Last time this writer spoke to Courtney Barnett, she dismissed her label’s claims that her third album, 2021’s Things Take Time, Take Time, marked the debut of “Courtney 2.0”, describing it as “just an extension of the same thing I’ve always been doing”. Seismic aesthetic shifts aren’t Barnett’s style; after happening upon her laconic, chugging mode with 2012 debut EP I’ve Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris, her vibe has been: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
Even the relative experimentation she undertook on Things Take Time… with Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa has been abandoned here in favour of her trad indie-rock setup. The title feels like an admission: that Barnett is the creature of habit, returning to the familiar.
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…includes solo material as well as co-written songs with the Rolling Stones, Faces and Jeff Beck Group with 38 tracks on the CD set including four all-new recordings exclusive to this collection.
Ronnie Wood is celebrating 60+ years in music with a new anthology, comprising solo tracks as well as key cuts from his time playing with the illustrious likes of The Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, and Jeff Beck as well as his earliest recordings with The Birds and The Creation. Fearless: The Anthology 1965-2025 kicks off with a pair of recordings from the Middlesex native’s early stints as guitarist for The Birds (“You’re on My Mind”) and The Creation (“The Girls Are Naked”). In 1967, he joined The Jeff Beck Group and kickstarted his career – now as a bassist. Wood first teamed…
Limited edition CD of “Anata” includes exclusive bonus track “Quatro Horizontes”.
In a recent interview with the great Joshua Minsoo Kim, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton explained that, whether in his music, his sibling Chuquimamani-Condori’s, or theirs as Los Thuthanaka, being loud is a part of the physical experience. “You’re supposed to feel the sound,” he elaborated. “It’s not supposed to be painful, but it’s supposed to change you, it’s supposed to make you feel healed in some way.”
…That disruptive power comes alive in Crampton’s universe, too — in the staggering, festering expanse of “Awila,” a 12-minute kullawada dance teeming with awakened guitars and wall-to-wall elementalism. It’s the building, confounding…
Author Philip K. Dick spent his career poking at the porous boundary between reality and illusion, questioning the reliability our perception and memory. Using motifs such as artificial intelligence (AI), mind-altering drugs, simulated realities, and corporate and governmental power, he examined our sense of identity, the nature of truth, and the very essence of reality. Given recent advances in AI as well as ongoing sociopolitical changes, Dick’s work now seems more prescient than ever.
Ubikuitous, yet another thematic compilation from Unexplained Sounds Group, uses experimental ambient and acousmatic music – with a touch of glitch and techno – to explore these concepts. Many of the 14 tracks employ synth-based droning with dark overtones as a core element,…
Magma’s Cosmic Masterpiece: The Absolute Classic Live Album That Redefined Progressive Music Magma’s mythic 1975 live set, captured in full fire at Paris’ Taverne de l’Olympia, returns to mark its 50th anniversary with a stunning new edition. Presented as an exclusive 2LP pressing on translucent blue vinyl and housed in a deluxe gatefold sleeve, this release honors one of the most powerful live documents in progressive music history. Widely hailed as one of the greatest live albums ever recorded, Live captures the band at their most transcendent, delivering a performance that shattered genre boundaries and redefined the possibilities of rock. The recording radiates raw intensity, precision, and an otherworldly vision that remains unmatched decades later.
It’s taken Sealed records more than five years to put this release together but finally it’s here. The one and only Bikini Mutants. The Bikini Mutants were from Yeovil, Somerset and part of the All the Madmen world. In their short life as a band they recorded two demos at Monitor Studios, Milborne Port in Somerset in 1982.
Let’s Mutate collects these two demos on one LP, along with a 20 page booklet featuring photos, lyrics, reviews, interviews and much more. The band played mostly in Yeovil and the West Country along with the Mob and the Review, and even though they were part of the West Country anarcho scene, the sound was a mix of scratchy post punk and indie pop. Members of the band went on to be in My Bloody Valentine and the Chesterfields.
After 33 years, Guitar Wolf returns to Goner Records, where they started! Way back in 1993, Wolf Rock was released by Goner and immediately, around the world, people enthralled with raw rock n roll and pure Japanese enthusiasm for over-the-top noise realized they had a new band to watch out for.
Many tours, many records, and many eardrums later, Guitar Wolf has returned for the latest, and greatest Guitar Wolf record yet – More Jet. More raw, crunching guitar noise, frantic rhythms, and unpredictable screaming! More head-scratchingly-great song topics! The perfect blend of Link Wray / Ramones / Joan Jett / Cramps sound and attitude mixed with industrial-strength noise.
