Cosán Casta means ‘winding path’, an apt title for this collaboration between fiddle player Aoife Ní Bhriain and pianist Cormac McCarthy. Their musical wanderings have taken them in many directions – classical, jazz, avant-garde – and have now brought them back to Irish traditional music, influenced by what they’ve picked up on the way.
‘A Mháire’ begins with the fiddle alone (Ní Bhriain has a deep interest in J.S. Bach’s works for solo violin), then she bends notes like a piper – and it turns out it’s inspired by a slow air collected from a blind piper called O’Hannigan, a year before the Great Famine. Ní Bhriain’s and McCarthy’s beautiful piece is inflected by that coming tragedy. Sometimes McCarthy’s piano supports the fiddle. In ‘Butterfly’, chords become blooms…
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The sad truth about memory is that it’s inherently unreliable: when you access it, you’re not remembering the event itself so much as the last time you recalled it. It’s this malleability of history that John Calvin Abney wanted to focus on when it came to his seventh LP, Transparent Towns. “Damn the dust storm / Blowing through my head,” he bemoans the fuzziness of recollection on the title track before equally lamenting all the empty words that go unspoken: “Damn the days / We let go left unsaid.”
‘Last Chance’ finds Abney meditating on the passage of time, and while he’s got enough insight to feel the good times for what they are in the moment (“Struck by suspicion / I’d never feel what I felt then”), that doesn’t mean…
…Gloorp ’Em Up, the second release by Philadelphia electro-percussionist Garrett Burke, is a frothy little dance tape in which every rhythm is recorded by hand. Many of them were played on a MIDI controller known as a DrumKAT 3.5, a digital drum kit with small ear-shaped pads that make it look like Mickey Mouse. Between this, an SPD-SX, and other acoustic instrumentation, Burke whisks together bits and bobs from footwork, gabber, acid, and breakbeat, imbuing their clubby rhythms with a blood-pumping pulse without sacrificing the mechanized momentum of a good DJ set.
A high school marching band kid with a drumming resume that includes stints with Mothers and of Montreal, Burke has spent plenty of time behind the kit. But Gloorp ’Em Up gives…
Sculptor, installation artist and seasoned improvisor Rie Nakajima has been friends with David Toop for many years, and the two became accustomed to their regular chats – on art, music and food – to the point that when face-to-face meetings were prohibited for a spell, the two transferred their musings to email. They noticed that the style of their back and forth had changed, forcing a level of creative thought that, in Toop’s own words, wasn’t “normal or natural”, and when they reconvened in the Spring of 2022, they realized their reality had shifted. Of course, if you’ve been following either artist you may have already stumbled across last year’s excellent ‘Music for Voilà’, and this set examines their interaction with mic-ed sculptures and small instruments…
Nils Frahm shares a new CD of solo piano music, Night & Day. The CD includes all eleven tracks from both last March’s mini-album, ‘Day’, and its companion collection, ‘Night’.
The album follows Frahm’s latest live release, Paris, which came out in December 2024. With this, he also responds to repeated requests from fans for another CD release.
The tracks on ‘Night & Day’ serve as a reminder that, although Frahm has become widely acclaimed for the intricately arranged, multi-instrumental approach of his most commercially successful albums, he first made his name through meditative solo piano works. These earlier pieces include collections such as 2009’s ‘The Bells’, 2011’s ‘Felt’, and 2012’s ‘Screws’.
November 1978. Henry Cow disbands after a decade of music that redefined the boundaries of experimental rock. November 2022. Four founding members return to the stage. Not to look back – but to improvise the present. Fred Frith (guitar, violin, electronics), Tim Hodgkinson (keyboards, saxophone, lap steel, electronics), Chris Cutler (drums, percussion), John Greaves (bass, vocals): the original core reunited under the name Henry Now. The key is in the name – as Clive Bell noted in The Wire, this is not a nostalgia project.
No scores. No prepared material. Only the instinct honed over fifty years of sonic exploration. For many, the music of Henry Cow represented a transformative listening experience…
After months in the studio and a series of powerful singles, soul-rock band Bonnie and the Jets are release their second full-length album, titled II. The album marks a bold new chapter for the band, and II explores themes such as karma, identity, and reinvention. Rooted in their signature soul-rock sound – with vintage warmth and a forward-thinking edge , the album blends soaring anthems with intimate, emotionally charged moments. The result is a sound that feels both timeless and innovative.
