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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WITH five years passed now – what? It’s really that long? – since Glasgow’s sweet indiepop quartet TeenCanteen released their debut album, Say It All With A Kiss, the band have been digging in the vaults, blowing the dust off a collection of recordings that by rights should’ve formed their debut album proper back in 2012. …

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IN THE arena of house music, perhaps never were artists more succinctly and appropriately named: Masters at Work. Masters at work indeed. The creatives behind such generation-defining floor-fillers as Voices’ “Voices In My Mind”, the Latin percussive skip of KenLou’s “Bangin’ Early Theme” and the summer shine of MAW feat. Patti Austin’s “Like A Butterfly …

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Y’KNOW one thing that’s missing from our lives – I know, I know, a zillion things, right, but: technicolour. Really eye-poppingly bright colour, cerise and sunset yellow and tangerine and electric blue, glowing, searing – and I mean in a sonic form, too. It’s gotta be a good thing, then, that Manchester’s new wave of …

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MASTERFUL psychedelic imprint Rocket Recordings has added another string to its bow with the signing of the hallucinatory collective The Holy Family, with an album due in July. The band is the feverish brainchild of David J. Smith, otherwise of Guapo and Miasma & the Carousel of Headless Horses, and thus a name well appreciated …

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SCOTT MORGAN, the textural, amniotic electronic artist responsible for such deep, pulsing and fathoms-deep works as the sublime Submers and Sketches From New Brighton, is releasing the tenth album of his Kranky career in May. It’s entitled Clara, it’s a meditation on light and shade and decay, and you can watch the three-colour macroscopic video …

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TAKE one of the finest and most intuitive leftfield jazz rhythm sections of past decades, Chicago drummer Chad Taylor and bassist Joshua Abrams, who between them amass waay over a couple hundred performance credits to their name on Discogs for artists such as the Chicago Underground Trio and all its various spiralling iterations, Brokeback, Sam …

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WITH On-U Sound recently making all of New Age Steppers’ back catalogue available once again on CD and LP, now seems a great time to reveal some other gems found while digging in the archives: not one, but two, rarely seen promotional videos from back in 1981, for “Radial Drill” and “Fade Away” both taken …

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LADIES and gentlemen of the weirder musical persuasion: introducing a new act to especially intrigue the weird jazzers among you, Peace Flag Ensemble, an experimental collective drawn from various points across the verdant central Canadian province of Saskatchewan. The quintet are set to release their first venture into long-playing recordings on June 18th on Toronto’s …

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A MULTIDISCIPLINARY artist by trade and by vocation, comfortable in any number of mediums, Heka is the sonic alias of Francesca Brierley, who’s just signed to the excellent Manchester-based independent Balloon Machine, home already to the breathtaking folk stylings of Laura Fell. Her debut EP for the zine-turned-label is succinctly titled (a) and will be …

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BRIGHTON shoegazing five-piece HANYA, whose lovely Sea Shoes EP – an eye-poppingly limited cassette release for hometown label Austerity we fell for here – have dropped a new single, the rousing dreampop of “Lydia”. Take a listen below. It’s a cleanly dreamy anthem, made of punchy guitar shimmer and Heather Sheret’s trademark, breathy vocals. It’s …

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