Czech guitarist Jakub Šimanský identifies himself with the “American Primitive” genre, evoking in his picking and sometimes in his song titles figures from Fahey and Basho to Rose and Bachmann. He does so with tongue in cheek, though; his previous releases were titled Face to Face Against American Primitivism Vol. 1 and 2. What Do You Mean by That? his third full-length solo release, demonstrates his progress as both a player and a composer. The ten taut tunes, all under five minutes in length, are rich with melody and dazzling fingerpicking. Šimanský reminds us of the inexhaustible potential of just one person and (with one exception) an acoustic guitar.
The focus here is on the six-string. “Knife Thrower,” “Cannoneer,” “Devshirme,” and…
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Long-standing U.S. art rock collective Biota releases a new album every few years. Measured Not Found, its first since 2019’s Fragment for Balance, is a woozy and disorienting journey through shimmering and haunting collages that have become the group’s signature sound.
The instrumentation is broad, including clavioline, French horn, prepared music boxes, Hammond organ, guitars, ektara, Fender Rhodes, strumstick, trumpet, bass, piano, synthesizer, harmonica, flute, rubab, pump organ, accordion, kit drums, tabla, biomellowdrone, bent circuits, dumbek, and violin. The most prominent are piano, synthesizer, guitar, and the other stringed instruments. Vocals are present on a handful of tracks.
Unlike any other outfit aside from…
When Crimson Whisper emerged out of the ether in 2024, it was with an EP of synthy, metallic textures, muscular live drums, and gossamer vocals, making for a giddy version of shoegaze that incorporated some dream pop and post-punk vibes. As intangible as their sound was the lack of background on the project. That EP, Flutter, was followed the next year by a mini-album and another EP. The Shelflife label stepped in to give the band their first label release, Flutter & Beautify, a track-for-track compilation of their two EPs. Meanwhile, it was revealed that Crimson Whisper consists of San Francisco-based singer Na Lim and an unnamed member of an “established shoegaze band.” The mysteriousness extended to Beautify, which on occasion incorporated…
The music of BlankFor.ms, aka Tyler Gilmore, emphasises duality, at its core representing both the calm and chaos of everyday life. The Brooklyn-based ambient artist is known for his disruption and manipulation of degraded tape loops, taking a medium which is by definition repetitive and making it unpredictable, shadowing the beats with slow, shifting synths which are sometimes sinister, sometimes glorious.
Gilmore’s 3rd solo album contains audible elements of his 2023 jazz-electronica album Refract, released in collaboration with pianist Jason Moran and drummer Marcus Gilmore. ‘Crail Family Post Office’ is where this is most apparent, with somewhat atonal and seemingly improvised bleeps dotted in rapid succession throughout.
And the Clocks All Ran Dry is the result of a single night suspended outside of time. Recorded in one continuous session, the collaboration between Andreas Voelk (das ende der liebe) and Scott Monteith (Deadbeat) captures the rare intensity of two artists fully surrendering to sound — unrehearsed, unhurried, and unbound.
The album unfolds as a meditation on transience and stillness, a dialogue between dub’s deep spatial pulse and krautrock’s hypnotic motion. Across its duration, drumless anti-rhythms dissolve into organic textures, and moments of silence take on equal weight. What begins as improvisation gradually becomes architecture — music that builds itself in real time and then vanishes into the night from which it came.
When I Like to Sleep first emerged, the Norwegian instrumental trio’s sound combined polar opposites. Vibraphonist Amund Storløkken Åse, six-string-bass/guitar player Nicolas Leirtrø and drummer Øyvind Leite were all schooled jazz musicians, and they all liked to rock, so they put the two together by combining vibes-forward post-bebop jazz with hammer-of-the-gods riffs.
Ten years and five albums down the road, they’ve filled in that middle space with studio sound manipulation and additional instrumentation. Amplification and effects have transformed the sounds that roll away from Storløkken Åse’s vibraphone from pure waves to sodium-vapor bursts. And he spends as much time playing Mellotron as mallets, a move that’s…
Bliss is the kind of record AI would make if it were actually what its most delusional adherents say it is: Not a pathetic, thought-terminating, and uncanny imitation of human creation but a beguiling alien intelligence capable of wringing new forms out of a near-bottomless archive.
