If you’re tapped into the right corners of the underground, Winged Wheel are a supergroup. Recruiting a member of Sonic Youth — arguably the greatest experimental rock band of all time, and inarguably one of the most popular — certainly bolsters that designation.
But even before Steve Shelley got behind the kit for 2024’s Big Hotel, the “creatively and geographically scattered collective” was an impressive assemblage of talent. More importantly, the music lives up to the pedigree.
The band began as a remote file-trading operation early in the decade, deep in the dregs of the pandemic. The players: Chicago-based Whitney Johnson, who releases music as Matchess and plays in Circuit Des Yeux; Cory Plump,…
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Pullman is a studio-born acoustic supergroup that emerged from Chicago’s post-rock milieu in the late ’90s, uniting Ken “Bundy K.” Brown (Tortoise/ Directions in Music), Curtis Harvey (Rex), Chris Brokaw (Come), and Doug McCombs (Tortoise/Eleventh Dream Day); drummer Tim Barnes later joined, solidifying the group’s core lineup. They debuted on Thrill Jockey with Turnstyles & Junkpiles (1998), a hushed, live-to-2-track collection of interwoven guitars that critics likened to John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Gastr del Sol. Their follow-up, Viewfinder (2001), expanded the palette with percussion, subtle electric textures, and multi-track layering, while maintaining Pullman’s rustic, cinematic restraint. Across both albums, the band became a touchstone for…
At only 26, Jenny Hollingworth has already (incredibly) been making music for half her life. Having formed freak-pop project Let’s Eat Grandma with Rosa Walton as a young teen, the duo released their striking debut effort, ‘I Gemini’, aged just 16. Now, with three Let’s Eat Grandma albums under their joint belt (the most recent being 2022’s confronting ‘Two Ribbons’), the pair have taken that record’s crux – namely, the metamorphosis of their relationship from inseparable teenagers to independent adult entities – to its natural conclusion, each embarking on solo endeavours under new monikers.
Jenny On Holiday, then, sees her step sideways with a staunchly pop palette, leaving behind the quirkier corners of LEG’s fantastical…
As a group who’ve always existed with a winning duality of punk and pop at their core, you can often gauge where The Cribs are about to land on that spectrum by the outside hands they’ve enlisted to help guide the ship. On 2017’s raw and grungy ‘24-7 Rock Star Shit’, legendary Nirvana producer Steve Albini sat at the desk. On new record ‘Selling a Vibe’, they decided to throw a curveball by bringing in former Chairlift member and Lil Yachty producer Patrick Wimberley. As guitarist Ryan Jarman told NME last year: “We wanted to try working with someone who specifically worked with more pop kind of people.”
But fear not: the band’s ninth studio album is far from a big, Swift-ian attempt to infiltrate the commercial pop mainstream. Within the first…
Emma Tricca’s Prisms of Winter is an intimate recording — a collection of twelve stripped‑down live recordings that feel less like a performance and more like a whispered conversation between artist and listener. Recorded in London’s backrooms and scattered studios, the album is suffused with a quiet magic, and the kind of intimacy that makes you lean in closer, as though Tricca were singing directly into your ear.
This is Tricca at her most vulnerable and poetic. By paring back the arrangements, she exposes the bare bones of her songs — the words, the voice, the guitar — and in doing so, reveals their timeless strength. The immediacy of the recordings creates a sense of closeness, as if each track were a secret shared in confidence.
…Sevdah – or sevdalinka, as Slavs tend to add an affectionate diminutive to anything they love – is the deep and distinctive music of Bosnia and Herzegovina, often full of lost love, nostalgia and longing. The name comes from the same Arabic root as saudade in Portuguese, which characterises both fado in Portugal and morna in Cape Verde. On the notes to their new album, Radio Sevdah, Divanhana describe sevdah melodies as “soft as moonlight and as powerful as the ocean’s tide.” Divanhana perform some traditional sevdah songs, in contemporary arrangements, but are more focused on composing new songs.
