Avant-garde
Track: Fougère – ‘Leap Of Faith’: piano delicacy radiates hope of a brighter place
FOUGÈRE is the modern compositional project of Jamie Norton, an artist who’s quietly gone about helping fashion some of the biggest songs of modern times as a musician and arranger; he’s worked with The Brand New Heavies, Brett Anderson and Take That. But as Fougère his work sits in the bright melodic shimmer of artists …
See: The lyric video for the tumbling odd-folk of Yves Jarvis’ ‘Body Of Work’
YVES JARVIS is the artist and autodidact Jean-Sébastien Audet who, in a pseudo-Bill Callahanesque move, came out from behind his Un Blonde facemask after 2016’s excellent Good Will Come To You (according to his personal colour palette, it was bathed in yellow, for optimism), reborn with a new name. Over here at Backseat Mafia we adored his …
Track: C. Diab’s ‘Love’ homages a discarded cassette in warm, bowed drone; the EP’s out tomorrow
HAILING from the City of Glass north of the 49th, Vancouver, bowed guitarist and sound collagist C. Diab has become something of an anchoring artist over at Injazero, the London- and Istanbul-based imprint overseen by producer and journalist Siné Buyuka. He was one of Injazero’s earliest signings, debuting for the label back in 2016 with …
News: Emma Houton announces debut album of choral ambience for Trapped Animal; hear ‘Watershed’
NEW YORK-based choral ambient artist Emma Houton has announced she’s to release her debut album, The Bath, on Trapped Animal Records, the home of psych-folkster Jeremy Tuplin and others, in May; and you can see the video for the first single from that immersive work, “Watershed”, here today. Born to an Irish father and raised …
Track: Bare Wire Son – ‘Fingernest’: the harrow of the Great War remade for towering slowcore
ART AS a means of transforming experience and particularly pain; it’s a well-tested process, and one that Olin Janusz, the artist working as Bare Wire Son, knows works. For his second album under that name (following on from 2016’s Gently), he decided to go investigate a certain and hugely traumatic period in modern history. London …
Track: Sam Genovese – ‘Signals For Signs’: ambience with a ceremonial concept ahead of April’s album
“SIGNALS FOR SIGNS” is a hard cut to horns heralding and welcoming the euphoria of the new. “The music invokes the sound of a union, not unlike a marriage ceremony. It unabashedly reaches toward the beautiful while grounding and holding us in a low-end hug.” So says Sam Genovese of his new and deeply wrapping ambient single …
Album review: Deniz Cuylan – ‘No Such Thing As Free Will’: a pastoral instrumental guitar gem
No Such Thing As Free Will is a much prettier and more enveloping record than words can convey; it has a really nice poise between the disciplines of the leftfield, the guitar soli and that of bright folk melody. In this regard if you’re a fan of early to mid-period James Blackshaw, but also very much the quartet of ‘free folk’ albums Stockholm’s Andreas Söderström released as ASS in the decade from 2006, you’ll find an awful lot to love. A bright, studious, harmonic, pastoral gem
Track: Loney Dear – ‘Oppenheimer’; the atomic age examined delicately in falsetto and solo piano
LONEY DEAR is the wholly unusual solo vision of Emil Svanängen, part of the stable of talent over at Peter Gabriel’s Real World imprint, with a curiously timeless and very intelligent take on the solo singer-pianist auteur thing; at once wholly himself but seeming to draw on elements of the drama of early John Grant and equally …
News: Neil Cowley presents a live-streamed recital live from London upon the release of ‘Hall Of Mirrors’
IN CELEBRATION of the release of his rather excellent longform essay into piano and electronica, Hall Of Mirrors, Neil Cowley is presenting a live-streamed performance from London’s Lafayette. The performance, live-streamed for the first time last night, will be available to watch in full until March 18th. The contemporary composer who has moved from jazz …
Track: SORBET feat. Maija Sofia – ‘I Heard His Scythe’: Irish producer conceives of the purgatory we’re in on ambitious new project
NEED a palate freshener? SORBET is the new guising and musical project of Irish producer Chris W Ryan, who can enumerate on his CV the scouring rock of Just Mustard; the dreamier, almost House of Love stylings of NewDad, and the Fugazi-meets-jazz melding of his own Robocobra Quartet. Chris is clearly a man of eclectic …