EP Review: Chouk Bwa & The Ångströmers – Ayiti Kongo Dub #1: Fusing Haitian Voodou rhythms with techno intensity.
It was around this time a couple of years ago that the pairing of ceremonial drummers Chouk Bwa and techno extenders The Ångströmers’ first rumbled attention with their potent blend of Voodou rhythms and heavy bass currents. Their joint album ‘Vodou Ale’, released in 2020, stepped out way beyond any Haitian roots meets Belgian minimalism …
Album Review: Noori & His Dorpa Band – Beja Power ! : a desert rock, ethio-jazz, surf guitar scorcher from Port Sudan.
Unearthing ‘what the truth sounds like’ is Ostinato Records’ enduring mission. This year we’ve already been introduced to the raw beauty of Capo Verde’s creole soul with the release from the Ano Nobo Quartet and now comes the label’s latest reveal direct from Port Sudan, Noori & His Dorpa Band with the release of Beja …
Album Review: Akusmi – Fleeting Future : pulsating electro-acoustic conversations with Fourth World sensibilities.
‘I want the future now’ pronounced Peter Hammill on one of his late seventies solo outpourings. Scroll forward almost half a century and producer/electronic musician Pacsal Bideau has been exploring his own avenue of future thinking. If you put him in a room with the old prog-curmudgeon, he might quiz Pete about which version of …
Album Review: Sessa – ‘Estrela Acesa’ : re-imagining Tropicalia with seductive Brazilian pop.
You would be wrong to lazily pass off Sessa’s music as laid back or simply chilled. For sure his sound-world is luxurious and something to recline into but drifting off is not what’s intended here. As Sessa, Sergio Sayeg entwines the pulse and poetry of classic Brazilian pop with psychedelic fluidity and tight-hipped acoustic funk. …
Premiere – Affiliate Links previews debut album ‘Enough Light’ with ‘Baby’s Changing Stations’ – heartfelt indie memories revisited and revived.
After a decade with Toronto based post-rock noise-stretchers ‘Fresh Snow’, Bradley Davis a.k.a. Affiliate Links recognised the need to re-frame things. Looking back to this time last year he recalls feeling “…compelled to make music filled with words and free from the red tape that can go along with a band”. Taking advantage of the …
Album Review: Madalitso Band – Musakayike : joyful, jumping urban folk from Malawi
Big in Europe, unknown in Malawi…It’s not often that you can use that strapline about a band but that’s the trajectory so far for Madalitso Band, the enduringly upbeat partnership of Yosefe Kalekeni and Yobu Maligwa. The pair’s distinctive raw Malawian folk sound, bonded through years of busking in Lilongwe’s shopping malls, may have first …
Meet: Supersonic festival director Lisa Meyer ahead of July’s must-catch happening.
Festivals are back and that’s important. Every festival, from gargantuan to the esoteric, has a community around it, they have become part of our folklore, part of our cultural clock, a marker in the year, a celebration of a certain thing that happens over and over. Relationships build between a festival and its people, the …
Album Review: TC & The Groove Family – ‘First Home’: global beat today-jazz with a collective spirit.
Well Worm Discs may have started out as an outpost for Bristol-centric nu- jazz expressionism (Snazzback Run Logan Run, Dun Dun Dun, the luscious ‘New Horizons’ compilation album etc.) but the signs are that this very particular underground is working its way beyond the wild west. There’s been excursions to Glasgow with Corto Alto’s soul …
Album Review: T. Gowdy – ‘Miracles’: electronic music for mind and movement.
Canadian producer and audio-visual artist T. Gowdy is not one to tweak or tinker. His way is to probe forensically, to submerge deeper into the possibilities of synthesis and synthesised, to think it through. Such intense application infused his lauded ‘Therapy with Colour’ debut for Constellation with a hypnotic resonance which uncurled as you listened. …
New Track: Tegh & Adel Poursamadi probe electro-acoustic possibilities with Ijād ایجاد from soon come album Ima ایما
From the burgeoning expanse of Iran’s electronic and experimental soundscape comes the latest project from practitioner/sound artist Shahin Entezami aka Tegh. Collaborating with fellow Tehran resident, violinist Adel Poursamadi, a player steeped in classical Iranian music, the pair are set to release the intensely emotive Ima ایما album via Injazero Records (due 22nd July). As …