The Bosnian band launch a radio station in the form of an album, encompassing ‘jingles’ and spoken-word interludes between new…
Vazz formed in Glasgow during the early ’80s, and initially consisted of vocalist/lyricist Anna Howson and multi-instrumentalist Hugh Small. With Howson’s ethereal harmonies floating over Small’s sparse drum machines and mysterious guitar hooks, the duo’s music fell somewhere between coldwave, post-punk, and dream pop. The five-song mini-album Your Lungs and Your Tongues (released in 1986 by Cathexis Recordings, also home to records by Fini Tribe and Pink Industry) was one of a handful of vinyl releases the pair made before splitting up near the end of the decade. As Small resurfaced during the 2010s with solo piano and ambient compositions, Vazz’s scant ’80s discography was rediscovered and revived in several different configurations…
It’s been a year and a half since BASIC first emerged out of a bare bones set up of two guitars (Chris Forsyth and Nick Millevoi) and a drum machine. That early experiment, inspired by the 1984 collaboration between Robert Quine and Fred Maher, put a boxy, machine-drilled framework around open-ended guitar jam. Mikel Patrick Avery tended the rough propulsion of the drum machine, enriching its stutter with additional improvised percussion, while Forsyth and Millevoi slashed away at one another on conventional and baritone guitar. It was, at once, disciplined and free-spirited, and you can see why it appealed to Forsyth. Christian Carey reviewed the full-length debut last year, writing “With a rattling drum pattern, synth lines embellished by bent notes…
San Diego in the ’90s was a great place to be if you were a weird punk kid. A conservative Navy town on the surface, the hardcore underground churned out innovative bands at a furious clip, with the bleeding edge of the scene revolving around Gravity Records and its standard-bearers, Heroin and Antioch Arrow. Balancing nihilistic fervor with a ragged poetic sensibility, these bands transmuted post-adolescent angst into timeless invectives against boredom and apathy. After Heroin broke up in 1993, guitarist Scott Bartoloni joined with vocalist Matt Goldsby, bassist Ryan Noel, and drummer Mario Rubalcaba to form Clikatat Ikatowi. Combining the intensity of hardcore with the epic soundscapes of local noise rock exemplars Drive Like Jehu, Clikatat Ikatowi quickly…
Despite his relatively young age, Kory Reeder has already produced well over a hundred scores, the earliest dating from 2017 and the Covid years being particularly fertile for him. He has composed in a range of genres which include large ensemble, soloist with orchestra, choral, chamber (5+ players), quartets, trios, duos, solo, open ensemble pieces, art songs, stage music, electronic music, field recordings. In addition, Homestead is his second album release on Another Timbre, his first on that label having been entitled Codex Vivere recorded in December 2021 by Apartment House. Prior to those releases, Reeder’s first album Love Songs, Duets had been released on the prestigious Editions Wandelweiser Records. Two other Reeder albums have been released…
Propulsion and stillness coincide in the atmospheric “State of Motion,” an early single from this third volume in the Nanocluster series. Vibrations build and surge, their overtones merging in limpid pools of sound. A pedal steel arcs over ambient tones, a drum beat pushes it onward, but mostly this music doesn’t develop so much as it exists. You can float on it, on your back, like a swimmer in salt water, effortlessly taking in the liquid tone and pulse of it.
Nanocluster Vol. 3 pairs Wire’s Colin Newman and his creative partner Malka Spigel with cosmic country’s SUSS, two sets of musical talents that Dusted has long admired. We’ve covered works by Spigel and Wire since moving to the Tumblr and Githead in the before times. As for SUSS, of the 2024 Birds and Beasts,…
If you thought Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal evoked the feeling of deepest winter, you should check out this beautifully odd and solitary project from Arkansas-based multi-instrumentalist Chaz Knapp to hear how it’s really done. Chaz is a traditional instrumentalist and field recorder, whose Microfolk series highlighted him as a musical collagist. Winter Music contrasts Microfolk (which was recorded in the summer heat) in that Chaz took his instruments to various locations in the rugged terrain of Northwest Arkansas in the depths of winter, recording with tape loops and improvisations while his fingers froze and his nylon string guitar neck shrank in the cold.
The result is something of a remote and isolated audio diary, as much documenting…
When you have a look at the June Star website, a wonderfully jaundiced and witty description of the band reads – “the band was formed in 1998 by singer/songwriter Andrew Grimm, and since then they have put out 21 records, toured a bit of the US and have gone into debt“.
…After making 21 albums, for the songs on this collection to sound as refreshing and memorable as they do is nothing short of astonishing. Grimm is backed up by a stellar bunch of musicians (the line-up of the band has changed a bit over the years), Dave Hadley (pedal steel), David Bryson (drums), Chris Iseli (bass), and Michael Zepeda (guitar). Hilariously, on the publicity material, not only does Grimm say he’s the band leader and singer, but also “Manager/Publicist/Songwriter/Plumber“.
