Avant-garde
Track: Pan Daijing – ‘Let 七月’: Guizhou performance artist reveals a more intimate but no less potently eerie side
PAN DAIJING is an uncompromising, sonically exploratory artist who hails from Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province, in south central China. Her approach to her art is unbridled, bold, and straddles sound, installation, storytelling, choreography. Her raw approach as composer and performer takes many forms: sound, choreography, installation, and storytelling. Her 2017 album for Pan, …
Album review: Masayoshi Fujita – ‘Bird Ambience’: a marimba and electronica masterclass for meditative thought
IF YOU like your music deliciously abstract, abstractedly delicious; arranged beautifully, an absolute world of evocative sound; fell hard, for instance, for the albums Ryuichi Sakamoto made with Alva Noto, Revep, Summvs, Vrioon, et al; or have adored the lusciousness of Chihei Hatakeyama’s new album, Late Spring, then sit down, sit up – Japanese vibraphonist, …
News: 7K! announces the latest in its series of digital ambient compilations, ‘Wind Layers’; hear a taster in Colin Stetson’s ‘Beyond The Break’
!K7’S mirror-image modern compositional and ambient offshoot label, !7K, has announced the latest in its ongoing series of digital-only, wide-ranging, thematic compilations, and this time the focus will be on wind instruments. Following Piano Layers, Strings Layers and last winter’s erudite and necessary Ambient Layers (read our review of that one, here), Wind Layers gathers …
See: Peace Flag Ensemble – ‘Presentism’: a bittersweet, lovely, experimental jazz essay from Saskatchewan collective
ROCK ‘n’ roll: the experimental jazz collective Peace Flag Ensemble has its seed in a meeting at a book group, somewhere, we’re told, between when pianist Jon Neher and ambient artist and producer Michael Scott Dawson had been reading and discussing Her Body And Other Stories, by Carmen Maria Machado and Murakami’s Killing Commendatore. As talk progressed …
Track: Hear Christina Vantzou’s spectral mash-up and remix of LEYA’s ‘ABBA’ and ‘Mary’
CHRISTINA VANTZOU, the Belgian-based vocalist, composer and film-maker who began her career with Stars of the Lid’s Adam Wiltzie in The Dead Texan and who’s gone to establish a powerful and eerie musical aesthetic over the course of four album for Kranky, has brought her otherworldly ambient skills to bear on a rerub and mash-up of …
Track: Mark Shippy & Alex Cunningham – ‘Clear Walkway’: US Maple guitarist brings the improv for guitar and violin
AFICIONADOS of the free music, this way please: Mark Shippy, former guitarist with the legendary Chicago noise-rock voyagers U.S. Maple, has got together with St Louis, Missouri violin improviser Alex Cunningham for a real exploration of what the two stringed instruments can achieve together in and of the moment. They’re releasing a two-handed album, Ghost …
Track: Mattia Cupelli reveals a dark ambient aesthetic with the eerie prayer call of ‘MONOLITH’
ROMAN composer Mattia Cupelli likes to play on the borders of modern classical, electronica, ambient and soundtrack elements, which has stood him in good stead over nearly a decade of composing scores for more than a dozen films. He’s now embarking on a non-filmic exploration of dark ambient, with an album, RUINS, coming out in …
Track: Trippers & Askers – ‘Chance’s Wake’: warming, spiritual Americana lays out the path towards an album drawing on the near-dystopian classic, ‘The Parable Of The Sower’
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER was a Californian African-American science fiction author whose 1993 novel, Parable Of The Sower, has rippled out with staying power across culture, with its tale of the marginalised attempting to survive a (really, very) near-future ecological and economic collapse. it was only written less than three decades, in the lifetime of many …
See: Emma Houton – ‘Bow & Balance’: a Scots murder ballad reframed as soaring ambient folk
EMMA HOUTON, the ambient-folk artist based in New York who draws on the traditional songs we’re all surrounded by and those of her Irish ancestry, has released the video for a second track to be taken from her forthcoming debut album, The Bath. It’s her plaintive, bold reworking of the traditional murder ballad “Bow And …
Album review: Sarah Neufeld – ‘Detritus’: a tour-de-force of violin catharsis that pushes out to post-rock
SUPPLYING the power of her violin to Arcade Fire from their breakthrough smash Neon Bible on; founding member of exploratory instrumental sextet Bell Orchestre, alongside Richard Parry, whose career has run contiguously with the former band; solo artist in her own right, Sarah Neufeld has her fingers in many Canadian musical pies. Initially releasing her …