A steady drip of aqueous, IDM-tinted techno has earned Dominican producer Boundary, born Josué Suero, a place at the vanguard of Santo Domingo’s electronic scene. After picking up a copy of Ableton at 16, the young artist quickly established a signature sound: taut basslines, blockish low-fidelity timbres, and a keen sense of momentum that elevates the standard four-on-the-floor pulse. Boundary’s beats practically glow in the dark with peppy snaps, clicks, pops, and snares, buoyed by evolving melodies that belie a certain melancholia. His most recent full-length, 2024’s Oxido en El Espejo, exemplified this saturnine bent, weaving grim warnings of planetary catastrophe into its track titles. With the new Epicenter Imager EP, Suero maintains focus on the natural…
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Drummer Kate Gentile is a restlessly innovative improviser and composer who does not shy away from pushing boundaries. In the equally adventurous guitarist Marc Ducret and experimenting saxophonist Jeremy Viner, she has found kindred spirits. Together, they make up the collaborative Sifters. Their eponymous release consists of seven stimulating originals delivered with seamless camaraderie, as the group often functions as a single dynamic unit.
For instance, Gentile’s “Flail Maneuvers” is a provocative piece built around a thrillingly riotous repartee. The textured ensemble play deftly fuses composed passages with spontaneous ones. Gentile’s thunderous polyrhythms, Ducret’s blistering chords, and Viner’s fiery…
On his own, Tony Trischka is considered one of the world’s foremost banjo players.
He is comfortable paying tribute to tradition of bluegrass pioneers while also stepping outside the box and innovating. To his own substantial body of work, Trischka adds two mammoth tribute projects: the 2023, Grammy-nominated Earl Jam, followed by Earl Jam 2.
…Both albums are built around a remarkable discovery: a cache of previously unheard recordings of Earl Scruggs and John Hartford informally jamming at Scruggs’ home between 1987 and 1998. Earl Jam 2 features 15 newly selected performances drawn from the same archive, spanning traditional standards, deep-cut fiddle tunes, and iconic American songs…
Lynn Miles may not yet be among your ‘top ten Canadian songwriters’, but A Bouquet of Black Flowers may be about to change that. With three Canadian Folk Music English Songwriter of the Year Awards and a JUNO Award for Roots & Traditional Album of the Year: Solo under her belt, Miles’ music, whilst not unsung, is deserving of wider recognition. In 2008, she began re-recording selected songs from her back catalogue with voice and guitar, or piano accompaniment. The resulting four volumes of Black Flowers albums were released over the next six years. Fifteen of the forty songs from that series were picked and remastered for A Bouquet of Black Flowers. This summation of a recording career approaching its 40th anniversary is a fitting introduction for anyone…
The All-Night Costume Company, the ninth solo effort from Tacoma, WA’s Kye Alfred Hillig, is the album that almost wasn’t.
After the release of his double LP in 2022, Hillig was feeling disillusioned and stepped away from music for the first time in more than 20 years. But quitting didn’t stick and instead served, in part, as a source for new material. Throughout the dozen songs here, Hillig weaves in themes of perseverance and getting by. In the first moments of the album, on “The Horrible Truth,” he puts vulnerabilities and existential dread over a mid-tempo beat. It’s not the best track on the album, but it offers a map of what’s to follow — stark, sometimes painfully honest truths of life over a solid indie rock soundtrack. But there is also…
Gloom, glorious gloom, permeates the musical catalogue of singer-songwriter Fågelle (Klara Andersson), and new album Bränn min jord overflows with it. There are screams, cries, and field recordings. There is a sense throughout that we are swinging between mourning and desperation. Most importantly, there is Fågelle, coolly confident and unpredictable as a composer and performer. Even in the record’s most sedate moments, there is always something simmering within her. As Bränn min jord moves from start to finish, it’s thrilling to find out what those somethings are and how they burst forth from the depths of Fågelle’s mind to the sonic surface.
As the album begins, it is slow, stark. Beneath a sparse piano line and Fågelle’s tense…
Nate Mendelsohn’s skills in the studio are legendary in New York’s indie music world. The multi-instrumentalist, producer and engineer has collaborated with the likes of Yaeji, Frankie Cosmos, Phony Ppl, Dougie Poole, Office Culture, Adeline Hotel, and many more. For more than a decade, he’s also been releasing his own music under the moniker Market. His style is eclectic and often beautifully bizarre, but always seems anchored, sometimes tenuously, to sophisticated pop structures. As idiosyncratic as his latest Market project can get, Cleanliness 2: Gorgeous Technologies has something to offer everyone, even as it travels along its own unique path.
