a sad song for A. brings together Stefano Gentile, Giulia Dal Vecchio, Gigi Masin, Fabio Orsi, Anacleto Vitolo, and the multimedia project Hiseka to explore emotional states through music, text and photography. Originating from an informal conversation about anxiety, the project evolved into a creative dialogue in which inner experience became shared expression.
Structured around four stages we may recognise – Panic, Anxiety, Light and Dream – each contributor shaped one phase in their own language. Gentile provided imagery, Dal Vecchio translated feelings into words, and the musicians responded with original works reflecting each emotional shift. The result is a thoughtful constellation of perspectives that invites listeners to…
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…Tsapiky! is named for a musical style that’s been popular in recent decades in the Africa-facing southern corner of Madagascar, an island in the Indian Ocean. It’s the preferred soundtrack for extended celebrations that people there throw around transitional events.
If you’re getting married or buried, it’s common to have a band hoist some loudspeakers onto the roof of your truck and get the outdoor party rolling. Heard for the first time, it sounds a bit like Congolese soukous being played through a megaphone. It has that style’s open-ended dance grooves and sprightly melodies, but it’s decidedly lower budget. A typical tsapiky band will have a drum kit, a bassist laying down bulbous, intermittent pulses and an electric…
ātamōn, the first full-length release from Swedish composer Amina Hocine, was born from a foghorn organ built by the composer herself, made from everyday objects taken from hardware stores. Listening to ātamōn without any context, it would not be immediately apparent that the music was made utilizing any acoustic instruments, let alone one so rudimentary.
The most immediately noticeable aspect of ātamōn is how icy and synthetic its drones sound, almost feeling like a digital condensation of Harry Bertoia’s sound sculptures.
ātamōn was recorded in an abandoned iron mine in rural Sweden, a process reminiscent of Pauline Oliveros’ cistern experiments, but the record doesn’t sound anything like her…
The influential saxophonist Tim Berne leads a new explorative trio called Capotosta, taking listeners on a sonic journey filled with hidden treasures. Berne enjoys the inventive support of two other creative visionaries: guitarist Greg Belisle-Chi, a recent yet highly compatible collaborator, and drummer Tom Rainey, a longtime associate who played an important role in Berne’s acclaimed avant-jazz trios Big Satan and Hardcell.
Yikes Too is a double album with two distinct parts. The first disc features ten studio tracks recorded at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, while the second captures a live concert performance in Seattle. The album’s mixing and mastering are handled by guitarist and producer David Torn, Berne’s collaborator in the Sun of Goldfinger…
…features a collection of reimagined acoustic tracks known as the “Londinium Versions”, which were recorded in West London with a heavy emphasis on string arrangements.
Technically, ‘Whiplash’ is bôa’s third full-length, but the discography and narrative of the London-based band is a little more complicated than that.
Formed in 1993 as a funk outfit, their first album is technically 1998’s ‘The Race of a Thousand Camels’, though due to label issues it was subsequently re-released as ‘Twilight’ in 2001.
There was also an unreleased full-length, ‘Acton Live’, that preceded it, which was subsequently uploaded and made available online in 2010.
And while 2005’s second record ‘Get There’ is officially ‘Whiplash’’s predecessor, there…
…it is no exaggeration when Zane Mclaughlin of Oldstar, a band from Panama City Beach in Florida’s panhandle, sings, “Let’s pray for my tires / So they don’t spread like wings.” Florida tires need prayers, especially when they have to live through all the driving that happens on Oldstar’s latest project, Of the Highway, a focused, heartfelt country rock record about, mostly, the highway. Oldstar’s first few projects, while showing hints of this album’s country inflections, drew more on a kind of post-Alex G bedroom — slowcore that continues to pervade alternative music — not an uncommon breeding ground for a contemporary alt-country band. But rather than translating that genre’s songwriting norms into the sonic language of major chords, pedal steel, harmonica,…
…doesn’t it seem like lovers with hubris, short-sightedness, and a lack of sentimentality are the ones most likely to get divorced — or, if you prefer, the quickest to get divorced? And yet, whatever the circumstances were in that scenario, fictional or otherwise — centrifugal force Mary Claire proves on their debut that they are an outlier. The musician also makes the very convincing points that the power of love is much, much stronger than statistical data; far more precious than the way we carelessly bandy about the word in our degraded and thus devalued lexicon.
