News
SEE: BLACK (W)HOLE – THE SHIFT
Austrian experimentalist Black (W)hole is already getting the leftfield brigade here at Backseat Mafia excited – the release of their forthcoming album Strange Worlds on March 5th has seen a few tracks shared for streaming over on their Bandcamp. It is however the simplistic, yet hypnotizing video for single “The Shift” that has further caught …
NEWS: Gearbox Records to release EP of Don Cherry rarities; hear ‘The Ambassador From Greenland’
LONDON’S Gearbox Recotds is carrying the torch and keeping the analogue fires burning from its own bespoke production facility in the capital, has unearthed some proper jazz treasure: a quartet of sides that Don Cherry cut for Danish Radio in the mid-Sixties; and the label is issuing ’em on wax, strickly mono, 45rpm. How about …
TRACK: Firestations – ‘The Circular’: bright as a button indiepop drop preludes March EP
LOST MAP’S quirkily lovely alt.popsters Firestations have released a really bright and moreish single, “The Circular”, ahead of their March EP, Melted Medium, which sings with a indiepop summeriness last heard around these parts with Real Estate – or, going further back, maybe even The Railway Children or something on Flying Nun. Bloody lovely, it …
NEWS: Bill MacKay and Nathan Bowles announce April album; see the brilliant instrumental bluegrass of ‘Joy Ride’
BILL MACKAY, the Chicago-based guitarist, improviser of note and all-round scion of six strings, sure loves to enter into a two-way conversation with other artists with reliably beautiful results; witness the brace of albums he’s recorded with the freewheelin’ Ryley Walker, Land Of Plenty and Spiderbeetlebee. There was 2019’s darker two-hander with cellist Katinka Klein, …
NEWS: Clark returns with March album for Deutsche Grammophon: hear ‘Small’
CLARK, the electronica voyager who came hurtling into our lives for Warp at the turn of the century and quickly decided his mission was to empty the bones of you – an offer in equal parts thrilling and worrying – is returning at the end of March with his ninth studio album, Playground In A …
SEE: Nick Schofield – ‘Ambient Architect’: modular retro-futurism full of light and grace
NICK SCHOFIELD is a Montréalais composer in love with modular synths, and who has a new album, Glass Gallery, coming out early next month, composed entirely on the legendary Prophet 600. And it’s very beautiful; uplifting, even, music for a bright future we’ve yet to realise. By day he’s a member of singer-songwriter Devon Welsh‘s …
SEE: Indigo Sparke – ‘Everything Everything’: astonishing spectral folk
IF MARISSA NADLER, Aldous Harding, Joanna Newsom, Vashti Bunyan light up your world with otherworldly folk fire – and if they don’t, then maybe we can’t be friends after all – then you really need to take a seat right this minute, and be astonished by Australian folk artist Indigo Sparke, who’s recently inked on …
TRACK: Douglas – ‘Cigarettes’: euphoric, blurry synthpop futurism
AMY DOUGLAS WHITE is a Los Angelino by adoption, by way of Madrid, where she was raised the child of American parents. She’s got form in the music biz, serving for three years behind the keyboard in LA’s suitably trippy West Indian Girl and contributing background vocals to M83’s seminal single, “Midnight City”. She’s stepped …
NEWS: The Peacers return with March set for Drag City; see ‘Irish Suit’
SIC ALPS were one of those bands which, with the amount of the talent in its ranks, could only burn bright and, like an unstable isotope, emit members to spin off into other musical pursuits, eventually to transform itself in a musical half-life. Tim Hellman went into the ranks of Thee Oh Sees; Mike Donovan …