Joining on track 2, “Old Stories,” is one of the most promising young blues musicians in Norway: Marius Lien! In addition, the legendary Stian Carstensen makes a guest appearance on the song “I’m Alone,” which was released as a single in March.
The pitch for the music of The Far West, whose new album is their first since 2014, is “horribly painful songs that you can dance to”, according to bass player Robert Black.
There is less pain, however, than resignation and expectation, but the arrangements often mask this. There are more swayalongs than hootenannies here, but Black is right about danceability on the infectious ‘Meet Me Where We Parted Last’, which uses the horn section well, and the far too short ‘In Your Own Time’ (“things will come, just as surely as the rising sun”).
‘See for Yourself’ opens the album with the sort of music Bob Dylan was making for ‘Blonde On Blonde’; indeed, there’s a lyrical nod to the man on “this rolling stone is now covered in moss”.
ha ha, now i’m sad is LA-based Cooper Kenward’s third album after Cooper Kenward (2022) and Dying in a Diner (2024). It takes you back to the seventies, with its Steely Dan-like pop, and you can even hear an echo of 10CC at one point. It features some great songs and melodies, often accompanied by gentle slide or lead guitar, and steel guitar and fiddle, which lends a country flavour at times. Brass and keyboards are used too, and the music is very easy on the ear. In addition, Kenward’s words have a quirky originality – both lighthearted and then more serious in turn, hence the title “ha ha, now I’m sad”– which sparks a real interest.
The album gets off to a cracking start with some glam rock drums leading into ‘53’ Bel Air’. It’s warm nostalgia for those of us of a certain…
For more than 40 years, Kaabi Kouyaté’s career has spanned theatre, traditional Guinean music and Mandinka jazz. Now this extraordinary singer, who fuses griot tradition with contemporary music, has released this tribute to his father, the celebrated Sory Kandia Kouyaté (1933–1977). Kandia was known as ‘The Voice’ of independent Guinea and this project was prompted by the director of the award-winning documentary, La Trace de Kandia, in which Kaabi returned to Guinea to retrace his famous father’s footsteps.
For the album, Kaabi Kouyaté recruited a distinguished ensemble of musicians including Ballaké Sissoko (kora), Makan Badjé Tounkara (ngoni) and Lansine Kouyaté (balafon), as well as his father’s backing vocalist, Aminata Camara.
1. Tobacco City – Buffalo
2. Florist – Have Heaven
3. Nico Georis – Geological Observations
4. Dean Wareham – Yesterday’s Hero
5. Eiko Ishibashi – October
6. Brown Horse – Dog Rose
7. Black Country, New Road – Besties
8. The Waterboys – Hopper’s On Top (Genius)
9. Songs Of Green Pheasant – Dark
10. Valerie June – Sweet Things Just for You
11. Index For Working Musik – Sister
12. Jason Isbell – Foxes in the Snow
13. Sam Akpro – Evenfall
14. Snapped Ankles – Pay the Rent
15. Butler, Blake & Grant – Bring an End
The descending refrain opening the song isn’t unusual but attention is instantly attracted as it’s played on a harpsichord. Equally instantly, an elegiac atmosphere is set. The voice, coming in just-short of the 10-second mark, is similarly yearning in tone. The song’s opening lyrics convey dislocation: “You and I travel to the beat of a different drum.”
