In Raven Chacon’s music, listening is about paying attention to silence as much as sound. The composer, performer and installation artist presents this dichotomy across experimental noise, chamber and installation works that unfold through layered timbres and ample rest.
His pieces leave space for ideas to emerge in moments that could seem, at first, like quietude. But listen closer and find that so much lives inside: the weight of history, the power of protest, the resonance of performing spaces.
Voiceless Mass, recorded by Milwaukee-based ensemble Present Music, presents three of Chacon’s chamber works that each offer a different lens into his use of sound and silence, showcasing how listening extends beyond pitch.
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Xerrox Vol. 1 marked a pivotal juncture of Alva Noto’s process-based, multimedia art, when it transformed from precision-tooled, pulsating minimalism to diffuse states of cinematic atmosphere. By the point of its release, 200, Carsten Nicolai had spent over a decade rising to acclaim for his exquisite, methodical glitch works, including contemporary classics in duo with Ryuichi Sakamoto.
But Xerrox Vol. 1 would radically alter his work’s aesthetic away from microscopic, pointillist grammar to explorations of lusher textural and widescreen fascination, systematically sampling and displacing familiar, everyday sounds – advert jingles, phone “hold” tones, film scores – within swelling symphonic structures that exist…
What would be experimental folk exactly? As with any other genre, it would approximately mean that you as an artist are not taking the usual routes associated with such a genre, and it could be anything from bringing in elements from elsewhere, to not so usual performance, lyrics and anything else that might be considered ordinary.
You can get practically all of that on Bird or Snake, the second album by Chicago-based singer songwriter Emma Hospelhorn, who operates under the moniker of Em Spel. It is more or less all there – jazzy song structures, classical flutes, found sounds, subtle electronics, and lyrics that go into deeper subjects.
Hospelhorn wrote the songs and produced them herself, with additional production by…
Buzzy Lee has a couple of tricks up her sleeve. She acts, writes, performs, and on occasion collaborates with musical powerhouses, notably Denzel Curry and JPEGMafia. Now, Buzzy Lee, frequently known to the masses as Sasha Spielberg, joined Harry McNally, her partner, and close friends along the way to build her third solo album, Shoulder to Shoulder. At first, the couple enlisted Nick Millhiser of Holy Ghost! though the team unanimously decided to keep the working process intrinsic — making her album naturally come alive.
Shoulder to Shoulder is unexpectedly soulful with accents of groove. Buzzy Lee delicately caresses her words in every track. Remarkably, she experiments with piano as a foundation while piecing together the right moments to test her…
8-CD Box Set – Newly mastered albums with bonus B-Sides and live shows.
After leaving Deep Purple, Ian Gillan retired from the music business to pursue other business ventures including ownership of the Kingsway studio, where in 1974 he began to work on his first post-Deep Purple solo tracks. This combined with a warm reception to his appearance at Roger Glover’s Butterfly Ball live show prompted him to form a new band.
Initially called Shand Grenade, Ian was persuaded by the management to change the band’s name to the Ian Gillan Band. He recruited guitarist Ray Fenwick, bass player John Gustafson, keyboard player Mike Moran and Mark Nauseef on drums, using Roger Glover as producer…
During the late ’70s, the beginnings of a wave of music heavily inspired by the garage rock and psychedelia of the 1960s began to swell. Chalk it up to many factors — the availability of a number of reissues, especially the Pebbles series, a disillusionment with the restrictive rules of punk rock, the passage of enough time so that the era seemed glamorous, the chance to get cheap vintage gear — but the result was an underground that evolved in many interesting directions and even went quite overground at different times. Cherry Red’s 2026 collection This Can’t Be Today: American Psychedelia & the Paisley Underground 1977-1988 looks to document the scene, gathering together the many strands and sounds of the time to present a comprehensive view.
