Time is a Succession of Such Shapes, declares Loula Yorke. But what shapes? The answers can be found within this double disc, which includes a hard copy of June’s exquisite The Book of Commonplace mixtape. Through her yearlong project of monthly releases, Yorke has been proposing that life itself is a mixtape, and we have the ability to capture its sounds and to share them with others. No matter how common or mundane these sounds may be – for example, the advertisment that follows the cassette click of the album’s opening seconds – they form a sonic fabric in to which we are woven. Whether flitting between TV stations or outdoor locales, we are entering different biophonies and anthropophonies. Yorke dances to them, and embeds them in ambient frames.
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It feels strange to be reviewing a ‘best of’ release in 2025 — and stranger still to be old enough to cover reunion releases from bands of your youth.
How We Choose to Remember It is a reminder that millennials are getting older — but more importantly, that Rilo Kiley’s songs still hold up effortlessly. Having gone their separate ways in 2013, ageing American indie-heads rejoiced at news of the band reuniting to headline the Just Like Heaven festival this summer. To mark the occasion, Rilo Kiley are releasing an eleven-track introduction to their back catalogue.
Is it needed? Of course not. But there’s something charmingly old-school about a concise snapshot of a band’s output — and no doubt a vinyl full of bangers will appeal to many.
At the tail end of 1976, with the majestic Oxygene, French composer Jean-Michel Jarre became electronic music’s crown prince, savior, and rock star all rolled into one. Overflowing with lush rhythms, tasty textures, and earworm synth melodies, it earned Jarre international fame and eventually sold some 15 million copies. Four years prior, Jarre was just a scrappy young buck finding his feet in a genre that barely existed; scarcely out of his teens, he was part of the pioneering electronic music collective Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), co-founded by legendary avant-gardists Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. By the early ‘70s, Jarre had dallied in rock, classical music, pop, and radical experimentalism, and his first album reflected it all.
Caroline Rose’s new album, year of the slug, is loaded with one jolting pleasant surprise after the next. The glaring standout in this regard: “god- damn train.” Amidst 11 tracks veering between hazy indie pop to punky singer/songwriter fare, this centerpiece song rushes out the gate with its twangy guitar and fittingly stomping percussion.
Rose — a Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter from New York — punctuates her vocals on “god- damn train” with long held humming that echoes the best ad-libs of classic Sun Records-era country. Her lyrics here are a stream of conscious list of things she feels pressured to do in a conformist, capitalist society, before giving way to more dysfunctional urges. Best of all: her juxtaposing an ad-rep worthy boast of “more…
The latest in Ivo Perelman’s endless parade of stimulating duets pairs him with the drummer Tyshawn Sorey who is every bit as perceptive, inventive and wily as the tenor saxophonist himself. Parallel Aesthetics will doubtlessly conjure up comparisons to the original sax/drums free jazz exploit, Interstellar Space by John Coltrane and Rashied Ali. But the concept of dual improvisation with a saxophone and drums has as many differences as there are similarities.
Perelman is a tenor saxophone of boundless facility but was never accused of aping Trane, as he has long ago developed his own language, one deeply rooted in the tradition established before JC emerged, but always looking forward.
Likewise, Tyshawn Sorey is not Rashied Ali.
Over recent years Norway has had an influx of emerging and firmly established talent that cross genres and offer their distinctive take, with Fucales being the latest in a long line to share their interpretation of jazz-infused psych/alt rock.
In their latest album Airhead, the band channel their personal stories into a vibrant exploration of circumstances told through the collaborative fusion of the band members driven through playful compositions, daring arrangements, and emotive lyrics.
With Airhead being their most creatively adventurous record to date, the band introduces their audience to the evolution of their sound and songwriting with album opener ‘Live’. Delving into their new-found maturation of musical…
There are highly conceptual, process-based albums, and then there’s GHOST, which absolutely thrives on a whole other level. Combining themes of grief and loss with the controversial concept of artificial intelligence, Amsterdam-based musician Asa Horvitz searched for the right combination of words and music and called upon AI designers and fellow musicians to complete the task.
Grieving from the 2017 loss of his father, jazz and experimental guitarist Bill Horvitz, Asa was looking for a musical language “to evoke our metaphysical and tangible experiences with loss and the weight of history that surrounds those who have passed on”, according to the press notes. Assembling a dataset of more than 150 pre-existing texts from throughout history that deal…
How does one go about making music not usually understood as “punk” sound like punk? How best to apply the DIY ethos, the construction by destruction, of punk art to other genres? How can the guide-fires that have been lit by past iconoclasts of the underground illuminate explorations in different styles?
Maine-based fingerstyle guitarist Liam Grant provides his answers to these questions in the form of his sophomore LP, Prodigal Son, a collection of anti-tradition-traditional-style music — American Primitive with a capital A and P through a dirtied lens — kindly and perhaps counter-intuitively dedicated to his parents.
The opening track, “Palmyra,” starts with a gong-like bang on the open strings of…
Composer Catherine Lamb (b. 1983) deals with harmonic spectra and microtones in her work.
Slow, staggered presentations of overtones unfold into rich vertical sonorities, with the tiniest shift in intonation serving more as an event than an inflection. Ghost Ensemble (Margaret Lancaster, flute; Sky Macklay, oboe; Ben Richter, accordion; Lucia Stavros, harp; Chris Nappi, hammered dulcimer; Martine Thomas, viola; Tyler J Borden, cello; James Ilgenfritz and Gregory Chudzik, contrabass) is a go-to for adventurous music-making, and they take to Lamb’s with commitment and precision.