The press materials for Market explain that Mendelsohn was influenced by hip-hop…
Being a composer in a modern sense of the term has gone way past a singular artist sitting down (or standing up) next to their main composing instrument and music staff paper, writing down the notes. The creative process is, these days, enriched by so many other tools available to music creators that enable them to go beyond what was possible in previous centuries, decades, even days. At the same time, the composing process doesn’t limit itself to what is considered classical music as such, but moves into other musical genres, as far as the imagination of the author can take them.
Take the example we have here – Claire Dickson and her third album Balance. A Metropolis Ensemble commissioned composer, Dickson is working mainly as a vocalist and…
Hailing from Côte d’Ivoire but now based in Berlin, we first came across the balafon player Aly Keïta as part of the Trio Ivoire, whose 2000 debut album was an intriguing exercise in Afro-jazz fusion. Since then, he’s made a number of impressive albums, both solo and collaborative, bridging contemporary jazz and African tradition. But this mostly instrumental set may just be his finest to date. Recorded with a new trio featuring Dutch drummer Marcel van Cleef and Italian bassist Roberto Badoglio, the balafon has rarely sounded so versatile: deeply rooted in African tradition and yet infused with a cosmic, futuristic twist. On ‘Farafinko’, for example, Keïta locks into a timeless West African groove in the style of the Malian virtuoso Lassana Diabaté,…
The border wall between the U.S. and Mexico is a symbol of division, and unfortunately representative of a manufactured political climate. During a 2020 trip along this structure, Jacob Kirkegaard and cellist Mariel Roberts Musa recorded the wall itself through a set of contact microphones. This was released two years ago as the album Traverse.
On Sunder, the same recordings are used as an accompanying instrument to solo piano compositions played by Conor Hanick. Each of seven movements is based around a different location on the wall, with varying resonance and overall sonic character. But rather than grafting the music to the field recordings or vice versa, Roberts Musa has integrated them more deeply.
Classical music begins with blood and guts. The first violins were strung with sheep intestines, while early timpanis bore heads made from goatskin. The conservatory-bound spend years blistering, bruising, and contorting themselves, sometimes to the point of permanent damage. On the Francis Bacon-inspired cover of her new album, Noémi Büchi lies splayed out and bloodied on a plastic sheet, a sight that evokes both a cocoon and a Dexter kill room. Büchi, a Swiss-French sound artist and classically trained pianist — the late Romantic period and early modernist periods are her province — titled her new album after the Latin “exuviae.” To Virgil, these were the spoils stripped from an enemy combatant’s body; to a modern-day entomologist, they’re the husks…
The cover of Tectonic Particles looks like it could be a photo of organic matter shot through a microscope. It suits both the album and the label, Quiet Details, who have a specific vision: each of their releases is meant to elaborate what the phrase “quiet details” as interpreted by the artist. In this case, the artist is Kayla Painter, an eclectic creative with a background in multimedia visual arts in addition to music.
…If Tectonic Particles is put on in the background, a first listen of the opening track “Forest Floor” is like a routine stroll through the woods. A gentle three-note piano theme paves the way. But upon a closer listen, as the sonic lens zooms in, one notices every twig that snaps underfoot and each distant bird call. This is not just…
Good to great singer-songwriters seem to be creeping up on us daily (again!) — artists obviously seem to have a greater need to try and express their personal sensibilities and whatnot as much as they did in the early ‘70s.
Stressing that good or great epithet, we can add to that list Seattle’s Sarabeth Weszely, who took the moniker of Where’s Beth.
Weszely has been around for a few years now and has some early recordings, but Ache Is Cricket in the Night stands officially as her second album and can easily serve as the best possible introduction to a wider audience.
