Electronica
MEET: We chat with landscape artist and musician Richard Skelton ahead of his new album
RICHARD SKELTON is an artist in the deepest sense of the word. He publishes intense poetry in lovingly designed editions with Corbel Stone Press; he also makes a very deep music with a fierce geographical, experiential focus – initially very much about the undervisited, bleak West Pennine Moors; and more recently, the Scottish borderlands. Often …
SEE: the video for Kinbote’s ‘Hiemalis’: pretty, sampledelic glitch-pop teases December debut
A PRETTY, chopping, sampled sound source lays the foundation stone; a soft shuffle of percussion dovetails, and we see Matt Gibb, aka Kinbote, walking wistfully through the dunes; he’s very well turned out in trad tweed and tie “I’ll go walking in the winter, I’ll go walking in the winter / If you want I’ll …
EP REVIEW: HAAi – ‘Put Your Head Above The Parakeets’: a quartet of hard future tronica floor-fillers
HAAi is the future tronica smithy of London-based, Australian-born sound forger Teneil Throssell. She’s taken a meandering journey to become who she is musically now, moving through a myriad of scenes and influences in order to fashion the sound she’s arrived at for Mute. A teenage guitarist with a vision of where she wanted to …
TRACK: Blue States’ latest slice of cinematic chill, ‘Archival’; 20th anniversary issue of ‘Nothing Changes …’
BLUE STATES, the gorgeous, cultish, chilled electronica pop project of Andy Dregazis, has dropped some new widescreen vibes in the shape of “Archival” – listen with us. It’s actually culled from an EP entitled Trinity Tapes, which will be an accompanying expansion of the forthcoming reissue of his acclaimed breakthrough album Nothing Changes Under The …
ALBUM REVIEW: Richard Skelton – ‘These Charms May Be Sung Over A Wound’: enthralling, organic electronica arising from the earth itself
MUSICIAN, free versifier, deep landscape investigator; psycheogeographer, artist, publisher: British polymath Richard Skelton is all of these things with a singular focus and identity. He turned to the sphere of music in 2004 after a close personal loss, making albums with a fierce geographical, experiential focus – initially very much about the undervisited, bleak West …
SEE: the pristine ‘tronica of Sam Prekop’s ‘Above Our Heads’
SAM PREKOP has been building beguiling melodies with the lightest of touches for decades now; firstly with Chicago’s The Sea and Cake, and then as a solo artist. If you don’t know his self-titled debut for Thrill Jockey, you really ought; it’s masterful, light, sun-drenched, jazzy. Of recent times he’s moved further and further into …
NEWS: Silver Apples’ Simeon Coxe dies, aged 82
ONE of the founding fathers of electronica, Simeon Coxe of legendary synth-drone primitivists Silver Apples died yesterday, aged 82, it has been reported. The following statement was issued: “Simeon Coxe of Silver Apples peacefully passed away at 4am on Tuesday, September 8th. He was 82 years old. “He had been battling with a progressive lung condition, pulmonary …
Album Review: Tolouse Low Trax – ‘Jumping Dead Leafs’
TOLOUSE Low Trax is the recording pseudonym of German composer Detlef Weinrich, and this is his fourth album under that name. The eight-track album is a 38-minute smorgasbord of all manner of musical genres, ranging from krautrock to 80s’ electronica, with pinches of avant-garde, post-rock and ambience whisked into the buffet. The album starts as …
ALBUM REVIEW: Sam Prekop – ‘Comma’: further into wordless ‘tronica melodies
EMERGING from that Chicago scene so ripe with cross-fertilisation and ideas around the turn of the century, Sam Prekop was part of that fountain of creativity that brought us Tortoise, Bobby Conn, Jim O’Rourke’s shift into pop melodicism, Freakwater; many more. Sam himself cut his recording teeth alongside Archer Prewitt and John McEntire in The …
TRACK: A Lily – ‘Endless Jasmine’: bewitching minimalism laments troubled times
A LILY, the harmonious experimental project of artist James Vella (save, of course, his 2011, Japan-only dive towards a wonky pure pop form, Thunder Ate The Iron Tree) is set to release its fifth album, Sleep Through The Storm, on October 16th. It’ll be his first to be curated by London-Dorset imprint Bytes, who recently …