Pianist Espen Berg has made alluring sounds in his pursuit of unencumbered jazz with his trio since 2014. Entropies may lean into a more free-flowing style at times, but there is great lyricality in the melodies emerging from the tunes (all originals except “Russians” by Sting). Bassist Bárður Reinert Poulsen and drummer Simon Albertsen join Berg to fill out the team. And at once, one can tell that there is superb communion and communication between them.
“Rue Saint-Michel” might not start the release, but it is an elegant, noteworthy tune. It fits the fluidity of Berg’s ideal style while still containing musical meat in the themes and motifs played throughout. Not a heavy song, the instruments glide about the sonic space. Flavia Huarachi on…
Latest Entries »
Upstate New York trio Play Time may be a new band, but its members hail from a wide swath of established underground scenes. Drummer Booker Stardrum sits behind the kit for rising jazz jammers SML, while Moog player Ben Vida co-founded the turn-of-the-century minimalist-ambient group Town & Country, and logged time in post-emo fountainhead Joan of Arc. Saxophonist Will Epstein has played with Darkside members Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington, and worked as a film composer. All three have released solo albums that further expand their palettes, moving into ambient (Vida), experimental (Stardrum), and singer/songwriter (Epstein) realms.
With all that group experience and wealth of individual styles, Play Time try something…
With No Resting Place, The Tallis Scholars devote an entire album to the music of Nico Muhly, bringing together six works written for the ensemble at the invitation of Peter Phillips. Often associated with contemporary minimalism, Muhly reveals in this program a far more intricate musical language, shaped as much by his engagement with liturgical traditions and ancient texts as by contemporary concerns surrounding memory, displacement, and cultural identity. The composer’s close affinity with early choral music is evident from Recordare, Domine, the first work he wrote for the ensemble. Without ever resorting to historical pastiche, Muhly appears instead to draw on certain contrapuntal techniques of the Renaissance masters, combining them with more unstable…
The jig is up. The act behind the most bewildering ambient techno of the past 15 years is not a shadowy syndicate or group of evil geniuses. It’s actually just Izaak Schlossman, who started the project back in Seattle as part of a crew called Aught. The proliferation of aliases, and the artist’s eventual move to San Francisco — where he started the synth-pop band Loveshadow — caused lingering confusion. No one could decide where Topdown Dialectic was based, or how many people it was, or if people were even making the music, instead of algorithms or bots. But now the 20,000 r/TheOverload followers who couldn’t sleep at night can rest easy: We found our guy.
For those not in the know, Topdown Dialectic was originally a faceless project putting out…
The LP, released on Text, brings together an unusual solo project by Kieran Hebden that deliberately plays with the unpronounceable in the way it is presented. As the immediate follow-up release to Four Tet’s 12″ “Human Voice,” this edition appears on Text and has been pressed in a very small run; initial dealer lists and pre-orders suggest that it will be in short supply.
Musically, the work continues Hebden’s characteristic balance between understated melodicism and finely detailed electronics: layer-by-layer arranged samples, fragmentary percussion and intimate textures shape the pieces. Several of the compositions collected here have already been available in other forms – some as contributions to the Four Tet album “Parallel”…
By 1976, Uriah Heep was on shaky ground. Although they had scored a big success with Return to Fantasy, the group was suffering from personality conflicts (vocalist David Byron left after this album) and division over their musical direction. This tension is visibly apparent on High and Mighty, an album that shows flashes of the group’s old firepower, but is ultimately sunk by a combination of unfocused experimentation and uneven songwriting. It starts promisingly with a solid first side: “One Way or Another” is a surging, dramatic hard rocker that features Ken Hensley trading verses with bassist John Wetton, and “Misty Eyes” is an engaging up-tempo tune that trades the group’s hard rock thunder for a sound built on some tasty acoustic guitar riffs.
Guttural screams, desperate moans and disaffected, dragged-out deliveries suffuse the Canadian quatuor’s second release. Reformulating some of their debut album’s mix of hardcore and folk (it’s aptly named Violence), Truck Violence delivers a more suffocating and altogether weary vision of the world. Not without reason: increasing climate catastrophes globally and rising fascism in the Western sphere have inspired the band, undoubtedly. The weathervane is my body, though, finds a glimpse of light amidst the hail.
