Electronica
See: A live studio take on Matt Robertson’s ‘Bees’: a retrotronic acid techno sweep to spiral around a forest clearing to
GROWING up listening to a mixture of Jean-Michel Jarre and Jimmy Smith, Matt Robertson certainly had a good early primer in the weirder beauties of music; big-screen synthesiser worlds, the grooviest, cinematic organ jazz (you mean you haven’ heard Jimmy Smith’s The Cat?) Matt studied at the University of Surrey and matriculated into the arcane world …
Album Review: Electro Indie beauty from R Zak ‘s ‘Dialetcs’
Review : 9/ 10 There’s a certain folkloric quality that’s embedded in your mind, as the music shifts from the nuanced beauty to the darker , more solemn places in between. Portland based singer -songwriter R Zak ‘s album ‘Dialects’ is truly a kind of extended passage of discovery, gentle at times then suddenly haunting …
Album review: Tristan Kasten-Krause – ‘Potential Landscapes’: a debut quartet of potent longform drones
Tristan’s solo debut is a quartet of pieces that all head out from the same wellspring in different directions, different emotions; yet with a unity of feeling. If you worship at the altar of a well-executed drone-based record, then this one is mightily pleasing, if it doesn’t break new ground, it takes you for a different look round places you thought you knew and introduces them afresh. Classy
Track: GoGo Penguin – ‘Totem’ (James Holden remix): expansive, swirling and hypnotic rerub paves the way for what’s sure to be the remixes album of the year
WITH their deliciously tempting new remix album GGP/RMX out in a month’s time, GoGo Penguin are just keeping them comin’; following the deeply energised MachineDrum retake on “Atomised” and Squarepusher’s stealthily head-melting inversion of “F Major Pixie”, the Mancunian trio have just dropped the blissful dream of “Totem”, as overseen by James Holden. Come listen …
See: The layered monochrome stylings of MICROCORPS’ ‘UVU’: a dark electronic language for a dark age
MICROCORPS, the new project of Alex Tucker, lurches us forward into a near-future dystopia part-flesh, part-microprocessor, and achieves eerie beauty; as you can hear below with the second track to be revealed from next week’s XMIT album, “UVU”, the steel grey visuals for which you can see below. The album takes us out deep and …
Track: Tomas Nordmark feat. Waterbaby – ‘Ghosts’: eerie, amniotic, ink-black choral electronica preludes his May album
LIVING these days in London, but hailing originally from the small Swedish coastal town of Västervik, some 280km further down the coast from Stockholm, Tomas Nordmark is a electronica producer and soundscaper with a very complex and organic musical vision. His interest in the sonic avant-garde was brooked by the 1960s’ art scene in New …
Album review: Spirit of the Beehive ‘ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH’
New album from Spirit of the Beehive on new label, Saddle Creek, out April 9th this is Entertainment, Death. The shape shifting Philadelphia trio return with a new work for a new label but remaining true to their spirit of noise rock immersion with their work being less music but pop music just not as …
Track: Sabiwa – ‘鬼 / The Demon’: deeply expansive rescoring for the Japanese animation from Geist im Kino’s second ‘Imaginal Soundtracking’
IMAGINAL SOUNDTRACKING is one of those excellent conceptual series whereby a label creates a scheme for artists to work within, often lead to surprising and enveloping results. This particular schemata comes from Phantom Limb’s soundtrack imprint, Geist im Kino, and looks to “… reframe overlooked or forgotten works of cinema and to offer a new …
News: Seefeel’s mid-90s’ Warp and Rephlex material gets repressed, expanded and there’s a new compilation too; hear the Autechre remix of ‘Spangle’
SEEFEEL, the brilliant British dub-ambient-electronica outfit who recorded beautiful, eerie and hypnotic work for Too Pure, Warp and Rephlex through the Nineties are the subject of a long-overdue reissue campaign, arriving in May – and there’s a comprehensive new compilation, too. The band, who released the hallucinatory and dubby Quique for Too Pure in 1994, …
Album review: Chihei Hatakeyama – ‘Late Spring’: a halcyon, beautiful ambient journey
Late Spring takes elements of IDM, shoegaze, and drone, and fashions them together in an impressionistic, delicious fog, with a pretty unique pastoralist feel, alive in nature. It’s pretty much the only album I’ve ever heard that makes me reconsider such unassailable classics of the slow leftfield as Stars of the Lids’ The Tired Sounds Of … and Windy & Carl’s Consciousness and made me think: whoah there guys, these records are a bit … sharp-edged, right? Take it easy. Let it breathe. That halcyon. Late Spring is bloody, bloody beautiful.