experimental track
Premiere: Christine Ott – ‘Landscape’: haunting modern compositional pastoralism
THE FRENCH composer and multi-instrumentalist Christine Ott can never be accused of running with the pack in her compositional aesthetic; down the years since her first release, Solitude Nomade, in 2009, she’s really pushed the possibilities of modern composition, not in experimenting for the sake of it, but in trying to express and elicit a …
See: The video for Matt Emery’s ‘Anxiety Mist’: a samurai waiting for battle as told by solo cello
BRITISH composer Matt Emery, who calls the lovely Injazero Records home, has launched a series of recordings focusing on one instrument at a time; and for his first EP in the series has chosen to shine a light on the cello, which is starting to find a bigger appreciation as a standalone instrument through the …
News: Secrets of Elements announces April album; hear the grand electronic sweep of ‘Cassini’
THE GERMAN composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Johann Pätzold, who records as Secret of Elements, has announced the release of his first album since 2011’s Minds. It’s to be entitled Chronos, and it’ll be with us come the back end of April; but today he’s dropped as a welcome the track “Cassini”, which you can hear below. It fuses …
See: Tristan Kasten-Krause – ‘Dawn Looming’: delicious dronescapes for a new day
NEW YORK-based bassist and composer Tristan Kasten-Krause likes to mix it up, see a little of the creative world. As well as being active on the Big Apple’s DIY and experimental scenes, he’s also played in Oklahoma!, in a production running on Broadway, which gives you any idea of his breadth and scope culturally. He …
See: The incredible hand-drawn video to ’68’s ‘Bad Bite’: righteous noise proves less is so much more
ATLANTA noiseniks ’68 have a much-anticipated new album, Give One Take One, out on Cooking Vinyl at the end of next month; in advance of which they’ve unveiled a frankly excellent hand-drawn video for lead single “Bad Bite”, which you can watch below. It showcases how much cathartic noise you can make with just two …
News: Mute and Spoon’s Can live series to begin with ‘Live In Stuttgart 1975’ in May; hear an excerpt
MUTE and Spoon Records are proud to announce that they’ve got together in order to begin issuing a series of live performances by the legendary krautrock outfit Can, beginning with Can: Live in Stuttgart 1975, which will be out on vinyl, CD and digitally on May 28th. For those fans who have been mining through the …
Track: Only Now & Beneath the Ruins – ‘Mine Of Memories’: scorched earth blues foraging for what remains
IT’S A dark meshing of minds: experimental electronic producer Only Now and guitarist Beneath The Ruins have convened out in the sonic edgelands for a joint debut EP, Anamnesis, out next month. The artists born Kush Arora and Peter Arensdorf respectively have meshed to investigate badlands atmospherics, dark electronica and wasteland West Coast blues – as you can hear …
Track: Cameron Knowler & Eli Winter share the spiralling guitar wonder of ‘Parapraxis of a Dragonfly’
TWO ADEPT young guns of the fingerstyle guitar, Cameron Knowler and Eli Winter really came to appreciate each other on a winter tour of the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas. The Trans-Pecos is a land of stark beauty, of ghost towns and mountain ranges. The pair spent the winter of 2018 gigging through the small …
TRACK: Balmorhea – ‘The Myth’: Texan duo reveal a first track from their forthcoming album for Deutsche Grammophon
BALMORHEA, the Texan duo of Rob Lowe and Michael A. Muller, whose particular take on the modern compositional form nods to the American West, have signed to Deutsche Grammophon for their seventh album, The Wind, which record will be out at the end of April. That The Wind should be released by Deutsche Grammophon, which …
TRACK: Hear Naoko Sakata’s ‘Improvisation 3’ – free piano expression leads for album for Anna von Hausswolff’s label
NAOKO SAKATA is a supremely free, expressive, elemental pianist, very much cheerful and thriving in the avant-garde end of the modern piano spectrum. Born in Japan, she’s now based in Gothenburg; whence she’s come to the attention of Anna von Hausswolff who, caught by her experimental incantation, is to release Sakata’s album on her own …