Album review: Matchess’s ‘Sonescent’: an irresistible flow of experimental, meditative drone recollection and conscious absence

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Album review: The Jazz Butcher – ‘The Highest In The Land’: one final pop postcard from Northampton’s foremost gent

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Album review: Black Flower – ‘Magma’: a perfumed souk of North African psych jazz from the Lowlands quintet

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You know what the best thing about Keys is; for all its intimacy, the focus wholly on how the two players and their instruments mesh,a real joy in creation rings through. William Tyler, Black Twig Pickers, Jack Rose fans; please come on over and pull up a pew

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LONDON pianist Theo Alexander likes to loop, to evoke the dreamstate, to explore the beauty of harmony and melody and repetition. He’s an album coming up on Toronto’s lovely Arts & Crafts imprint in late May that looks to seal his reputation as one of the most interesting people working in the minimalist end of …

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Balmorhea draw a line back in the tradition to the much-missed Louisville, KY outfit Rachel’s, who opted to take an idea and use whichever instrumental mix they found brought out the best of what they wished to convey. And The Wind roams freely and with precision across a spectrum from formal classical through a more pastoral take on the form and all the way out to ambient experimentalism, spoken word, found sound, with a unity and cohesion. It’s just a lovely, thoughtful record; complex in its simplicity

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Late Spring takes elements of IDM, shoegaze, and drone, and fashions them together in an impressionistic, delicious fog, with a pretty unique pastoralist feel, alive in nature. It’s pretty much the only album I’ve ever heard that makes me reconsider such unassailable classics of the slow leftfield as Stars of the Lids’ The Tired Sounds Of … and Windy & Carl’s Consciousness and made me think: whoah there guys, these records are a bit … sharp-edged, right? Take it easy. Let it breathe. That halcyon. Late Spring is bloody, bloody beautiful.

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STILLS 01 is the first, beguiling three-track release from new imprint String and Tins Recordings that looks to marry the disciplines of music and fine art, insomuch as each piece of music recorded and issued in the series is a direct response to a painting in the collection of Tate Britain. The first in the …

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PRIYA CARLBERG, singer and wayward guiding light behind the fun as hell and wonderfully weird punk-funk concoction of Birthday Ass, won’t be drawn on the meaning of the title of their latest single drop, “Plubbage Bubbage” which, if you “think it’s fun to say, roll it around your mouth now – best collocation of words …

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Dre Danburry sat on a sofa with fire behind him.

COMIN’ atcha with a bagful of tunes that strike right at your heart in a simply lovely way – in that way the songs of Daniel Johnston or BMX Bandits do, naive, true, unaffected, from the heart – Drew Danburry, who also sometimes dons the Icarus Phoenix baseball cap for recording purposes – is the …

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PRESTON. Lancashire city, First section of British motorway avoids it. First KFC in the country. Brutalist bus station. According to the Happy Mondays, home of “some c**t from”. Roaming the city astride the Ribble and evoking it in music is Rainy Miller, who’s just dropped “Meridian, 1520”, a slice of urban pop with sliding, eerie …

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LET’S welcome to the grand pantheon of recorded music a debuting (at least solo) songwriter and a new label: firstly Barnaby Keen, who has, on the evidence of “Lay Our Cards”, a nicely whimsical take on the psych-pop troubadour form, taking some of the quirky delirium of the post-Carnaby Street comedown vibe and giving a …

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ROSS TONES, the West Country-based practitioner of a very I form of textural IDM, has announced he’s releasing his forth album under that moniker for Houndstooth come the end of June. It’s to be entitled Dragons, and he’s dropped a first sonic enticement in “Brujita”; scroll down, press play, come back up to finish reading. …

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