The fact that the album was recorded live in her Seattle home studio might surprise some, as the sound has that perfect studio pitch…
Taracá is the 15th album by 17-time Latin Grammy winner, Uruguayan singer/songwriter Jorge Drexler. His first in four years, it marks his first time recording at home in two decades. Its contents offer a return to root sounds, in particular candombe. Candombe is a drum-based musical style that originated among the enslaved African population of capital Montevideo, and is based on Bantu African drumming. The musical style was racially marginalized and even banned over its existence (as were Brazilian samba and American blues) but survived, evolved, and in the 21st century, thrived. Like the aforementioned styles, candombe is at an ascendant moment in 21st century popular culture. Drexler plays homage to his recently deceased father here; to that end…
Asia are back and roaring in their new, exhilarating line-up! Recorded live on the first of three unforgettable nights at Trading Boundaries in Sussex, in April 2025, this release captures the band performing their iconic 1982 debut album “ASIA” in full, along with a selection of their greatest hits.
Featuring Geoff Downes (keys), Virgil Donati (drums – ex-Planet X), John Mitchell (guitars – Arena, It Bites etc.) and the astonishing Harry Whitley (on bass and vocals), this fresh incarnation of Asia brings both reverence for the classics and a thrilling new energy to the stage. The setlist includes fan favourites like “Heat Of The Moment”, “Only Time Will Tell”, “Sole Survivor”, “One Step Closer” and “Time Again”, alongside video-era…
Last year White Reaper released their latest full-length, Only Slightly Empty. Now the band has released a deluxe version, Only Slightly Expanded, featuring previously unheard b-sides, including “Need,” “Mold,” and “No Counter.”
It took more than getting dropped by their label and losing the rhythm section to put a damper on White Reaper. Their 2025 album Only Slightly Empty has all the elements on board that have made all their other releases such a delight. Listed in order of increasing importance: crisp and clean production, guitars that split the difference between hard rock thunder and power pop chime, charming dude-next-door vocals, and huge hooks. It’s all here and all working perfectly well as the band – now down to a trio – crank through…
Bright Spirit marks the third instalment in a trilogy that began with The Universe Also Collapses (2019) and continued with Unending Ascending (2023). Recorded with long-time collaborator Frank Byng in his South London studio, Bright Spirit sees Gong at their experimental best, more adventurous and more open to the dream than ever.
And dreams are central here. Not just as lyrical imagery, but as a way of thinking – where psychedelia, love, and the thin membrane between worlds feed into the music. The opener, ‘Dream Of Mine’, unfurls like a transmission from the in-between, its mid-section blooming into harmonies and an angular melody that feels like a key turning in a long-awaited lock. Frontman Kavus Torabi describes it as a moment everything…
Legendary saxophonist Don Dietrich and his powerhouse cellist daughter Camille Dietrich collide in Live Bahdu, a fierce musical union that music critic Byron Coley hails as “sheer wailing sonic pleasure.” Don, an untamed force who has spent over forty years shaping the explosive core of Borbetomagus, unleashes a volatile, lung-shaking roar, an unyielding take no prisoners wall of sound.
Camille answers with her own ferocity, channeling raw, electric intensity through the disciplined edge of her classical training, wielding her cello with the instinctive wildness of someone raised inside the storm of improvisation.
Together, they don’t just play-they engulf. Their sound floods a room, swallowing the air, saturating the senses, and leaving audiences…
Country music fans will tell you, there’s country music, and there’s Texas country music. They are not the same thing. Just because someone’s from the Lone Star state doesn’t make one a Texas country artist. Defining just what Texas music is can be difficult. It is characterized more by what it is not, almost more than what it is (grittier than Nashville production, populated by self-described outlaws, more honky-tonk danceable than ballad driven, etc.).
Because Texas music contains elements of pop (Buddy Holly), rock (ZZ Top), folk (Nanci Griffiths), gospel (Beyoncé), R&B (Leon Bridges), blues (Stevie Ray Vaughn), jazz (Lyle Lovett), ad infinitum, it’s hard to find a unifying principal that binds all of these artists together other…
…Just 24, Natalie Del Carmen has already released two albums, a couple of singles, and an EP. She hails from Los Angeles, where she returned to after gaining a Bachelor’s degree in Music (with a songwriting focus) from the famed Berklee College of Music in Boston.
This explains her talent for wordplay in exploring themes of adulthood, self-discovery, and personal growth, wrapped in a series of glorious tunes. Her debut, Bloodline, was possibly a more simplistic album lyrically (most of which was written when del Carmen was in her teens and much more influenced by ‘pop’ music). That album came out in March 2023 and received a positive reception from critics and fans alike, who noted her voice and her way with a tune. An EP entitled…