chicago
Track: Bryan Away – ‘Dreams And Circumstance’: glorious baroque-psych from Chicago songsmith
SPURNING a promising career in acting is beginning to look like a good move for Chicago baroque-pop artist Bryan Away. With his third single, “Dreams And Circumstance”, out now, followed by an album early next month, it’s time we embraced a songsmith of great talent. The singer-songwriter born Elliott Korte came to music relatively late; …
Album review: Mind Maintenance – ‘Mind Maintenance’: Chicago rhythm masters produce a deeply contemplative, mantric set to guard against the world
TAKE one of the finest and most intuitive leftfield-into-indie 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: Mind Maintenance – ‘Valence’: further cognitive hygiene for mbira and guimbri calls you to the hearth
WHEN Chicago rhythm section masters Chad Taylor and Joshua Abrams get together to play, you know the results will be intelligent, off-kilter, crisp; intuitive. The pair have worked together in the engine room on so, so many great and cred records down the past coupla decades, including for the Chicago Underground Trio and all its …
Track: Hear Bryan Away’s ‘Scenes From A Wedding’: Chicago’s bright new exponent of a lush, jazzy baroque pop
BRYAN AWAY is how Chicago’s Elliott Korte finally and shyly comes to the world of a music with a rather tasty take on acoustic-driven baroque pop. We fell a little bit hard for his first single, “The Lake”, at the beginning of the month, noting it as being “a dusky beauty, piano-led, graceful, the kinda …
See: Bryan Away – ‘The Lake’: beautiful Chicago baroque pop brings The Left Banke sound to 2021
COME gather round, lovers of finely nuanced music, for the new sound of Chicago. Elliot Korte means this music. No jobbing careerist him, seeking a life of cars ‘n’ girls; and when you’ve heard the beauty of his latest single, “The Lake”, if you have a heart beating blood-red in your chest, you should be …
Track: Mind Maintenance – ‘The Ladder’: Chicago legends Joshua Abrams and Chad Taylor bring percussive African contemplation
IF YOU’RE at all a follower of the Chicago music scene that erupted in so many directions back at the turn of the century, then the rhythmic adepts Chad Taylor and Joshua Abrams will probably need no introduction; given how, they were so deeply woven into intelligent, seminal albums by the Chicago Underground Trio and all its various …
See: Axis: Sova – ‘(Don’t Wanna Have That) Dream’: Chicago psych with a noir lullaby twist
AXIS: SOVA began, as many excellent bands do, as a means to a gigging end (see similarly colonised TEKE::TEKE over at Kill Rock Stars, for example). Brett, the Sova of the equation, was watching his previous outfit Mass Shivers enter its death throes – we’re talking back in 2009 here; and having been offered an opening …
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 …
Droppin’ Knowledge: In Chi-Town, Rashid Hadee Is On The Beat. And The Mic, Too.
In hip hop, a sample can sometimes lead you on an unexpected journey. Rashid Hadee’s first box of vinyl records came from his uncle. The Chicago rapper and producer discovered the box in a closet, and decided to listen to the LPs, one by one, and create beats from what he found. Hadee’s uncle was …
Album review: Ryley Walker – ‘Course In Fable’: Chicago baroque-folk genius brings the prog to his latest dazzler
TROUBADOUR genius touched by the hand of the Tim Buckley, collaborator on some very fine albums, sole architect of yet other records that fall very much in that same category, and one of the funniest and most candid tweeters in music: Ryley Walker is all of these. He’s set to release his new solo album, …