Listening to it, it’s easy to imagine its maker (Alice Gerlach, erstwhile cellist for claire rousay and Tomberlin) as a strange cyborg locked inside a spacious chamber, worming their way through clusters of instruments with preternatural curiosity and mathematical precision. Across four tracks, each clocking in at exactly ten minutes, Gerlach assembles soundscapes from witchy ambient tones, buzzy drones, field recordings of birds chirping and muffled conversations, and…
…dEUS’ second album returns in a newly remastered edition, expanded with a selection of B-sides and rare recordings.
Producing the opening track “I Don’t Mind Whatever Happens” to sound like a scratchy blues track from 1930 may well be the little joke of either the band or producer Eric Drew Feldman in homage to his former boss Captain Beefheart. The results work pretty well anyway, though, and that characterizes the same “try it, let’s see what happens” spirit through In a Bar. Having established its own sense of savvy white boy urban blues on Worst Case Scenario, the band explores more ways around it on its second effort, generally favoring a quieter, calmer result throughout. New guitarist Craig Ward fits into the lineup well, business carrying…
…dEUS debut album remastered and added with B-sides and rarities.
About the only thing wrong with dEUS’ full-length debut is that the band put its best foot forward right at the start with the great “Suds & Soda.” A tense, energetic rip with Klaas Janzoons’ violin the final touch that sends everything over the top, it has all the wired energy of early-’90s rock, but with its own arty edge. The only thing quite like it might have been PJ Harvey’s early efforts, but with more feedback throughout the mix and a fine organ break. From that great start, the five-piece spent its time exploring its own interesting rock zone, referencing back to classic rock influences and jazz pioneers as much as any of its many frazzled contemporaries.
The Masonics are the Kings Of Medway Beat, known for being ‘the best Rhythm and Beat combo since The Milkshakes’, and there’s a very good reason for that…
With Mickey Hampshire (The Milkshakes, Mickey And The Salty Seadogs, Mickey And Ludella, Mick Hampshire), Bruce Brand (The Pop Rivets, The Milkshakes, Auntie Vegetable, Thee Headcoats, The Kravin’ “A”s, The Clique, Dutronc, The Voo-Dooms and more) and John Gibbs (The Wildebeests, The Kaisers), this Medway-based trio fire rhythm ’n’ beat and rock ’n’ roll!
Since 1991, The Masonics have been raising roofs all across the land, and disturbing audio grooves on at least ten studio albums and more than ten singles. There’s no stopping them!
Lee “Scratch” Perry Presents Black Man’s Time: The Jamaican Upsetters Singles 1972 Chapter 1 captures a transformative moment in the career of Lee “Scratch” Perry, a year when his productions begin to fully reflect both his radical studio experimentation and his increasingly outspoken personal vision. Released as part of Doctor Bird’s chronological exploration of Perry’s Jamaican output, this collection shines a focused light on 1972 – a year that quietly reshapes the future of reggae and lays crucial groundwork for what soon becomes known as dub.
By this stage in the early 1970s, Perry is no longer just producing songs; he is reconstructing them. His approach to rhythm grows more skeletal and hypnotic, basslines push further to the front…
Marc Sabat is a Canadian composer who was born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada in September 1965. He went to the University of Toronto, where he studied violin, composition and mathematics, completing a BA in 1986. He followed this with a Master’s at the Juilliard School in New York and then two years of string quartet playing in Banff and St. John’s Newfoundland. He has been based in Berlin, Germany, since 1999. Despite that, in 2017, as part of Another Timbres’ Canadian Composers Series, Sabat’s album Harmony was released on the label alongside Linda Catlin Smith, Cassandra Miller and the like.
Sabat is a pioneer of instrumental music written and performed in Just Intonation (JI) and one of a few composers who compose for…
The Nakibembe Embaire Group’s self-titled debut album was one of the highlights of 2023. Nyege Nyege Tapes captured the disappearing East African tradition of the embaire, a giant wooden xylophone designed to be played by as many as eight musicians at a time. The instrument can be the social center of a village, placed in a deep pit to amplify what is already a powerful sound.
On its own, the embaire ensemble generates a huge amount of energy. Repeating, overlapping figures are a kind of proto-minimalism, Steve Reich without the precise, bookish glaze.
