Electronica
ALBUM REVIEW: Dale Berning – ‘Horse Stories’: spacious, minimal and delightful art soundtrack
Dale Berning’s The Horse Stories is humble, in the very best way; it delights in the tiny and the everyday with a surreal wonder. It has eagle-eyed focus; it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s often as close as music can get to absolute quietude while still retaining a sense of melody and spatial wizardry. If you loved the Clicks + Cuts series of compilations, Ryoji Ikeda, Colleen or Jan Jelinek; The Boats, Alva.Noto, any of these artists who travel deep into the magical, miniaturised web of pure sound, then this record is so, so top of your shopping list. Bravo, Flau, for making it available again.
Premiere: Lycio release the taut electronic rock of ‘I will take over’
SELF-recorded and self-produced, I will take over is the new single from UK electronic trio Lycio, and we’re delighted to be able to premiere it right here on Backseat Mafia this morning. Genie Mendez of Lycio says:”So as you may have guessed from the hostility within the title, this song is mostly about me (and …
ALBUM REVIEW: Aaron Cupples – ‘Island Of The Hungry Ghosts’ original soundtrack: a sonic film in itself
There’s always that caveat with a soundtrack that this is music in service to another artform. But Island Of The Hungry Ghosts is a sonic film in itself. It wholly lets the soul of the island through and onto your record deck. If you’re a fan of labels like Touch, Kranky, this is so a record for you.
ALBUM REVIEW: Richard von der Schulenberg – ‘Moods And Dances’: a fun, exotique library music trip
Moods And Dances is the sort of album you cheekily slip onto the deck at a very groovy soiree at about, ooh, midnight, to bring some bizarre and spacey dimensions to proceedings and during which at least two of your friends turn to you and say with a bewildered grin: “Wow, what is this?”
Say Psych: Track Review: Blanck Mass – Starstuff
Blanck Mass, the project of musician Benjamin John Power, has this week released ‘Starstuff’, the first track from his new record In Ferneaux which will be released on Sacred Bones on 26 February. Following 2019’s album Animation Violence Mild, In Ferneaux explores pain in motion, building audio-spatial chambers of experience and memory. Using an archive of field recordings from a …
Hannah Peel announces March album: see the video for ‘Emergence In Nature’
HANNAH PEEL is a true renaissance woman and arguably the most musically multifaceted artist at work in the UK at the present time. She’s recently been curating and presenting BBC Radio 3’s Night Tracks; her catalogue, stemming from folky roots back a decade ago, has grown to take in the solo electronic and pop work of Awake But …
ALBUM REVIEW: Jon Mueller – ‘Family Secret’: an immersive drone palimpsest
Family Secret is a journey of deep interiority: it’s implicit that it be served fresh, after dark, suitably lit with no distractions. Clever, eerie and beautiful, it’s an album that will continue to reward you
SEE: Visionist preludes his March album for Mute with ‘The Fold’
LONDON’S musical scryer Visionist has announced details of a new album, A Call To Arms which, after his 2017 LP Value for Big Dada, will be his debut for Mute. The album, which will be released come March 5th, sees a departure in aesthetic methods as for the first time he brings his own voice to …
SEE: Jon Mueller – ‘Welcome’: glorious drone textures from Wisconsin
WISCONSIN musician? Sound artist? Explorer? Curator? – all of these things, Jon Mueller is always seeking new confluences of thought and sound. He may be best known to you as part of Volcano Choir, in which he lined up alongside Justin Vernon of Bon Iver to push out the boundaries of alt.rock into weirder, treated shapes, employing …
TRACK: IsoPHeX – ‘Doppelgänger’: haunting, propulsive ‘tronica from North Wales
CAE GWYN RECORDS is a little label out in Snowdonia which quietly goes about the business of releasing excellent tunes well-springing from the Welsh underground – which is what you want, really. Alongside label head honcho Dan Amor, and his beautifully blurry, chiming guitar essays, keeping that particularly Welsh psych-pop torch burning bright, Cae Gwyn …