See: Harkness gestures to a prettier, baroque pop world beyond the virus with ‘Moon Spell’
HARKNESS is a beautiful musical enigma wrapped up inside a conundrum wrapped inside a rather fetching, actuellement, mask and gown; from within which couture he has a very personal line in sounds for the topsy-turvy world we’re somehow tasked with navigating right now. Having honed his craft quietly away from the spotlight for a decade …
Track: Slip inside the gorgeous, dubby blur of ‘The Visitant’ as Scottish ambient duo Cahill/Costello announce an enthralling debut album
KEVIN DANIEL CAHILL and Graham Costello, guitarist and drummer respectively, first set off on the path that would lead to them wedding as a musical act with an oblique and rapturous aesthetic when they met at Glasgow’s prestigious Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, at which Kevin was pursuing a classical music education and Graham, jazz; they …
See: Alasdair Roberts og Völvur lead you through the sombre, beautiful out-folk of ‘Nu Solen Går Ned’
WITH a rather gorgeous new record in cahoots with the Norwegian experimental folk collective Völvur just a little over a fortnight away now, our favourite Perthshire and formerly appendically removed songsmith Alasdair Robert has dropped one final teaser, in which he gives way front and centre to Völvur’s Marthe Lea for an absolutely beautiful Norwegian …
See: Sølyst brings a playful, fractured machine-dub-pop with ‘Hold’ ahead of his August album
THOMAS KLEIN, otherwise drummer for the fine post- and krautrock rhythmic venturers Kriedler, also has a natty occasional sideline as Sølyst, wearing which hat he strides out with an album every year or three; August’s Spring will be his fourth album in eleven years, and collates together recordings he’s made over the past three. Not …
Track: Swiss post-rock trio HOLM bring the shimmer and the dapple to ‘Flickering Leaves’: a second, impressionistic step towards their 2022 album
WITH a months-long concept of dropping one single track every month on the pilgrimage towards their 2022 album, Swiss post-rock trio HOLM have followed up the cinematic and metronomic wash of May’s “Our Days And Years” with a second station of the cross for you to sonically supplicate before, “Flickering Leaves”, which we’ve got right …
Album review: Adam Stafford – ‘Trophic Asynchrony’: Falkirk composer moves to a deep, cyclical set of formal minimalism to address the ecological state we’re in
FALKIRK’S Adam Stafford, the film-maker and folk artist whose lockdown notebook album Diamonds Of A Horse Famine we warmly embraced here last summer – not least because it contained the free-associating “Erotic Thistle” and its fantastic line, “melt down my death mask to fashion it into a dildo” (read our full review here) – has returned …
With his debut solo album just a fortnight away, Cameron Knowler invites us to contemplation in ‘Kuyina’
WITH HIS two-hander album with Eli Winter, Anticipation, an excellent study in guitar primitivism, just three months behind us in the rear-view mirror, Texas acoustic explorer is just a fortnight or so away from the release of his debut album proper, Places Of Consequence – a study of roots, memory and the land in the …
See: Devendra Banhart and Noah Goergeson unveil an expansive, meditative ‘Refuge’ double set for August; come float within ‘Into Clouds’ and ‘In A Cistern’
THEIR first meeting may have been entirely inauspicious – the one enquiring of the other whether in fact he was, indeed, a French drug dealer – but once that initial barrier was overcome, the twin, surging talents of acid folk scion Devendra Banhart and minimalist composer and producer Noah Georgeson became firm friends; collaborators. And …
Track: Bellatrix fashions toxic romance into alt.pop silk with ‘Bad Love’
SHE’S got one of those brilliantly tonally expressive voices, which skips up and down the register with easy fluidity, flowing through the notes in the way Bjork does; but then, she knows a thing or two about leftfield vocal expression, being a former beatboxing world champion. The artist we’re talking about? Bellatrix, who plies a …
See: Lucid Express wrap a fleeting romance in the shoegaze bliss of ‘Hotel 65’
THE HONG KONG shoegaze quintet Lucid Express have tapped into the beautiful blur of that genre at its finest as a safe and exhilarating space away from the continuing political upheaval, domestically. The band began when the five were teenagers in the winter of 2014, in the weeks leading up to the protests that became known …