The storied, three-decade (and counting) career of American visual and performance artist, sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, costume designer, and musician Marnie Weber (b. 1959) began with gigs paid in beer at an LA trucker bar in 1977. Her band, Party Boys, formed in artists’ hangout spots in downtown LA’s semi-abandoned industrial zones. Weber was then 19 and had just left home. After a handful of shows, the bar’s owner asked if she and her female bandmate would perform nude. Taking this as a sign to leave LA, they promptly took off to London. However, their search for more ethical trade there was arrested by a harrowing experience. The band were violently assaulted following a cancelled gig, resulting in the destruction of their instruments, their singer’s…
Blues singer-songwriter and guitarist Selwyn Birchwood has always described his music as ‘electric swamp funkin’ blues.’ Now, on his seventh release and fifth for Alligator, Birchwood sees fit to make that the title. He ‘owns’ this record more than any of his others as it is a self-produced effort, unlike his past two, where he deferred to Tom Hambridge. Here, he sounds positively unleashed, as wild as we’ve ever heard him. Birchwood proudly states in the promotional materials that he carves a unique path: “You would be hard-pressed to find an album or a band that sounds exactly like mine, and that has and will always be the goal.”
Let’s take a closer look. Birchwood, per usual, plays guitar and lap steel. Longtime collaborator Regi Oliver, who has graced all of…
Rosendals Garden is yet another chapter in Yelena Eckemoff‘s ongoing historical narrative devoted to people and places both real and imagined. Recorded in 2024 at RMV Studio, Stockholm, Sweden, by engineer Linn Final, with mixing and mastering by Stefano Amerio, the audio is as colorful and detailed as the musicianship and the packaging.
Remarkably, there has never been a sense of hurry in the playing of keyboardist Eckemoff and her two bandmates. During the luxuriously slow build-up of “ABBA Museum,” for instance, there is every indication all three musicians trust their instincts, individually and collectively. The shared intuition is even more apparent on the title song: the structure of the composition is mirrored…
Since forming in 2015, jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements have charted a singular musical course. Their sound marries the fiery liberation poetry of Camae Ayewa (better known as Moor Mother), with exploratory and often improvisational brass from trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and saxophonist Keir Neuringer. Grounding their experimental style are double bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Tcheser Holmes.
The band’s music exists in a space between wild artistic freedom and the righteous anger that defines the lyrics of Moor Mother. Their focus on social and racial justice is written into their DNA. They did after all first come together as part of a Musicians Against Police Brutality event, organised in the wake of the killing of Akai Gurley.
Mark Fell has spent much of his career building castles out of splinters. Or their digital equivalents, anyway: The Sheffield native’s music is an amalgamation of shards, fragments, and slivers of electronic sound sculpted into dazzling arrhythmic bursts. Composed on software platforms like Max/MSP, his pieces are rigorously formalist in nature, their shapes largely determined by the interaction of elements within closed systems. Even in the absence of understanding just what makes his music tick, one intuits the action of inscrutable processes at work, arcane rules generating sequences that unspool at the speed of black MIDI. To listen to Mark Fell often feels like standing in the shadow of the mathematical sublime.
Still, while the effects may be bracing, titles…
How do you move from electronic dance music (or EDM, if you will), with 14 million views for your Boiler Room set, to creating a boundary-pushing label and post-modern classical music that veers into ambient? It might sound perplexing on paper, but for an inventive, classically trained composer/musician, in this case German-Italian pianist/composer David August, it seems a breeze, as his latest album Hymns showcases.
And yes, August also runs 99CHANTS, a label that is supposed to push boundaries between genres, but also art forms.
It seems that Hymns serves as some kind of career deconstruction/reconstruction move for August. Going back to his classical piano training, August moves from prime EDM to…
Lauren Auder‘s journey from Soundcloud uploader to embracing pop sensibilities has been a long one, but by the sound of Whole World As Vigil, it could be one that’s coming to fruition.
Auder has been recording music for over 10 years now, working with the likes of Slowthai and Jeshi and self-publishing a variety of demo songs. This led to a series of EPs, and eventually a support slot with Christine and The Queens. Her debut album The Infinite Spine showed that she was a dab hand at baroque electronics but her second album feels like a massive step forward – a record that finds the sweet spot between industrial grit and arena-sized ambition.
Having apparently started off life as a series of voice notes recorded while walking round…
Arlo Parks has long made a home in vulnerability and poetic lyricism, and on Ambiguous Desire, she doubles down on that instinct with confidence. The album is full of psychedelic textures, punchy basslines, and dreamy vocals that blur together into something hypnotic but anthemic.
