Avant-garde
See: The video for Matt Emery’s ‘Raindrops And Blood Spurts’: the scarlet fire of battle as reimagined for solo cello
THE EXCELLENT Surrey composer Matt Emery, a leading light over at Injazero Records for four years or so now working at the more deliciously experimental edges of modern composition, is launching an EP project entitled the Spotlight Series, in which he looks to investigate and put the spotlight on an instrument in turn, really explore …
Track: Portico Quartet’s gliding ‘Terrain II (edit)’ unveils a three-part suite of a new album in late May
PORTICO QUARTET, whose Jack Wyllie we last encountered in these pages at the end of last summer with his exhilarating Afro-ambient project, Paradise Cinema, reconvened at their East London base during lockdown, the events that swathe us necessarily informing the new music they began to fashion. The world we all suddenly precipitated into necessitated a …
See: Theo Alexander’s ‘Bright-Eyed Hunger’: London composer targets the dream state with his dazzling minimalism
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 …
Track: Hear Jim Stewart’s ‘Dead Sea’: the composer responds to a Paul Nash painting, taken from the forthcoming ‘Stills 01’ music and painting project
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 …
Track: Rainy Miller – ‘Meridian, 1520’: a new and leftfield pop language from Preston artist
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 …
See: The video for Mind Maintenance’s ‘Glow & Glimmer’: Chicago’s Chad Taylor and Joshua Abrams step out for some exceedingly cool world-jazz melodicism
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 …
Track: Peace Flag Ensemble – ‘Human Pyramid’; Canadian improvisational jazz quintet drop a lovely, fluvial piece ahead of their debut album
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 …
See: Patrick Belaga – ‘The Tunnel Is A Tower’: off-kilter ambience in which electronica plays against shadowy cello
AS YOU can pretty much deduce from the photo, Patrick Belaga isn’t your common or garden cellist. Classically trained, natch, he loves to bust out of convention – whether that’s collaborating with performance artists such as Wu Tsang, or scoring Lady Gaga’s Netflix documentary. Life – and music, and art – are for living. His …
Track: Gazelle Twin ensures you won’t sleep easy with ‘The Well’, from the soundtrack to forthcoming British horror ‘The Power’
WITH her seductively dark beckon to the dark sides of a dankly merrie old country in cahoots with NYX, Deep England, now out and wreathing like evening mist around the collective consciousness, you may well be forgiven for thinking Elizabeth Bernholz, aka Gazelle Twin, could rest easy, her work here done at least for the …
News: Kid Millions and Mouse On Mars’ Jan St. Werner announce exploratory album for Thrill Jockey; hear ‘Sorrows And Compensations’
IF YOU like your experimental tunes wholly exploratory and improvisational, then the news that Kid Millions, known elsewhere for his work with Man Forever and Oneida, and Mouse On Mars’ Jan St. Werner have got together to shake down some music caught in the moment is something to put a smile on your face. They’ve …