Slake have carved out a wry sub-sub-subgenre called “lesbian doom folk.” The indie band hails from somewhere in the Bay Area, but it’s unclear exactly where, since Slake’s…
The Worm Moon is the fifth full length LP from New Hampshire’s Footings, home to the songs of underground music lifer Eric Gagne. Out now on Feeding Tube records, The Worm Moon is an immersive set of brief skeletal folk-rock missives and instrumental interludes that rewards repeated through-listens. Thematically The Worm Moon deals with attempts to find peace and growth within spaces of decay and stagnation, reflecting its title which refers to a full moon in March. A time when the worms start moving again, and all the new possibilities of spring are just around the corner – but we are also reminded of all that living tissue which fell the previous Autumn, upon which the worms feast. Like many works of art surfacing at this point in history, this…
Kelby Clark is an LA-by-way-of-Georgia banjo player who blends divergent styles and approaches to forge his own novel direction for the instrument. Over a series of mostly self-released home-spun recordings from the past five or so years, he has honed his approach, expanding the traditions of his point of origin in the American south to include free improvisation and eastern modalities — an alchemy familiar to Sandy Bull, a fellow stretcher of the vocabulary of the banjo and of the concept of “folk” and the traditional. His sparse and appropriately fiery new LP Language of the Torch represents a significant milestone in his development of his own science of the banjo, a statement of intent for his artistic practice.
…Across the seven searching pieces that…
Seven beautiful, melancholic motets and a chanson by Renaissance composer Nicolas Gombert, arranged for instruments by James Weeks, who also composed the interludes.
Gombert’s music was renowned for the complexity of its polyphony, and these realisations, played by leading experimental ensemble Apartment House, emphasise the layered density of the music, while trying to take it as far away as possible from its origins as choral church music.
…the music here is rather more complicated than that as the album comprises eight Gombert compositions — seven motets and a chanson — as well as four interludes composed by James Weeks which were commissioned by…
According to Roland Barthes, the event of grief gives way to an absence that paradoxically fills us. “We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.” The oxymoron of becoming full with emptiness. The hollows fill with more empty space. When Richard Skelton lost his wife in 2004, he began to process the tragedy by composing music. He filled the empty spaces with sound. At that time he also returned to his parents’ home in Wigan, where, in his own words, he was “reconnecting with a sense of that childhood wonder, completely refracted through the prism of grief”.
Born in the UK and most recently based in Ireland, Skelton is a multidisciplinary artist: a musician, poet, filmmaker, and writer. He resolves to bury his ghosts and then exhume them,…
The steady, incremental rise of UK-based vibraphonist Jonny Mansfield continues with the release of his latest album, Light Finds a Way In, an album as ambitious as the ones that preceded it. Issued on Edition Records in 2019, Elftet, his auspicious debut, saw him fronting an eleven-piece ensemble. The Kenny Wheeler Jazz Prize winner followed that with The Air in Front of You (on Resonant Postcards, which he founded in 2023), an album that boldly integrated strings into a jazz context, the result a heady chamber-jazz fusion, and then Quartet! Live at Pizza Express, where a slightly smaller outfit became an exciting live conduit for his vision. With Light Finds a Way In, Mansfield presents a sequel of sorts to The Air in Front of You by reinstating…
…featuring exclusive bonus CD with four additional tracks.