While the coherence of the record sometimes lends itself to monotony, the darker sonic undercurrent, coupled with a newly found more intricate and explorative sonority, has a sensation of quiet and dreamlike absorption.
Across the whole record, Parks’ vocals are soothing and ambivalent. ‘Get Go’, one of the album’s singles, is definitely the record’s most euphoric moment. Punchy but shimmery, its broadness conjures the feeling of dancing and…
…includes several ‘cuts’ reimagined by friends and collaborators, as well as previously unreleased demo drafts from the original recording sessions.
Those familiar with 2022’s Squeeze might find themselves disillusioned here. Where Sasami’s albums once began with frustrated vocals atop a brash metal backdrop that gets off on rodent torture, they now arrive hosting a succint, full-blown pop record perfectly acceptable for daytime radio, nurtured by a newfound superstar alter-ego. Predictably, she’s shied away from diving too deep into the pop realm up until this point. Immediately upon entry, however, Blood On the Silver Screen makes an effort to blend the barriers separating rock and pop: Sasami wakes us up to her serious ability to excel across both fields.
Scout Gillett’s Tough Touch chronicles the experience of a touring musician and the constant sense of change road life entails.
On this record, Gillett’s powerful vocals and artistic presence is in constant motion, as she adeptly applies stylistic variety over Tough Touch’s ten tracks. We get songs that range from country-flecked folk beaty to spiky blasts of angsty uncertainty. Gillett and company have learned how to manipulate strong emotions and the desire to experience something new and exciting that continuously drives her forward.
“Coney Island,” one of Gillett’s finest songs to date, is a haunting contemplation on youthful innocence and loss. Gillett’s vocals have a bit of a young Emmylou Harris tone here, whereas…
The Beatles are a singularly iconic rock band. While plenty of classic rock groups, like the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and, most successfully, Queen, continue to rack up tens of millions of monthly Spotify streams, no other band remains as relevant as the Beatles. Many YouTubers build popular channels by explaining musical theory through their songs or by delving into the supposed mysteries of how their music was created.
That makes it increasingly more challenging to find a new perspective on the group. With a Little Help from My Friends: Covers of the Beatles 1967-1970 may well provide some interesting new points of discussion. Does it make for an equally enjoyable listening experience?
This 3-disc box set from Cherry Red Records…
Nene H’s best work is born from disruption. While her singles and EPs are often flirtatious and infectious, she is at her most compelling when cross examining the kind of upheaval that gives way to self-transformation, fusing electronic music genres with the sounds of her SWANA heritage. Her striking album debut, Ali, followed the passing of her father — a body of work that doubled remarkably as both a haunting rumination on grief and a dancefloor weapon. Second Skin similarly wraps itself around loss, inspired by a recent breakup, but rather than ruminate, as on Ali, here Nene annihilates.
…One need not have experienced a breakup to relate to the music, which pulses with industrial power, especially on standout track…
In 2023, the CalArts centre for contemporary arts, REDCAT, exhibited Lisa Alvarado’s Pulse Meridian Foliation, a multidisciplinary work that consisted of paintings, textiles, murals, photographs and a sound installation.
Pulse Meridian Foliation explored the interconnectedness of geological processes, deep time and the politics of repatriation. Images of the installation show beautifully patterned abstract pieces: double-sided, large-scale textile pieces that hang from the ceiling and startlingly bold designs painted directly onto the gallery walls. The visual aspect of Alvarado’s work owes a debt to her Mexican heritage: aesthetic vibrancy and political astuteness become inseparable.
Alongside her work as a visual artist, Alvarado…
Recorded at night by candlelight in the Temple of La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, Music for Intersecting Planes captures the immediacy of sound in space.
Cellist Leila Bordreuil and organist Kali Malone dubbed the session back in 2021 when they were given access to the Temple of La Tour-de-Peilz, a chapel with two organs that’s just near Lake Geneva. Malone plays organ and sine tones while Bordreuil plays cello and feedback, leaning in to the building’s natural resonance.
As night fell, they lit candles and began to record, letting the natural ambiance from outside (birdsong, church bells) bleed into the air, focusing their performance to bring out the most disquieting resonances.