Led by singer and guitarist Seiji the group’s…
Chicago-born record label International Anthem capped off an entire year of anniversary activities (under the IA11 chrysanthemum banner) with a very special event celebrating the label’s actual eleventh solar return at their new Southside Chicago HQ inside Theaster Gates and Rebuild Foundation’s latest space-based project, The Land School.
The evening featured a performance by Rob Mazurek with Matthew Lux and Mikel Patrick Avery (the ensemble behind Alternate Moon Cycles, the very first album in the IARC catalog, which was originally released December 2nd, 2014), in what Mazurek refers to as “A Polysonic Resonance Field in One Continuous Movement.”
About the performance, Mazurek recalls: “At the invitation of International Anthem, I gathered…
1. The Black Crowes – Cruel Streak
2. Snail Mail – My Maker
3. Andrew Wasylyk – Private Symphony #2
4. Courtney Barnett – Mantis
5. Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection – Rowan Tree
6. Flea – Traffic Lights (feat. Thom Yorke)
7. Bruce Hornsby – Indigo Park
8. Tinariwen – Imidiwan Takyadam
9. Ellie O’Neill – Anna with the Silver Arrow
10. The Long Ryders – Stand a Little Further in…
11. Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Hey Little
12. Memorials – Dropped Down the Well
13. Charlotte Cornfield – Lost Leader
14. Billy Fuller – Rummer
15. The New Pornographers – Ballad of the Last Payphone
1. The Studio 68! & Dani Turner – Funky People
2. The Delines – The Meter Keeps Ticking
3. Altin Gun – Öldürme Beni
4. Bill Callahan – Stepping Out for Air
5. Marielle V Jakobsons – Everything Lost Remains
6. Ulrika Spacek – Picto
7. Iron & Wine – In Your Ocean
8. Cardinals – I Like You
9. Crooked Fingers – Haunted (feat. Sharon Van Etten)
10. KMRU – With Trees Where We Can See
11. Hen Ogledd – Clara
12. The Wave Pictures – The House Painted Blue
13. Buck Meek – Ring of Fire
14. Clémentine March – Lucie
15. Isabel Pine – Fables
The ousting of Bassvictim from Berghain feels like a Biblical prophecy: Of course these electroclash expats, who fucked around and crystallized a fried twee-pop resurgence, would be banished from the Garden of Eden. Just two years ago, Maria Manow and Ike Clateman were heirs apparent to “indie sleaze,” a catch-all whose constraints, musically and aesthetically, boiled down to “kinda Crystal Castles coded.” Here was a photogenic boy-girl duo with two wonderfully wubby albums, a vague air of disaffected cool, and a very active Instagram account. “I’m not joking/I’m being hella serious,” Manow had drawled on “Air on a G String,” their silly-sexy breakout hit. Even with the explicit clarification, the canon they seemed to be entering — sleaze first, sincerity second…
After topping the U.K. dance charts with his first two albums and garnering Brit Award nominations, Barry Can’t Swim presented a volume of the Late Night Tales mix series, showcasing music he’s fond of but wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate for him to drop in a club. While there’s a little of the type of lush, organic house that he produces, much of the mix is more downtempo, often exploring Balearic chillout territory, but also venturing into a few other directions.
Loket’s cosmic trip-hop number “Afternoon at Barenquell” is an early highlight, working up a jazzy groove before clearing out for a lovely string-based coda. Following a short excerpt of Superpitcher’s 20-minute, harp-based chugger “Yves,” a handful of introspective pieces…
In 2017, in two batches of five, Another Timbre released ten albums of music by eight Canadian composers (two of the composers, Linda Catlin Smith and Cassandra Miller, each had a couple of albums among the ten) accompanied by a booklet about the composers. The intention was to improve Canadian composers’ reputations, one which was soon achieved. As well as Catlin Smith and Miller, with the help of Another Timbre, Canadian composers such as Mark Sabat and Martin Arnold gained in popularity.
Although Eldritch Priest is Associate Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and writes on sonic culture and experimental aesthetics, he is also a composer and improviser. He has a relatively…
In the five years that they’ve been active, it sometimes seems as if Purelink are dissolving right before our eyes. They’ve never again released anything quite as corporeal or propulsive as their debut EP, which paired visceral dub techno with rolling drum’n’bass.
