experimental track
Track: Mark Shippy & Alex Cunningham – ‘Clear Walkway’: US Maple guitarist brings the improv for guitar and violin
AFICIONADOS of the free music, this way please: Mark Shippy, former guitarist with the legendary Chicago noise-rock voyagers U.S. Maple, has got together with St Louis, Missouri violin improviser Alex Cunningham for a real exploration of what the two stringed instruments can achieve together in and of the moment. They’re releasing a two-handed album, Ghost …
Track: Mattia Cupelli reveals a dark ambient aesthetic with the eerie prayer call of ‘MONOLITH’
ROMAN composer Mattia Cupelli likes to play on the borders of modern classical, electronica, ambient and soundtrack elements, which has stood him in good stead over nearly a decade of composing scores for more than a dozen films. He’s now embarking on a non-filmic exploration of dark ambient, with an album, RUINS, coming out in …
Track: Trippers & Askers – ‘Chance’s Wake’: warming, spiritual Americana lays out the path towards an album drawing on the near-dystopian classic, ‘The Parable Of The Sower’
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER was a Californian African-American science fiction author whose 1993 novel, Parable Of The Sower, has rippled out with staying power across culture, with its tale of the marginalised attempting to survive a (really, very) near-future ecological and economic collapse. it was only written less than three decades, in the lifetime of many …
See: Emma Houton – ‘Bow & Balance’: a Scots murder ballad reframed as soaring ambient folk
EMMA HOUTON, the ambient-folk artist based in New York who draws on the traditional songs we’re all surrounded by and those of her Irish ancestry, has released the video for a second track to be taken from her forthcoming debut album, The Bath. It’s her plaintive, bold reworking of the traditional murder ballad “Bow And …
News: claire rousay launches a new imprint through American Dreams; hear ‘Twin Bed’
WITH HER acclaimed album a softer focus only just in the rear-view mirror, San Antonio sound experimentalist claire rousay has announced a new imprint, Mended Dreams, in partnership with American Dreams Records; which she intends as an outlet for highly limited editions of both solo and collaborative work that will be available ony by subscription or through the …
See: Hyunhye Seo of Xiu Xiu announces her debut solo album, ‘Strands’; watch the video for the amniotic dronespace of the title track
HYUNHYE SEO is an artist you may know better in a slightly different nomenclatural iteration as Angela Seo, one half of hypnogogic techno experimentalists Xiu Xiu. But she’s branched out with her first, forthcoming solo release for Lawrence English’s excellent Room40 imprint, in which she keeps the wash and blur of her parent band’s dreamscape …
See: The surreally beautiful Arctic visuals for Matt Evans’ ‘Arcto 2’: an exploration of loss and grief in drone and piano evocation
THE LOSS of a life partner, an intimate; for many of us an unimaginable experience, and one that words would fail to convey, either in the expression of or the condolences to the mourning. Multi-instrumentalist and composer Matt Evans was left devastated by the death of his partner, Devra Freelander; and as the composer of the …
Track: Masayoshi Fujita – ‘Morocco’: audiophile, jazzy, ambient brilliance on Erased Tapes
A MUSICIAN who deals with a nuanced ambient beauty that audiophiles should surely treasure, and to my mind lining up alongside fellow countrymen Ryuichi Sakamato and Chihei Hatekeyama in making music not only of a bewitching delicacy, but with a really empathetic understanding of sound in space, Masayoshi Fujita is set to release a new …
Track: Dau – ‘Zed Zed’: the warm purity of string-driven ambient drone, new on Spirituals
A MEMBER of rather fine instrumental quartet yndi halda alongside James Vella, whose album Sleep Through The Storm under his A Lily persona we received rapturously last October, Phil Self has emerged with a forthcoming mini-album of corresponding beauty and bliss under the moniker Dau, due out next month. Whereas A Lily played with contemplative …
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 …