Interius/Exterius (2022) is a large-scale piece in which Lamb deals with the spatiality of sounds. As the title suggests, the juxtaposition…
Pantsula dancing and kwaito go hand in hand. Both emerged from the townships of Johannesburg, and both were forces of joy and genius during desperate times. When kwaito landed on the global main stage around the turn of the millennium, star acts like TKZee, featured pantsula dancers in their hit music videos like the brilliantly upbeat “Dlala Mapantsula.”
Mahlubi “Shadow” Radebe and Zwelakhe “Malemon” Mtshali were two dancers from the township of Tembisa, in northeastern Johannesburg, who decided to transition from the shuffling and low movements of pantsula to singing over kwaito’s laidback hip-hop-meets-house swagger. But to do that, they would need to upgrade from their beat-up cassette player to an actual,…
In the second decade of the twentieth century, one of Italy’s most revolutionary artistic movements was born in the face of rapid technological and social change: Futurism.
One of its key figures was Luigi Russolo, a painter, inventor, and composer. In 1913, he published the manifesto ‘The Art of Noises’, which proclaimed that if the world’s sounds have changed, then music should keep up. Instead of using classical instruments and harmonies, Russolo advocated the use of noise – the hum, screech, shriek of the new soundworld of machines.
To realise his vision, he constructed a series of instruments called intonarumori (literally ‘noise intoners’). They were mechanical devices resembling boxes with large resonance tubes…
Lampland is both a band and a solo project. Started in NYC, Tommy Bazarian, the artist behind this project has now moved it to California, and Get Serene is the third offering from Lampland.
Behind these bare facts though, there is some detailed, layered, languid music here, that covers quite a wide ground, taking cues from both Elliot Smith and Belle and Sebastian, via Yo La Tengo when they are in their more quiet moment.
Luckily for Bazarian and his collaborators, he doesn’t wear his influences, consciously or unconsciously, right on his sleeves, but wraps them up nicely in his very own take of them without seeming to make any forced effort to do so – it all seems to come quite natural to him through the nine songs here.
The album was released in July 1971 and followed his successful and influential album Songs for a Tailor. Once again, Jack’s intention was to make a record distinctly diverse from the music he had recorded with Cream, and Harmony Row expanded even further on the musical palate he explored on Songs for a Tailor featuring compositions which drew stylistically on jazz, folk, classical, rock and Eastern musical influences.
Joining the recording sessions at London’s Command Studios were guitarist Chris Spedding and drummer John Marshall, with Jack singing and playing piano, organ, bass guitar and cello. Harmony Row was highly acclaimed upon its release and is now rightly regarded as a masterpiece and one of Jack’s seminal works.
Although she has been releasing albums since 2011, the Serbian-born New York resident, composer, pianist, performer and improviser Teodora Stepančič is here making her second appearance on Another Timbre — the first as a composer as her previous appearance on the label was as the pianist who performed Mark R. Taylor’s compositions on his album Aftermaths (Another Timbre, 2018).
In the years between that release and O A | F G, years which included the COVID disruption, Stepančič self-released an impressively varied 14 albums digitally. One of those featured “OA” performed by the ensemble Ordinary Affects and Douglas Farrand + people buying books at MIT bookstore Boston, released in December 2018.
First some translations. Incendies means fires, and d’incise means “of incise.” The latter is the nom du song of Laurent Peter, a Swiss experimental musician who has worked in folk-infused La Tène, dub-inspired Diatribes and communal Insub Meta Orchestra, all ensembles that have explored the manufacture, manipulation and repetition of sound. He also tests the parameters of techno under the name Tresque (And Three). His tools have varied across and within all of these projects, but a dispassionate curiosity about the material at hand has persisted.
Two and a half years have passed since the last time Dusted checked in on d’incise, at which time he and his frequent partner Cyril Bondi were making music from and about cowbells.
“I write when I feel overwhelmed in my life,” explains Miles Chandler, singer, songwriter, and guitarist with the Boston-based band Clifford. “I want to disobey the impulse to keep these things private.” True to this confession, which appears in the press materials for their latest album, Golden Caravan, Clifford are a quartet that produce lumbering, guitar-heavy indie rock, giving voice to the frustrations and complications of everyday life. They’re not millionaires selling out arenas; they’re in the trenches with the rest of us, which makes Chandler’s songs all the more potent and easy to love.
Chandler, along with drummer Ben Curell, guitarist Danny Edlin, and bassist Nate Scaringi, worked on Golden Caravan for hours at…
The world needs The Ex, now more than ever. For 45 years, the Dutch post-punk trailblazers have loudly and frantically defied capitalist oppression with a militant message, focusing klieg lights on the cracks in our geopolitical system. With unflagging fervor, they hold up a mirror to inequality and social injustice. Their music, rife with punk energy and an exploratory spirit, is just as radical as their words. Today the band’s communiqués are less frequent, but their music and their motivating force are just as powerful. What once was a raging firehose of primitive fury has become a nuanced and poetic juggernaut, always growing and moving forward.
If Your Mirror Breaks is The Ex presenting a sense of eclecticism. Over the decades, they’ve…
Throughout three releases, Detroit’s Big Life have quickly established themselves as one of the best bands in that city’s ever-fertile punk scene. They effortlessly blend 1980s hardcore touchstones like Dag Nasty and Hüsker Dü with more contemporary touchstones like Drug Church to create a potent, catchy Molotov cocktail that would make the Minutemen proud. The album cover recalls the classic Raymond Pettibon Black Flag covers, and that’s appropriate for this collection of politically minded rippers.
The Cost of Progress is the record we have been waiting for – eight righteously pissed-off tracks that will have you shouting along after just a couple of listens. We used to get bands like this all the time. Out of fear, solipsism, or…