Track: GoGo Penguin – ‘Totem’ (James Holden remix): expansive, swirling and hypnotic rerub paves the way for what’s sure to be the remixes album of the year
WITH their deliciously tempting new remix album GGP/RMX out in a month’s time, GoGo Penguin are just keeping them comin’; following the deeply energised MachineDrum retake on “Atomised” and Squarepusher’s stealthily head-melting inversion of “F Major Pixie”, the Mancunian trio have just dropped the blissful dream of “Totem”, as overseen by James Holden. Come listen …
See: Moonshine – ‘Ginseng (Zaire Space Program: Act I)’: utopian Afrofunk where Congo meets Canada
LINKING together the musics, the aesthetics and traditions of Paris, Portugal and the the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pan-African collective Moonshine have dropped a brace of singles – “Malembe” and the deeply bassy, Afrofunk groove of “Ginseng (Zaire Space Program: Act I)”, which we’e concerned with here, featuring the Paris-African talents of Bamao Yende, …
Premiere: Lowpines – ‘Weight Of The Water’: tumbling in the waves of some lusciously bright, transatlantic Americana
LOWPINES come to us with Americana brightness and glimmer from Brooklyn – by way of the Lake District, of all the seemingly unlikely locations. And today at Backseat Mafia we’re more than a little honoured to be premiering the first single from his new album, Sun Down Over The East River Shore. That track’s called …
Album review: Cory Hanson – ‘Pale Horse Rider’: a psych-country triumph from Wand frontman
You might expect Pale Horse Rider to be a really good record; it’s actually a great one. It’s a record about LA written with all the perception and acuity of native. It takes the country-psych template and when it plays within it, it plays with grace and precision and blur; and when it shifts out beyond, it does with the dynamics of British exploratory rock. All points covered, no filler; perhaps its time to crown Cory the new Wolf King of LA. Buy.
See: Holy Hive – ‘I Don’t Envy Yesterdays’; a cool summer breeze of a folk-soul number, new on Big Crown
FOLLOWING the retro-indie-soul loveliness of last year’s album for Big Crown, Float Back To You, Paul Spring is showing that breakout classic, seeming to draw on influences as disparate and perfectly married as Skinshape, Marvin Gaye and Terry Callier, was no accident – oh no! – ’twas absolute design; and can be shown by the …
Track: Masayoshi Fujita – ‘Bird Ambience’: the deft, spacious wonder of the marimba glimmers with delight
THE WONDERFUL Japanese vibraphonist, multi-percussionist and composer Masayoshi Fujita is all set to release a new album for Erased Tapes on May 28th which, if you like your experimental music powerfully layered, melodic, enrapturing in its nuance and depth, so should be a red-letter day in your diary. The album’s called Bird Ambience and Fujita has released …
See: The layered monochrome stylings of MICROCORPS’ ‘UVU’: a dark electronic language for a dark age
MICROCORPS, the new project of Alex Tucker, lurches us forward into a near-future dystopia part-flesh, part-microprocessor, and achieves eerie beauty; as you can hear below with the second track to be revealed from next week’s XMIT album, “UVU”, the steel grey visuals for which you can see below. The album takes us out deep and …
Track: Tomas Nordmark feat. Waterbaby – ‘Ghosts’: eerie, amniotic, ink-black choral electronica preludes his May album
LIVING these days in London, but hailing originally from the small Swedish coastal town of Västervik, some 280km further down the coast from Stockholm, Tomas Nordmark is a electronica producer and soundscaper with a very complex and organic musical vision. His interest in the sonic avant-garde was brooked by the 1960s’ art scene in New …
See: Neil Cowley – ‘I Choose The Mountain’: solo compositional delicacy with love to Wim Wenders
BRITISH pianist Neil Cowley, who released a septet of albums sitting astride the point where jazz begins to shade into modern composition and ‘tronica over a period of ten years from 2006, has been on something of a musical journey. Having dissolved his previous combo, the Neil Cowley Trio, he’d seemingly fallen out of love …
News: Matador to give a quarter-century repress to Bardo Pond’s classic ‘Amanita’; hear the previously unreleased ‘Shadow Puppet’
AS PART of its continuing sifting of absolute gems already in the catalogue, Matador has announced its marking the quarter-century of Bardo Pond’s none-more-hallucinogenic debut for the label (and the band’s sixth overall, by a Discogs reckoning), Amanita, will be getting an empurpled and deluxe anniversary edition pressing, out October 8th. Good news for major …