The 12″ single redefined music and the way we move to it, something that’s celebrated on the fantastic new four-CD collection from Cherry Red Records, Extended Stimulation: 12″ Pop Adventures on the Dancefloor 1983-1988. While 12″ vinyl is generally associated with disco, electronic, and hip-hop, this box set explores just how revolutionary it could be for traditional pop music, featuring tracks from the likes of New Order, Simply Red, the Human League, Duran Duran, Talk Talk, Pet Shop Boys, and many others.
However, these may not be the songs as most people remember them. That’s because everything here is either a remix (or extended mix) of some kind, originally released on 12″ vinyl. A little history lesson may be in order. Before the 12″…
Lightning in a Twilight Hour are another band built around the heartbreak of Bobby Wratten, and like the Field Mice, Northern Picture Library, and Trembling Blue Stars, their albums are made up of songs that trickle like warm tears down the cheeks of a heartbroken soul. Colours Yet to Be Named has all the hallmarks of his work: precisely jangling guitars, dub-inspired basslines, soothingly dark synth pads, and vocals that alternately glide on top of, or sink into, the gloom. Wratten is joined as he was on the group’s previous masterpiece of overwhelming melancholy Overwintering by longtime collaborators Anne Marie Davies and Beth Arzy on vocals along with producer Ian Catt and bassist Michael Hiscock. They work together seamlessly to create a soft…
TAKAAT began (and still operate) as the rhythm section to Mdou Moctar, the breakout Nigerien rock band named for its charismatic frontman.
This puts Ahmoudou Madassane (guitar/vocals), bassist Mikey Coltun (the sole American in the group), and drummer Souleymane Ibrahim in the same realm as Calexico. That indie band started out as part of alt-country weirdos Giant Sand, but TAKAAT aren’t seeking to branch out from or expand the sound of their parent outfit. They might have more in common with one of Bob Weir’s non-Dead outfits. Like Weir, Madassane has had to invent his own method of playing rhythm guitar to accommodate a brilliant, dynamic leader–and when that leader’s not in the picture, there’s a lot of space left to fill.
…Amaika Rude’s album, The Ska and the Abstract Truth, evokes happy head nodding to the tunes found on Oliver Nelson’s masterpiece Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961). The original album, released in February 1961, featured Nelson on saxophone and included such jazz luminaries as Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and Roy Haynes. With a lineup like that, is it any wonder why many jazz publications have given it 5-star accolades?
Amaika Rude’s remake adds a new dimension — the ska beat — to the mix, hopefully attracting new listeners to this timeless set of compositions. The band, comprised of Inigo Elexpuru (drums), Inigo Imatz (bass), Andres Navascuez (piano/organ), Borja Goni (guitar), Joan Gonga…
Iain Ballamy’s new album Riversphere, released late 2025, is a fluid, textural exploration between improvisation and composition. Featuring performances by Rob Luft, Conor Chaplin, Corrie Dick, Laura Jurd and introducing Charlie Ballamy.
…The cross-generational lineup and captivating ideas of Riversphere, his first solo release in years, testify to exactly why he has stayed there for 40 years. In their 20s, Ballamy and pianist/composer Django Bates frequently joined forces as two mavericks, skilfully respectful of the classic jazz tradition while adventurously and often mischievously transforming it. They were key figures in a gifted UK generation that created some of the sparkiest European jazz of the 1980s and 90s, most influentially in…
Even listeners in the U.S., where this Cuban-born composer is based, may be less familiar with the music of Tania León than with that of other Latin American composers who have gained popularity lately. This set of four live performances by the London Philharmonic offers a good sampling of her style. It includes three new works performed during her residence with the orchestra, on either side of the age of 80, in the early and mid-2020s. León’s work certainly includes Cuban rhythms, but she builds substantial structures out of them, with her wind sections engaging in vigorous dialogue with the percussion section.
The multi-sectional pieces weave a lot together. Sample Raíces, whose “roots” are León’s own and include jazz and even a Peruvian…
Are we approaching The End? A quick global vibe check points to the affirmative. From non-stop doomscrolling pummeling our neural pathways to climate scientists throwing up their hands in despair, the near future might be a wrap on the world as we know it. Philosophers like Slavoj Žižek and Amador Fernández-Savater have already gone as far as to argue that the apocalypse has already occurred. For so many of us, it feels like we are just drifting through dystopian fallout, waiting out the days until inevitable societal collapse.
So, where to turn when confronted with such dire and defeatist predictions? Hieroglyphic Being (AKA Jamal Moss) offers a few avenues of spiritual release on his latest album, The Sound of Something Ending. The title track drops…