The innovations of Berlin’s Basic Channel in the mid-’90s led to a whole new way of thinking about dance music, introducing countless producers to the possibilities of reverb and delay. Producers have been working off the template they set for dub techno ever since. Less often imitated is the duo’s work as Rhythm & Sound, where they slowed their music to reggae tempos and hewed closer to the Jamaican innovations that informed their trippy production tricks. This sound is having a small moment right now. Stuttgart’s Ghost Dubs has made a career of it, both solo and with a fired-up Kevin Richard Martin; Brussels’ Carrier shaped it into cavernous forms on last year’s awesome Rhythm Immortal; all the while, co-originator and close Rhythm & Sound collaborator…
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KOGG is Cerys Hogg and Selena Kay, who both teach music. With backgrounds in jazz improvisation and classical composition, respectively, they found a common interest in exploring randomness and new ways to make sounds, including building their own instruments. They describe collecting whistles from Christmas crackers and creating a device to blow them with air bulbs. Programming devised sounds into synthesisers, they have crafted their own music, and it is quite something.
As they point out, experimental music has a reputation for being a male business, and a serious one. Hogg and Kay set out to make music their own way, and the results are joyous. The opening track, ‘Reel’, is conceptually satisfying,…
The Turtle Island String Quartet has built a unique position in chamber music. They improvise as readily as they read from a score, and they are committed to bringing diverse musical traditions into dialogue with the classical quartet tradition. Throughout the album, these composers write their art-music passages with skill, but the strongest moments come when the quartet is set free to improvise. So fluent is their collective improvisation that on many tracks it is genuinely difficult to tell where the written score ends and the spontaneous invention begins.
Representing the tensions between different musical traditions, the title piece by Balakrishnan is aptly spirited, tuneful, and blues-inflected, with fiddle-style violin playing and ample…
Norwegian jazz pianist and composer Kjetil Mulelid was born on February 4th 1991, in Hurdal, Norway. In 2014, he completed his studies at the Jazz program at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Thereafter, he has been active with such bands as Kjemile, Wako and others, as well as his own work with Kjetil Mulelid Trio and his duo with Siril Malmedal Hauge.
Hauge, a Norwegian jazz singer, was born on November 28th 1992. She was also educated on the jazz program at University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. In addition to heading projects such as Fieldfare and Wild Things Run Fast, she has collaberated with other bands and musicians. In 2010, she received the Norwegian Cultural Educational Council (dream scholarship).
Known for his involvement in the long-running Chemirani Ensemble – a Persian classical group founded alongside his father and siblings – acclaimed French-Iranian percussionist Keyvan Chemirani here leads his own quartet, exploring Persian and Indian traditions through the lens of jazz and contemporary classical music. With his brother Bijan on percussion, saz and laoúto, Keyvan is joined by Benjamin Moussay on piano and modular synthesiser and violinist Yvlin.
The result is a rich and eclectic set of compositions, from the plaintive opening chords of ‘Royaumont’ and the intense trance-like groove of ‘Dar-é Marmouz’ (featuring Keyvan on fiery santur) to the Parisian romanticism of ‘La Cena Grande’, on which the violin takes centre stage…
…Originally shelved by his label in 2001, this 21-track record has finally seen an official release.
The Suicide Handbook is Ryan Adams’ most elusive and mythic recordings. The album is a raw and intimate collection of songs that captures the songwriter at his most unguarded. Recorded at the beginning of his solo career and long circulating only through bootlegs, the album has earned a legendary status among die-hard fans and fans of the Americana genre alike for its stark stripped-back beauty.
Acoustic arrangements and hushed, late-night vocals, these songs feel like private confessions set to tape. Adams leans into themes of heartbreak, isolation, and emotional vulnerability, delivering recordings that are as fragile…
…includes two bonus tracks: Mitski’s covers of One Direction’s “Fireproof” and Frank Sinatra’s “I’m a Fool to Want You” previously only available on compilations.
Based in Brooklyn but with an unsettled background that called over a dozen countries on multiple continents home before she reached her twenties, Mitski Miyawaki makes her Dead Oceans debut with her fourth album, Puberty 2.
