SEE: Le Volume Courbe take on Daniel Johnston’s ‘Mind Contorted’ with Terry Hall and Noel G
LE VOLUME COURBE, aka Charlotte Marionneau: if you love a certain cultish, Gallic erudition in your indie songwriting, you have to say it’s more than a little great to see her back. Following a brush with mortality last year, the urge to release music again for herself “became like a vital thing”. (She’s been a …
TRACK: Holy Drone – ‘Fibres’: a lovely Cheshire shoegaze drop
HOLY DRONE, Warrington’s lovely purveyors of shoegaze, are back with their first new material since last year’s blissful heathaze shimmer, “Northern Fire”. They’ve spent the past year working on new material and, like the rest of us, navigating the new weird we find ourselves in. The first fruits of those months of writing are with …
TRACK: Louis-Étienne Santais – ‘Reflection 1’: a piano study for an old friend
QUEBECOIS composer Louis-Étienne Santais has only been releasing music as himself, for himself, for a matter of months now; but he’s already racked something like two million streams on Spotify for his wistful, warming modern solo piano composition. Also a member of the beautifully melancholic duo Ghostly Kisses alongside Margaux Sauvé, he’s about to release …
SEE: Tele Novella – ‘Words That Stay’: another beautiful, quirky lament
VINTAGE shop owner Natalie Ribbons and rare record collector Jason Chronis had been kicking around in various musical projects in Austin, Texas, but knew they could fashion something pretty special when they met and started creating tunes: ladies and gentlemen, we give you the medieval outsider country of Tele Novella. (Hey, it’s what they call themselves). They …
TRACK: Cabaret Voltaire – ‘What’s Goin On’: a pertinent enquiry, eerily couched
…. IT’S WELL a question we could all be asking. What, indeed, is goin’ on? Society riven; the ‘rona running riot; politicians brazenly self-serving and at new peaks of mendacity. And it’s with a characteristic precognition that Cabaret Voltaire have just dropped a track full of that South Yorkshire industrial-era monochrome, the title repeating as …
TRACK: MP Productions – ‘In My Heart’: Global Comms man returns with crisp IDM EP for Warp
A PROPER old-skool British IDM general, Mark Pritchard, the man behind Reload, one half of Global Communications (just buy 76:14, OK? Just … buy it), Harmonic 33, so many other greats of the British tronica and dance music scenes over the past …no, I’m not gonna count actually; well, he’s back wearing the guise of …
PREMIERE: See the video for KJ & The Fox’s ‘Never Gone Hill’
KJ & THE FOX is the glimmering, shimmering indie project of Keith Johns Adams, who’s been releasing fun and beguiling, raw ‘n’ folksy indie tunesmithery for a while now as just himself (check out “Roughhousing”, which pitches itself at a lovely point partway between Billy Bragg and Hefner). He’s now happily ensconced with the his …
TRACK: Marie Bashiru – ‘Joyride’: a little Afrofolk-soul sun to help us through
DEARLY beloved, gathered here today: let’s let a little smooth Afrosoul sun into our lives to keep the harsh bite of Lockdown 2: The Return at bay. And what better antidote for crawling those winter isolation walls than the first taste of what we have to come from Marie Bashiru, a singer-songwriter who has signed …
TRACK: Maps’ ‘Sleep Today’ teases for a new four-tracker
AFTER the brilliantly varied series of remixes of his work he commissioned and dropped throughout the summer – featuring artists as diverse as soundtracks scion Simon Fisher Turner, Andy Bell of Ride under his GLOK alter-ego, New Order’s Stephen Morris and Barry Adamson – Maps is already busy looking forward to the next thing – …
ALBUM REVIEW: Gabriel Ólafs – ‘Absent Minded Reworks’: Icelandic piano prodigy receives very fine electronica rerubs
ICELANDIC composer and pianist Gabríel Ólafs – who wrote his debut LP, Absent Minded, aged just 14 – is always happy to offer his beautiful music for reinterpretation – by himself and others. After Absent Minded was released to widespread critical adoration on One Little Independent in 2019, he refashioned much of the work therein …