The new record from Kayo Dot begins with an achy drone – think a tea-kettle whistle as filtered through the pump organ of some long-abandoned Gothic cathedral. “Day to night to following night,” frontman/primary songwriter Toby Driver growls at the record’s dawn, his voice alternately tortured and torturing as the drone glacially shifts. “I sit quietly, contemptuously/ Stalking myself.” And, later in the same song, the 11-minute-long affair that opens the group’s Every Rock, Every Half-Truth Under Reason LP, that sense of darkness and dread spreads like a stain: “Rusty garden shears cut through the weeds/ Growing over the grave,” Driver bellows, his consciously “evil”…
There’s J.D. Salinger, there’s Thomas Pynchon, and then there’s Takashi Mizutani, founder, singer and guitarist of Japanese psychedelic rock giants Les Rallizes Dénudés. How and why could someone so obviously gifted, perhaps even touched by the divine, remove themselves from a world that not only inspires their art but adores it? This question plagued some of the most dedicated and maniacal record collectors in the world, the deepest heads with the most fried and obscure psych rock platters, until 2021 when The Last One Musique and Temporal Drift opened the floodgates and let the music stream forth. It’s curious to think that if Mizutani had emerged from hiding before his death in 2019, perhaps he might have enjoyed the exposure, much in the way…
Omnivore Recordings and The International Pop Overthrow Music Festival are proud to present International Pop Overthrow: Vol. 26, a three-disc compilation featuring 66 tracks by artists from all over the world who have played the International Pop Overthrow (IPO) festival, along with some who haven’t — at least, not yet! The IPO compilations go back as far as the festival, to 1998 when Vol. 1 was a single disc. Since then, the collection expanded to two discs the following year, and then three discs in 2002 for Vol. 5, and it has remained a three-a set since. International Pop Overthrow: Vol. 26 showcases artists from across the globe, doing just about every sub-genre of pop music, including power pop, pop/rock, folk/pop, psychedelic pop, garage, indie-rock, modern…
There are albums that, because of their seeming fragility, don’t make a great first impression. The debut offering from White Magic for Lovers is a case in point. Come to The Book of Lies half-attentive in the midst of a busy day and don’t be surprised if it seems to spiral away and get lost in the ether, all too easily overwhelmed by distractions as prosaic as the pinging of an email arriving or the whistling of a boiling kettle.
But persevere because the wispiness here is deceptive. Second and third listens reveal intention, playfulness (for all the prettiness of its melodies, the LP rather ominously shares a title with a book by occultist Aleister Crowley) and a far wider sonic palette than you might initially have realised. To adapt a phrase popularised by…
…remastered by Rashad Becker with previously unheard bonus track exclusive to this edition.
In 2010, Matthew Barnes emerged from The Wirral with an almost album-length EP, Dagger Paths. It immediately caught the attention of the music press with its strange, blurry mixture of psychedelic pop and languid dubstep. Engravings follows the same vein, but with Dagger Paths‘ rougher edges honed into a series of enigmatic spectral half-songs that swirl and bite in successive layers of oblique, occasionally abstract, textures.
To record Engravings, Barnes made the audacious choice of mixing his tracks outdoors, immersing himself in the supposedly spiritually-charged environment of the Wirral peninsula. As such, even if his music descends from…
The title of Kinda Out West nods, of course, to Sonny Rollins’ influential 1957 album Way Out West, but it’s just as importantly Edmonton jazz artist Aretha Tillotson‘s homage to her native Alberta and the province of British Columbia. The acoustic bassist’s follow-up to 2024’s Introducing Aretha Tillotson partners her with drummer Dave Laing and the Nanaimo, BC-born sisters Ingrid and Christine Jensen. The hardships prairie residents endure inhabiting the land make them strong and resolute, and it’s not stretching things too far to suggest said qualities are part of Tillotson’s DNA and the music she creates. In keeping with someone who grew up surrounded by large open spaces, the pieces on her sophomore effort are similarly expansive in providing…
Red Bull Records and AWOLNATION present the limited edition of Run, celebrating the 10th Anniversary of this album. Remastered for this release, the Anniversary edition includes the original Run album, and a bonus songs of previously unreleased material.
Run is an ambitious and impressive project. AWOLNATION’s sophomore album was written, performed, and produced entirely by lead singer Aaron Bruno. The album features 14 new songs that go in many different directions, offering softer, more acoustic sounds, energetic almost-punk-like sounds, and everything in between. The album starts off strong with “Run,” with its heavy beat and eerie lyrics like the repeated “I am a human being/capable of doing things”…
…features five new tracks, including her recent singles, “Elton John,” and “Mid July,” the original demo of “Erotica,” and “LTTL”, a new version of “Light Through the Linen,” feat. Chrome Sparks.
Returning for her third full-length outing, with Erotica Veronica Miya Folick has delivered a record that’s equal parts haunting, spectral folk-pop and anthemic, guitar-drenched heft.
A cathartic sonic exorcism, it duels between the melancholy and the empowering, showcasing Miya’s ability to switch from tender and serene to grungy power pop.
Take the saccharine opener ‘Erotica’, which serpentines between indie rock and folk; the synthpop richness of ‘La Da Da’; or the impassioned war cry of ‘The Fist’.