Album review: Mapstation – ‘My Frequencies, When We’: playful, immensely thoughtful tronica
My Frequencies, When We may not flaunt its wares with garish insouciance; but like so many of the albums that end up welded to your turntable, it keeps on enticing you back for more exploration, further interaction. It occasionally raises a grin and equally occasionally, an eyebrow; it’s varied in its approach yet thoroughly cohesive. It’s an immensely thoughtful record
Track: Only Now & Beneath the Ruins – ‘Mine Of Memories’: scorched earth blues foraging for what remains
IT’S A dark meshing of minds: experimental electronic producer Only Now and guitarist Beneath The Ruins have convened out in the sonic edgelands for a joint debut EP, Anamnesis, out next month. The artists born Kush Arora and Peter Arensdorf respectively have meshed to investigate badlands atmospherics, dark electronica and wasteland West Coast blues – as you can hear …
Track: Cameron Knowler & Eli Winter share the spiralling guitar wonder of ‘Parapraxis of a Dragonfly’
TWO ADEPT young guns of the fingerstyle guitar, Cameron Knowler and Eli Winter really came to appreciate each other on a winter tour of the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas. The Trans-Pecos is a land of stark beauty, of ghost towns and mountain ranges. The pair spent the winter of 2018 gigging through the small …
Album review: A Winged Victory For the Sullen – ‘Invisible Cities’: thrilling set pushes way beyond polite ambience
Invisible Cities is an intriguing and challenging accompaniment to a multimedia work of the same name. It’s also a cracking record in its own right, which is beautiful and textural and also genuinely thrilling in passages, and proves that A Winged Victory For the Sullen are not content to sit inside the pocket of modern composition and await their tribute; but wish to push onwards, much further onwards.
See: Deniz Cuylan – ‘Flaneurs In Hakone’: stunning, chiming guitar soli from Turkish composer
IT ALL started with Beethoven’s Fifth. That’s LA-based, Istanbul-born composer and exponent of modern guitar composition Deniz Cuylan’s first and wholly abiding memory of music; it’s the early Eighties, he’s at home in the Turkish capital, all of 5, and the Fifth is spinning on his parents’ turntable. Duh-duh duh-duh … the grandiosity, the majesty …
News: Apparat to release limited ‘Soundtracks’ vinyl box set mid-April; hear ‘Joel’
SASCHA RING, the German electronica artist who plies his trade as Apparat, is set to release a limited edition four-album box set through Mute in mid-April collecting together a quartet of his recent soundtrack works. It’s the first time these soundtracks will have been available on vinyl, and this rather lush edition will also include …
Track: The Drive – ‘Can You Feel It?’: South African sunshine funk nugget reissued
CANADIAN label We Are Busy Bodies has unearthed a proper dose of jazz-funk sunshine, South African outfit The Drive’s 1975 set Can You Feel It?; and the label has dropped the title track from that set to tempt you out into the rays for the full album repress. It’s a loose groove, big on the …
See: Kyle Edward Connolly – ‘Get Me Tomorrow’: springtime country rock from Toronto
TAKING that particularly Canadian spin on the alt.country sound, as espoused by Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, particularly as he moved through the ranks of Buffalo Springfield – that seems to be the mission of Kyle Edward Connolly, who’s previously plied his trade with artists such as WISH, THE SEAMS, and alongside masked country artist …
News: Stubborn Heart to release first album for eight years; hear ‘Talking Gold’
LUCA SANTUCCI and Ben Fitzgerald, the British electronica duo who fire a line into electronic soul through techno, house, synthpop and more, are back, with their first album in more than eight years set to be released on One Little Independent come summer. That self-titled debut from back in 2012 got the plaudits from the …
Track: Hannah Peel’s ‘Evocative’ is tomorrow’s world today
FOR HER latest journey into the world of sound, the album Fir Wave, out at the end of next month, Hannah Peel was given the keys to a sound source of classic production recordings made by a legend of electronic music whose lineage she’s carrying forward – Delia Derbyshire. As she explains: “The specialist library …