“Different Drum,” the September 1967 single by an outfit dubbed Stone Poneys Featuring Linda Ronstadt, was immediate, had a country edge and was written by Mike Nesmith – then best known as a member of The Monkees. The band had already issued a couple of folk-pop singles simply credited as Stone Poneys, neither of which had clicked with record buyers. Third time out on 45,…
Get Ready for the Countdown: Mod, Brit Soul, R&B & Freakbeat Nuggets includes exactly what it says on the box and does it in exciting fashion. Trawling through the dozens of tracks on offer is likely to give even the most hardcore devotees of the sounds of mid- to late British pop enough thrills to make the nominal entrance fee well worth it. Apart from a few tracks by big names of the era like the Small Faces, the Moody Blues and the Pretty Things, and oft-compiled bands like the Action, John’s Children, and the Creation, the bulk of the collection is populated by off-the-main tracks, artists, and songs. Most of the bands are familiar to the members of that group and a handful of trainspotters, though judging by how good most of their tracks sound, they should have…
British reggae artist Dennis Bovell had his own sensibilities when it came to production. Active in the same vibrant era in the late ’70s that created some of reggae’s most lasting sounds, his take on reggae and dub was a little more reined in than his Jamaican contemporaries like King Tubby or Lee “Scratch” Perry. While his production was less chaotic, with clearer details and space made for every rebound of echo and thunderclap of reverb, Bovell’s style wasn’t lacking in excitement or daring. The anthology collection Different: The Singles Collection 1977-1981 zeros in on his unique and wide-ranging style as a studio mastermind, presenting Bovell productions originally released as singles that run the gamut from roots reggae tunes to lovers rock…
Anna Thorvaldsdottir was a cellist before she became a composer, and this 11-section work includes two cello parts as well as one for piano and some electronics. The central figure in the work, however, is the flute of Claire Chase, who commissioned the work as part of her “Density 2036” series leading up to the 100th anniversary of Edgard Varèse’s Density 21.5. There are motives here recalling that work, but it is the more general resemblance that is most interesting, and it is safe to say that lovers of Varèse will be drawn to the new developments in the idiom here.
Ubique is not a solo work like that of Varèse, but the flute emerges from a neutral background in chunks of distortion, extended technique, and occasional lyricism. It is quite…
Drummer Carl Allen digs into the acoustic jazz tradition with gusto on 2025’s Tippin’. Joining him are two equal jazz heavyweights in saxophonist Chris Potter and bassist Christian McBride. These are musicians who can play anything and have, digging into big band, avant-garde, and fusion. This is especially true of Potter, whose albums often push the edges of post-bop. All of which makes their collaboration here such a delight. Tippin’ is a kind of throwback jazz album, a straight-ahead blower split between classic standards and originals. It’s also a trio album without a chordal instrument like a piano or guitar. This means McBride is the only harmonic anchor and both he and Potter are free to move in an almost three-dimensional way through…
Camila Meza offers one of her most sonically creative and personal albums with 2025’s Portal. Her first album since 2019’s Ambar, Portal was recorded following the birth of Meza’s first child, an experience that informs many of her songs. Rather than mix covers alongside originals, here Meza has for the first time written every song, lending the production a deeply intimate, handcrafted quality. These are flowing songs that find the Chilean guitarist and vocalist singing in both Spanish and English. She is equally as fluid stylistically, and much of the album has a cross-pollinated sound, bringing together her adept fusion and post-bop jazz chops with her ear for sun-dappled Brazilian and Latin pop traditions. Joining her is a cadre of equally gifted…
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing Jasdeep Singh Degun when he decided to put Raag Jogkauns on record: how to keep it on a single LP. In the Hindustani tradition, ragas can run two hours or more. The structure of a piece gives the performer immense amounts of freedom. Both vocalists and instrumentalists explore that freedom at length.
Degun, for all his respect for the tradition, is not your typical raga-playing sitarist. At age 34, perhaps the best young sitar player in Britain, he has written for orchestra and collaborated with a string quartet. This is his first proper Indian classical recording.
The clash of civilizations is audible. It starts with Degun’s most fundamental choice. Jogkauns is a fairly modern raga, dating back to…
Digging up information on lo-fi pop entity Great Area feels almost counterintuitive, given her sparse online presence and succinct promotional materials accompanying her latest record, Good Coding, courtesy of fellow absurdist Lolina’s Relaxin label. The musical project by London artist Georgie Nettell presents itself in the form of brief, laconic pop songs which tread the line between social commentary and disillusionment, chronicling moments of city life with little apparent enthusiasm, and yet all the more entertaining for their honesty.
The two-minute bop “100% enthusiastic”, from last year’s sample-heavy LP light decline, might be the perfect introduction to the Great Area treatment: a recalcitrant beat and a wistful bassline conjure a sense of mischief, until…
Few bands come out of the gate sounding as genuinely unique and beholden to little that came before as Camper Van Beethoven did when their debut album, Telephone Free Landslide Victory, first appeared in 1985. They also managed to do so with a loose-limbed amiability suggesting it happened by mistake, or at least without too much conscious effort.
Camper Van Beethoven’s easygoing fusion of folk-rock, ska, indie rock, world music, psychedelia, and punk (the latter more in attitude than attack, though “Club Med Sucks” builds up an impressive head of steam) is smart, but also playful, as if some guys with really good record collections threw all they loved at a wall and it not only stuck, but managed to be funny at the same time.