On their 2023 debut album, Signs, glitchy drums crackled in a pastel haze, and last year’s Faith was even more ethereal; the trio’s individual identities melted together under cover of amorphous arrangements that suggested fogbanks, blizzards, and other zero-visibility conditions.
Anyone who has seen Purelink live, however, knows how much physical heft they’re capable of conjuring — a bold, bassy throb that sets bodies in motion even in the absence of obvious…
Humanity’s future — or so we are told — is dependent on technological advances, powered by millions upon millions of computer chips, the primary components of which can be found only in rare-earth deposits. Brazil is among the most important chess pieces in the globalist metagame; it’s home to nearly a quarter of the world’s rare-earth reserves, with next to no regulation (but plenty of corruption and deforestation).
No Ritmo da Terra, the brilliant new album from São Paulo producer and sound designer Antropoceno, is a musical projection of this future, constructed in part as a warning and, mostly, as a statement of Latin American resilience in the face of colonialism. By bridging Brazilian folk and Amazonian field recordings with…
“Willie o’ Winsbury” is a traditional English folk ballad about a king who spares his daughter’s lover because said lover is a pretty man. But when Irish composer, sound designer, and performance artist Aoibhín Redmond, aka NIMF, borrowed a bit of the tune for her album Sirenoscape, she took it in a much darker, more nebulous direction.
The centuries-old melody makes a brief appearance as the album opens, played by a calling trumpet amongst howling winds and seafaring atmospherics — but then Redmond slowly but surely breaks apart every preexisting sonic element into stirring ambient layers that fold, morph, crystallize, and shatter across four distinct, extended musical “scenes.” The result is an album that feels almost defined like a narrative story…
Why it’s volume two from the Rotting Tapes series that’s being given a vinyl reissue, rather than volumes one, three or four is anybody’s guess, but why not? All four tapes contained two tracks each, all were recorded live in Tokyo in the first half of 1982, and all feature the duo Michio Kadotani (1959-1990, vocals/guitar) and Nanjo Asahito (bass), this time joined by an uncredited drummer. The group was well-named; although the music at times seems like impenetrable, formless sludge, there’s often a real beauty and poetry to it, too. When Rotting Telepathies performed together, there was, perhaps fitfully, a unique alchemy, and when it works, it’s glorious, presaging the more fully formed music of noisy, doomy Japanese bands like Gallhammer, but it’s also…
For Footballhead’s Weight of the Truth, a “post-grunge revival” is hard to claim. There have consistently been new bands popping up that play the style, while Nickelback and Three Days Grace have never stopped being discussed. Perhaps “post-grunge reassessment” is a better wording.
What in the 2000s was viewed as a gravel-throated cyst on the carcass of mainstream rock, by 2026 is “real music” with a tongue planted firmly in your cheek. The likes of Pierce the Veil and Cane Hill pushed their sound closer to it during the 2020s, and today, post-Jeris Johnson Generation Z solo artists Violent Vira, Leah Barrientos and Alexis Munroe rule TikTok. At some point this decade, Gen Z did what Gen Z did and made the term “post-grunge” fall out of favour,…
For their sixth album, What We Are Made Of, Shalosh turn their focus inward while extending the scope of their sound. The music reflects the trio’s shared history, shaped by years of collaboration and extensive touring, and draws on the influences and impulses that have gradually formed their collective musical language.
“From the very start of Shalosh, we have always said that we would never commit to any one genre but keep our music as open as possible,” drummer Matan Assayag says. “It’s the best way to bring ourselves fully to each song and the only way to stay truly authentic.” In more than a decade since its founding, the trio has made its signature this freewheeling, energetic and deeply-felt blend of jazz improvisation with…
Saxophonist Ben Wendel has been experimenting with form and technology throughout most of his career. He is an ambitious composer and fluid improviser, so that makes him a “jazz” musician by default. Whether on his own or as a founding member of the band Kneebody, he has played with groove-oriented rhythms, electronics, and unusual instrumentation, as if jazz tradition were secondary to creativity. His new album, BaRcoDe, uniquely does exactly that.
Recorded after this band had a pair of residencies at New York City’s Jazz Gallery, BaRcoDe brings Wendel together with four innovative vibraphonists/percussionists: Patricia Brennan, Simon Moullier, Joel Ross, and Juan Diego Villalobos. That’s the band: tenor saxophone…