Their first album under San Franciscan label The Flenser, Truck Violence keeps up with traditions of old-school hardcore, starting with DIY production and a straight edge attitude sprinkled with a healthy dose of irony.
Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman released Other People, Other Wedding Songs via Secretly Society. The album collects stripped-down acoustic versions of wedding songs originally written for David Levithan’s novel Songs for Other People’s Weddings, in which protagonist J composes wedding songs as a service to couples.
These 17 tracks were originally distributed exclusively via QR codes inside that book to enhance the reading experience. Due to high fan demand, Secretly Canadian officially compiled these tracks for streaming platforms and a special limited-edition vinyl release.
Several of the tracks appeared in fuller arrangements on Lekman’s 2024 album Songs for Other People’s Weddings; here they are…
The volumes of music referenced in the title of Gnod’s latest dispatch are slated to total three, all of them drawn from just shy of a week in the studio. In many ways, this Salford-originated experimental group are different – in personnel, setup, lifestyle – from their beginnings, two decades ago this year, but by no means comprehensively so, and this sort of nose-to-tail approach to serving up their recording sessions is reminiscent of when there’d be a new Gnod release practically every other month.
Moreover, on the evidence of Chronicles of Gnowt Vol.1 there’s no reason to think they’re offering us offcuts. With vocals featuring only sporadically, it lacks the polemical feel of some of their releases, but insularity can be very fruitful…
Hazy and out of focus, not as in a dream, but as in awakening from short, uneasy sleep. Uneasy because it never became a full separation from the world, instead letting all of its invisible threads pass through, the mind yet another cat’s cradle – a spider’s web, leaf veins spreading fractally, voices intersecting, branching thunder, constellations in the night sky changing over millions of years. Here in the Valley, with its blurred cover art, its Grouper-like soft and processed vocals, and its echoing folk instrumentation, nurtures that disorientation, experienced as a light porosity; its murmurs become you, its murmurs become the world.
Helllhound is the duo of renowned harpist Nailah Hunter and her partner, multi-instrumentalist Cadmar Fitzhugh, and it is named…
Lifted’s recordings chase the feeling of being a “fly on the wall,” of witnessing a musical moment emerge as if you were right there in the studio with them. The many-aliased duo of Andrew Field-Pickering and Matt Papich invite a rotating cast of instrumentalists to unspool their ideas and discover the results — sometimes finding loping grooves, often fanning out into roaming ambience that they further process with computers and CDJs. You’re asked to devote attention to a few layers of abstraction at once: The analog improvisers are finding common ground in the room, while the duo’s digital wayfinding structures the music, organizes the personnel, and charts new paths for them all to travel together. It’s a challenging proposition that requires the right…
Three years ago, saxophonist Jeff Lederer issued Schoenberg on the Beach, an audacious jazz song cycle based on music of the Second Viennese School and performed by Lederer and his partner, vocalist Mary LaRose, alongside jazz artists Hank Roberts, Patricia Brennan, Michael Formanek, and Matt Wilson. It would appear that blurring the lines between jazz and classical comes naturally to Lederer as his latest project There’s a Yearnin’ does something similar, if from the opposite direction. This time, pieces by jazz alto saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, and Oliver Nelson are delivered in a chamber-like manner, with Lederer (on clarinet and alto saxophone) and LaRose now augmented by the Brooklyn-based Wildebeest Wind Quintet: flutist Michel Gentile,…
1925 was a landmark year for US recording studios, marking the introduction of electronic microphones to replace the huge gramophone horns previously used to harvest the sound of singers and musicians. This brought about a dramatic leap in sound quality and established 1925 as an effective year zero for modern compilations.
The 32 tracks selected here by the author and musicologist Dick Spottswood draw on 1925 releases from Paramount, Columbia and Vocalion – then the industry’s three giants – but also from smaller and more adventurous labels, such as OKEH and Gennet.
Spottswood’s choices provide us with a rich and thoroughly enjoyable mixed bag of light-hearted trad jazz (including one of…
…The album was recorded in situ by Grammy Award winning producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, Ustad Saami, The Good Ones).
In Oman, descendants of the “other” African slave trade continue to live in the Ash-Sharqiyah region that hosted the main port.