Her background is not irrelevant here, as the album reflects her own, very personal — and intentional or not, her generation’s — crisis of belonging as she recounts stories of navigating young adulthood in the City. A visceral work that shares the immediacy of classic punk and confessional singer/songwriter fare at once, Puberty 2 takes…
When Joan As Police Woman released Real Life in 2006, it felt like the arrival of a fully formed solo artist rather than a debut in the usual sense. Joan Wasser had already lived several creative lives as a violinist, band member, collaborator and arranger, and the album gathered those histories into a poised, intimate set of songs about grief, love, survival and the possibility of carrying on. Twenty years later, Real Life Evolution returns to the same ten songs with a different kind of knowledge. The title is well chosen. These are songs that have aged, travelled, stretched, tightened and changed emotional weight through performance.
A clear sign of that evolution is the running order. The original album began with ‘Real Life’ and ended with ‘We Don’t Own It’. The new version…
In the grand tradition of left-of-center rock bands, Neptune started as an art project. In the 1990s, Boston sculptor Jason Sanford began fashioning homemade guitars and basses out of scrap metal and repurposed detritus, and the band quickly followed (check out their first ever show in 1994). Over the ensuing years, Sanford (who also plays in E with Thalia Zedek) bolted Neptune into a tight and ferocious noise rock unit that brandished very heavy instruments adorned with blades, spikes, and jagged edges. When George Miller made Mad Max: Fury Road, he dropped the ball by not showcasing Neptune riding the Doof Wagon. (Sure, Coma-Doof Warrior was impressive but Neptune as the harbingers of the apocalypse would have killed.) Because of the construction of…
Devlin and the Harm sits in an intriguing place somewhere between widescreen indie rock and shadowed americana. There are moments here that feel vast; songs opening into towering choruses, drums crashing, powerful guitars, melodies that make you think of open skies, but the emotional landscape beneath them is far darker and more intimate. Across these eleven tracks, the band returns repeatedly to themes of collapse, inheritance, addiction, memory, and the uneasy possibility of redemption. It is an album concerned less with escape than with what remains after illusions fail.
The opening track, ‘Kingdom Comes’, immediately establishes the album’s central tensions. Built around a slow-burning atmosphere…
…Former members of Zebra Hunt have got together in Seattle to form Fallen Oaks, and we should rejoice that they did. Lead vocalist and guitarist Robert Mercer has written a fine assembly of songs and is ably backed by Erik Bennett on bass, Mitch Leffler on drums, Zack Erb on fiddle, and the wonderful pedal steel player Paul Hutzler. Will this record change your life? Maybe not, but it should, and at the very least, will add something special to the days you play it. ‘Roadside Prayers’ and ‘Stucco House’ are a must, along with the plaintive guitar on ‘Motel’.
‘Roadside Prayers’ is a three-minute, stunning alternative country ballad lamenting the love and loss of a friend. The guitar and mournfully aching violin work perfectly. The change of…
…In addition to a new remaster of the original album, this edition includes 13 previously unissued bonus tracks including demos, alternate takes, and outtakes from the album sessions.
After The Beau Brummels dissolved in 1968 following their swan song, Bradley’s Barn, it was doubtful that we’d ever hear from the band again, despite their individual and collective brilliance. The group did somehow reunite in 1975, however, for this fine and somewhat understated album. The band’s weaving of folk, country, and pop stylings hadn’t really changed that much from their prime in the mid- to late ’60s.
Ron Elliot has several superb songs on here, notably “Tennessee Walker” and the excellent album closer, “Today by Day,” which is sung by…
Heretics & Heritage is the fourth album from Leeds-based Lewis Pugh, combining both bluegrass and traditional folk/roots influences. Pugh himself plays banjo, guitar, snare drum and double bass, in addition to lead vocals, and all but two songs are self-penned.
The album lineup includes two members of north-east bluegrass band The Often Herd, in Evan Davies on mandolin, and Niles Krieger on fiddle. The opening track, ‘Big Stone Lifter’, is an up-tempo bluegrass number, with pedal steel courtesy of Stephen Hicken Jr., an addition to the usual bluegrass lineup including the aforesaid mandolin, fiddle and banjo. Indeed, the pedal steel is a very effective addition to the sonic mix, providing a unifying thread through much of the album.
