
Over the past decade, European archival label Flee has been unearthing some of the globe’s most distinctive sounds. Reissuing out-of-print rarities along with new interpretations from contemporary artists, their albums have included 2017’s exploration of Kenyan Benga music, a 2021 recording of the oral traditions of Gulf pearl divers and most recently a catalogue of Greek orthodox singing from the monastery on Mount Athos. Their latest edition is equally specific, delving into both archival and new French-language Creole music from Louisiana.
Influenced by the birth of jazz in New Orleans, as well as early blues, rock’n’roll and French colonial legacy, this largely African American folk music of the 1950s to the 1980s veers from…
“Forest and the Shore” by Keith Christmas is remarkable. In his essay for Gather in the Mushrooms, compiler, author and Saint Etienne member Bob Stanley says it is “as evocative as its title. The song has a deeply wooded sound, like a cross between Serge Gainsbourg’s “Ballade de Melody Nelson” and Ralph Vaughan Williams.” To this can be added the brooding, dramatic melancholy of Scott Walker’s “The Seventh Seal.”
Despite the grandeur of “Forest and the Shore” – and the astounding Richard Thompson-esque, Tom Verlaine-predicting guitar solo taking it to its close – Gather in the Mushrooms: The British Folk Underground 1969-1975 is ostensibly an 18-track collection of British folk recordings. Or, more accurately, folk-rooted or…
Welsh musician Cerys Hafana’s first release on the brilliant subsidiary of Hamburg-based global music label Glitterbeat explores the full sublime potential of its title, one all too often invoked to mean meekness and sweetness.
Opening track ‘Helynt Ryfeddol’ (An Incredible Ordeal) introduces a folk story about an old man drawn towards the purest music he has ever heard, sung by a bird, to which he listens until it stops. He returns home to find his house entirely changed and lived in by different people. Seven tracks later, the title track tells us that the bird was an angel, and that the man went away for 350 years, never to be seen again.
Angel is the third release by this piercingly beautiful singer and exceptional, adventurous…
In an interview with David Joez Villaverde from March 2024, Fred Moten considers crossing out the world. Building upon the writings of Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva, he positions the pursuit of justice as requiring not just “the end of the world as we know it, or the end of the world, or this world, as such” but “the end of the very idea of world.” Less than a year later, the feeling of the end – or, at least, an end – is in the air, with Western liberal ideals of a stable existence, which only ever applied to some anyway, swiftly swept aside to the rhythm of executive orders.
While the sort of destructive accelerationism we’re witnessing is unlikely to be conducive to Moten’s interests in “the preservation of earth”, his works, past and present, seem prescient in…