Avant-garde
See: Memory Pearl takes a New York Met painting and explores it in sound on ‘Red And Brown Scene, 1961’
WITH his album exploring a septet of paintings hanging in American galleries in sound out on Altin Village and Mine this Friday, Toronto’s Moshe Fisher-Rozenberg, has dropped one final video single, “Red And Brown Scene, 1961”. Moshe is by day, as it were, a member of experimental group Absolutely Free and collaborator with fine indie popsters Alvvays, …
Premiere: Stump’s whispering foil Kev Hopper returns for Dimple Discs – hear the rubbery baroque pop excellence of ‘The Dog Walker’
STUMP were one of those ultra-Peel bands, like The Noseflutes, Bogshed, The Fire Engines, who sorta belonged to the (no doubt press-confected) ‘shambling’ movement of the Eighties – Beefheartian, collapsed, askance, freakishly fun, revealing truths about the world from an oblique perch above it all. They had an all-too-brief moment of notoriety in the public …
Track: Vanessa Wagner presents the first ever acoustic interpretation of the Enos’ ‘Celeste’, with an album following in March for InFiné
BRETON pianist Vanessa Wagner, who began her long romance with the piano aged 7 and who, earlier in her career, released albums tackling the works of Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Scriabine and Mozart, came to something of a crossroads in her musical development in 2016; that year she recorded a collaborative album with Leaf Records’ Mexican electronicist …
See: Disassembler – ‘Devotion’: right on course for lifting the ambient experience from lulling to profound
DISASSEMBLER is the nocturnal ambient playground in which visual artist, multi-instrumentalist and producer Christopher Royal King – whose work includes album covers for both Thrice and Deftones and videos for Adult Swim – comes together in a perfumed, ambient post-classicism with violinist and composer Christopher Tignor, in which they look to weave together current thinking …
Track: Joy Guidry explores their ‘Inner Child’ in throaty free jazz bassoon ahead of their February long-player
NEW YORK composer, bassoonist and Berlin Prize for Young Artists nominee Joy Guidry is an artist who likes to – nope, is compelled to – dive deep into the music they investigate, be that modern composition, the high flight of free jazz, the expanse of drone, or the articulation of spoken word pieces. The artist …
See: Guitarist Duncan Marquiss ventures into folk motorik with the seductive ‘Drivenhalle’
ELSEWHERE a very fine guitarist with The Phantom Band, Duncan Marquiss is stepping out into the world of solo instrumental guitar in the spring with an album for folk imprint of high regard, Basin Rock. And he’s already held in such esteem in guitar soli circles that he’s picked up a support slot with the …
News: Constellation sign Kee Avil, who debuts with the burrowing, fracturing post-folk of ‘See my shadow’
MONTREAL’S Constellation, who’ve brought us so many great leftfield moments these past two decades from Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Fly Pan Am, Do Make Say Think and a host of others, have added another string to their bow with the signing of Kee Avil, the new project from hometown singer, guitarist and producer Vicky Mettler. …
Track: Leo Abrahams pushes six strings into a pyroclastic flow of glitch on ‘Spiral Trem’
GRADUATE of the esteemed Royal Academy of Music, and a man who’s collaborated musically with a host of the truly great and good – that CV including, since you ask, Brian Eno, Imogen Heap, David Byrne, Grace Jones, Regina Spektor, Jon Hopkins and Paul Simon, and that’s just a précis; on that CV Leo Abrahams also has also …
See: The intrusive flicker of memory brings disquiet to Fhunyue Gao & Sven Kacirek’s theremin and breaks drift ‘Bowie’
THE POTENT, experimental sonic meeting of minds that is Fhunyue Gao and Sven Kacirek came about quite by chance, and with a first single and video from that meeting, “Bowie”, being released today, those of us who enjoy our music nuanced and leftfield and odd can be thankful for the serendipitous. Fhunyue, who has previously …
News: Erland Cooper releases his chorally collaborative ‘Egilsay’ EP: see a making-of film and find out more about his debuting silent movie score performance
MAGISTERIAL Orcadian composer Erland Cooper has released his second choral collaboration with the Shards ensemble, an EP focussing on one of Orkney’s northern islands, Egilsay, featuring four tracks of and about the island with a population of 14. Here at Backseat Mafia we featured a track, the moving, almost holy “Glimro”, at the beginning of …