Centuries on, Al-Mudema (“sailor songs”) musicians continue to sing mostly in Swahili and feature music mixing African rhythms and bagpipes. These descendants are referred to as the Zanzabari (or sometimes locally as Khal people). And they sing the songs of those who were brought forcibly by ship centuries before.
Rather than bagpipes (qurbah) being appropriated from Scotland or introduced by the British colonizers as is commonly claimed,…
It is true that the number of artists covering that currently popular ground between Americana and pop/rock. Yet the key there is how distinctive their music is – whether they separate themselves from the rest and whether they come up with enough individual elements to separate themselves from the rest. A hard task that gets even harder if you go the independent (self-releasing) way.
Singer songwriter Amelia Day can easily paste her photo along with everything that is described above – her music is right in the center of that now ever-popular sub-genre, and she is doing it all by herself with her latest 7-song EP, Ego Trip.
She knows best what the title relates to, but on the evidence of her songs here, there’s no ego trip involved on her part here – she can…
Lynn Blakey was not a name that gained a great deal of traction commercially but she was an influential figure in the indie rock and alt-country scene in her home state of North Carolina where she DJ’d on college radio in the early ’80s; this was before forming Oh Ok in Athens Georgia with Michel Stipe’s sister Lynda (driven by the inspiration of seeing REM at a small local gig). She collaborated with others such as guitarist Mitch Easter in The Royal Opposition and guitarist Michael Chumbris in Glory Fountain, but her most well-known group experience was with Tres Chicas, a band formed in the late ’90s in Raleigh, NC, with Blakey, Caitlin Cary (from Whiskeytown) and Tonya Lamm (from Hazeldine). The group sang together for a few years before releasing Sweetwater in…
Incredible live concert from Rainbow’s debut world tour and documenting one of the band’s first ever shows in Europe, at Düsseldorf Philipshalle on 27th September 1976.
When Rainbow finally landed in Europe for their debut live shows there, it was on the back of both the albums ‘Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow’ and ‘Rainbow Rising’ having charted, so the band were playing sold out venues, and what a band… with the line up consisting of Ritchie Blackmore, Ronnie James, Cozy Powell, Jimmy Bain and Tony Carey. As one of the cornerstones of British Rock, Rainbow, led by the never-predictable but ever-astonishing guitarist, Ritchie Blackmore, became synonymous with some of the most well regarded and popular charting Rock songs of the seventies and eighties.
Take a look at Thames & Hudson’s magnificently illustrated coffee table tome Off the Wall: Psychedelic Rock Posters from San Francisco, and among the phantasmagorical, hallucinogenic artwork promoting nights at venues such as the Fillmore, Winterland, Carousel and Avalon ballrooms, three names trailing clouds of lysergic glory occur more than any others – the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Yet although the Dead and the Airplane have become the stuff of legend, the other corner of the original San Fran acid-rock trinity has been rather forgotten. This 79-track boxset chronicling Quicksilver’s protean iterations over seven albums in the space of five tumultuous years – along with a generous helping of bonus tracks…
Fire Man’s Caio Brentar has a warbly, emotion wracked tenor, a way with melody and an affinity for loud, distorted guitar. His first full-length (following three cassette EPs) explores the same nervy, amplified but vulnerable and ultra-anthemic/romantic neighborhood inhabited by Cloud Nothings and the Japandroids. He works here with just one other musician, drummer and producer Kiyoshi Chinzei, alternating between naked confessional simplicity and blaring garage rock, sometimes within the space of one song.
“Marry Me,” for instance, fluctuates from clanky, post-punk bass and drums to fey, indie pop verse to an exhilarating blast of guitar riffage. The verse extolling the loved one’s virtues is quiet, but the storm of angst and hormones she…
With time and experience always comes a sense of knowing, and CASTLEBEAT built his new album around this idea. After releasing his debut album, CASTLEBEAT has spent the last decade working on his record label, spirit goth. CASTLEBEAT II feels like a landmark project he’s been leading up to, revisiting sketches of songs from his debut, and giving them a second life.
CASTLEBEAT, a.k.a. Josh Hwang, returns to his roots on this new record, but expands it further. The indie dream pop artist stays firmly rooted within the genre, with guitar riffs in “This Takes Time” feeling unmistakably 2016, while tracks like ‘Table and Chair’ add elements of electronic drums and layered production that bend far beyond the constraints of genre.