Electronica
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.
See: Throwing Snow unveils a June album for Houndstooth; watch the grainy, generated imagery for the hip-fizzin’ groove of ‘Brujita’
ROSS TONES, the West Country-based practitioner of a very I form of textural IDM, has announced he’s releasing his forth album under that moniker for Houndstooth come the end of June. It’s to be entitled Dragons, and he’s dropped a first sonic enticement in “Brujita”; scroll down, press play, come back up to finish reading. …
Track: The Amorphous Androgynous Looks Both Ways At Once On Collaboration With Peter Hammill
Futurism and progressive rock go together like peanut butter and jelly, and the new offering from The Amorphous Androgynous has given listeners the same hearty feeling of nostalgia. In collaboration with Van der Graaf Generator frontman Peter Hammill, Amorphous Androgynous (AKA The Future Sound of London) marks their return to new music with a clip …
SEE: The three-colour, macroscopic delicacy of Loscil’s ‘Vespera’ announces a new set of textural electronic bliss for Kranky
SCOTT MORGAN, the textural, amniotic electronic artist responsible for such deep, pulsing and fathoms-deep works as the sublime Submers and Sketches From New Brighton, is releasing the tenth album of his Kranky career in May. It’s entitled Clara, it’s a meditation on light and shade and decay, and you can watch the three-colour macroscopic video …
Track: Jeshua – ‘IDK (mnlghtr remix)’: classy Scottish dreampop gets a blissful breaks rerub
IT WAS only a month back that we covered the third single drop from rather obscenely talented upcoming Glasgow tunesmith Jeshua, “IDK”; and it was another fine entry in his fledgling catalogue. I mean, he’s been releasing tunes for such a short length of time. And they’re all effortlessly cracking. When “IDK” first came out, …
Track: Kaktus Einarsson – ‘Kick The Ladder’; Fufanu frontman steps out with intelligent, post-rock pop
YES, THERE are glacial guitars; deep, granular textures, broad-spectrum instrumental effects that see you soaring over the landscape in your mind’s eye; it would be all too easy to stop here and reference back to fellow countrymen Sigur Rós. But then the sweet male vocal makes itself known and the dramatic scenery of the song …
Album review: Conrad Schnitzler – ‘Paracon: The Paragon Session Outtakes 1978-1979’ – more solid-state wizardry from the Kluster genius’s archives
Outtakes these nominally may be, but a decade on these tracks would have all seen a parallel life in the 12″ and the like; a format which was only just starting to find its viability Stateside at this point in the Seventies. And remember not just that these ten tracks are culled from a year or more’s intense creative fire, but that those sessions gave birth to three albums. It’s an album for intense post-dusk savouring, soundscapes to fall sideways down the rabbit hole into, deep and otherworldly sonic immersion from one of the greatest electronic music brains.
Track: Feiertag – ‘Saccharine 374’: cool sunset nujazz preludes a full album in late May
THOSE good people over at Berlin’s Sonar Kollektiv imprint, the label founded by Jazzanova in ’97, have announced themselves coloured excited by the debut album of Dutch drummer and producer Joris Feiertag, who’s released a clutch of singles – strickly surname only – since 2015. He’s developed something of a rep for warm electronica, which …
Track: Glassmasterer – ‘Trouvaille’: clean, graceful Glaswegian electronica bliss
IT’S AN interesting name that cool Glasgow electronicist Lewis Bingham has decided to mask up in order to bring his musical creations to the world. Glassmasterer? Er? Well, we’re told it’s actually taken from an arcane process employed at the very last stages of CD duplication, – a process known as ‘glassmastering’. There, that’s a …