…includes three bonus tracks: covers of Eddie Murphy’s “Party All the Time,” William Bell’s “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” and Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
“Johnny can do what he wants,” Sturgill Simpson told Uncut when his new alias debuted on 2024’s Passage Du Desir, which found him rolling through Paris streets “like a cork in a bottle” while listening to ‘70s soft rock and Serge Gainsbourg.
His first five albums proper had burned Nashville bridges during an odyssey through outlaw country, psychedelia, synths and Kentucky bluegrass, while tracing the five metaphysical phases of the Western soul.
Johnny Blue Skies blew this preordained cycle away. He feels more real this time round, not…
District Five’s Glut continues the Zurich band’s push into a sound that pulls equally from art-rock, jazz, post-punk, and experimental noise without fully settling into any one category.
The four-piece has spent over a decade developing a sound that feels loose and spontaneous without losing focus, and this album captures that balance particularly well.
Recorded with minimal overdubs, the record has the tension and unpredictability of a live performance, but the band’s control over dynamics and texture keeps it from spiraling into chaos. Instead, Glut feels like a document of a group constantly reacting to one another in real time.
“Seed” opens the record with uneasy momentum as scattered guitar lines, pulsing bass,…
Trumpeter Steven Bernstein contrasts a spare jazz trio with bold electronic reinvention on his 2026 double album. The first half (ResoNation Trio) finds the longtime Sex Mob leader in ruminative exploration alongside bassist Scott Colley and drummer Nasheet Waits. Together, they strike a painterly expressionism with songs that often feel more like sketches based on a mood, like little improvised vignettes. Some cuts, like “August 3,” are more ruminative, with Bernstein’s lyrical melody shadowed in skittering, woody bass and drum colors. Others, like “Woodstock,” play like a funky, improvised jam. While the trio’s spare approach is a far cry from the rambunctious party atmosphere of Bernstein’s work with Sex Mob, they nonetheless pull you closer within their…
When considering the title, one might imagine the answer as “sound,” as the post-rock collective Hanry, as the album, or all three. Defined as a “meditation on emergence,” What Came From Silence is a celebration of music and a coming-out party for the French band, who has released a series of EPs and singles leading up to this full-length debut.
The core trio becomes a quintet for this release, the typical post-rock setup enhanced by piano, cello and electronics. In deference to the title, the set starts with “Noise Drowns Out,” which rises from silence rather than attacking; this smooth entry allows the theme of emergence to take hold. The background sheen is like a drone upon which the percussion – both organic and…
Unexpected encounters often yield unexpected results. It is easy to get lost in Radwan Ghazi Moumneh’s extensive discography. Especially if your eye (and ear!) is drawn to the albums recorded under the name Jerusalem in My Heart, which take Arabic music as their starting point, falling somewhere in the vicinity of bands such as Land of Kush, Praed or Sanam. These unexpected collaborations sometimes result in overlooked releases, such as the exceptional The Sentimental Moves – a project that brings together musicians from different worlds, recorded with Canadian guitarist Eric Chenaux – essentially, before Moumneh fully established his distinctive style straddling those worlds.
In Montreal, Moumneh runs a recording studio,…
A lot of life can happen when nothing’s going on. As the years tick by, landmarks become less regular. Highs become less vaulted. Lows become less abyssal. There’s a reason that posting to social media is mostly a younger person’s game. It’s not that less becomes less exciting or moving, it’s just less flashy. Most of life tends to happen in those quiet periods, which we far too often write off as boring, which, in turn, makes us feel bad about our lives, as if we’re not living up to the influencers we could be.
On her first album in five years, British composer and pianist Poppy Ackroyd explores those moments that fall between the posts, the phone calls and text messages; they might not even warrant a diary entry, depending on how…
…compiled by Robert Fripp, including Brian Eno, David Sylvian, Andy Summers, The League of Gentlemen and more.
“[Panegyric label head] Declan Colgan told [Fripp’s manager] David Singleton: ‘Robert has more ampersands in his professional life than anyone I know!’ We went through three iterations of this CD – a David version, a Declan version, and then I made my own comments, and we have this CD that you have. Primarily this is stuff that I want to sit down and listen to. How do we begin? How do we get drawn into this? And then in the middle, when everything sags, what do you do there? And then at the end, well, how do you complete and wind this all up in such a way that the beginning and the end have gone full circle? And there you are.”