…The result is their live collaboration with Japanese live-sound engineer Naoyuki Uchida, Phantom Keys. Six men do their thing on the embaire, while Uchida applies his live-dub…
“Satan is my father”, are the first words heard on the latest release from Germany’s The Green Apple Sea and it’s as intriguing a line as you will hear to begin a song, let alone an album. It’s a bold missive that more than succeeds in earning the listener’s attention. Dark Kid plays as a concept album of sorts, detailing aspects of singer Stefan Prange’s less than idyllic childhood, sequenced as episodes, as if listening to a podcast or watching a television show. Despite the seriousness of the subject, the lead track ‘That’s how you called him when I was small’, (or Episode 1, if you will), bounces along on a rather jaunty, mid-tempo beat, complete with some lovely acoustic guitar and even some whistling that belies the heaviness of the words being sung. It’s a formula that the band…
Brooklyn-based songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Alex Toth charts the wild permutations of emotion, both as one half of the indie art-pop duo Rubblebucket and across his solo work under the Tōth moniker. His strongest work turns compassionately toward the unsettled self while balancing a pop sensibility that is both danceable and honest.
Across his Tōth releases — Practice Magic and Seek Professional Help When Necessary (2019) and You and Me and Everything (2021) — Toth continues polishing this mode of musical catharsis, which he has also explored within Rubblebucket’s more kinetic, outward-facing framework. On his latest full-length, And the Voice Said, this instinct fully coheres. Here, it lingers longer,…
Described in the press materials as “an outstanding visual artist, a righteous community member, and a kind soul”, Chad Kouri has been absorbing and meditating on music in Chicago and Detroit for decades. His full-length debut album, Mixed, brings together an abundance of inspiration filtered through his lyrical saxophone, combined with field recordings, percussion, and synthesizers to create a unique, deeply felt musical experience.
For Kouri, 15 years of visual art and community work – including commissions from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Art and Design New York, and Adidas, in addition to solo exhibitions and performances in Los Angeles, New York, and Italy – were followed by five years of returning to music practice as…
After a loved one dies, might part of their essence be inscribed in the objects they owned? When the object is as personal as a beloved accordion, the case grows stronger. When a member of Arigto happened upon such an instrument, memories came flooding back: not only of the relative playing but breathing, an act performed not only by the artist, but the instrument. When one hears the lungs of this accordion – the only instrument used here – the impression of breath is so strong that we wrote to receive confirmation. Is this really Arigto (Noah Haußmann and Sebastian Stauß) or a communication from the great beyond? There’s no reason why it cannot be both.
The cover photo is haunting; black-and-white lends itself to such moods, and has been…
“Hypnagogic” is a word that refers to the unique space between sleeping and dreaming, and it’s not surprising that the term has been used to describe the music of Greg Jamie. Hailing from Portland, Maine, Jamie’s music is often an odd, woozy, and unsettling place, but his songs also contain warmth and comfort, as if he’s your guide through a dark place just before dawn. His debut album, Crazy Time, was a seductive, lo-fi gem, and the follow-up, Across a Violet Pasture, covers much of the same territory, but with a broader scope and greater ambition.
Jamie, who sings and plays guitar and synth, is joined primarily by Colby Nathan, who produced the album and also contributes bass, synth, guitar, and vocals (and was also a crucial….
Two years on from the hedonistic rush of their debut, Eades return with a record that trades chaos for clarity.
On Final Sirens Call, their long-anticipated second album, they shed the last remnants of their scrappy post-punk adolescence and step firmly into a more refined, expansive sound – one steeped in Americana-tinged melancholy, mid-90s indie grit and the restless introspection of artists coming to terms with their place in a fractured world. Growth is placed front and centre, as the quintet dive ever deeper into their roots, finding rare solace amidst the shifting earth.
Following 2022’s Delusion Spree – an album that ricocheted through the anxious energies of early adulthood – and 2024’s Fight Or Flight…
One glance at the credits to Nashville by-way-of Canada guitarist Garret T. Willie’s second release, and any blues rocker who reads liner notes knows this is a worthy addition to the genre without hearing a note.
When you attract veteran talent like producer/drummer Tom Hambridge, along with the blessing of Gulf Coast label co-owner and blues star Mike Zito, and well-known backing musicians such as Audley Freed and Kevin McKendree, it’s clear this youngster has captured the attention of some of the most respected guys in the business. That’s an impressive feat for someone only on his second album, working in an arena with plenty of competition from players who have devoted many more years perfecting their craft.