experimental
See: Krautjazz quintet Fazer offer an ode to a weird year ending in the whimsical but classy ‘Dezember’
WITH the recent album by Spiritczualic Enhancement Center (which, not to blow our own trumpet, we reviewed here) and others, it very much looks like one of the current leftfield trends to be ear to the ground for as 2021 melts inexorably into 2022 is krautjazz; that scene fermenting in city basements and performance spaces …
See: Memory Pearl takes a New York Met painting and explores it in sound on ‘Red And Brown Scene, 1961’
WITH his album exploring a septet of paintings hanging in American galleries in sound out on Altin Village and Mine this Friday, Toronto’s Moshe Fisher-Rozenberg, has dropped one final video single, “Red And Brown Scene, 1961”. Moshe is by day, as it were, a member of experimental group Absolutely Free and collaborator with fine indie popsters Alvvays, …
Album Review: Tout Bleu – Otium
London, New York, Paris Munich, everybody’s talking about…well it’s got to be Geneva, home to one of the most vibrant European scenes that gets broadcast to the rest of us through the antennae of Bongo Joe records. The label has offered up some fine home town releases this year from Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, …
Premiere: Stump’s whispering foil Kev Hopper returns for Dimple Discs – hear the rubbery baroque pop excellence of ‘The Dog Walker’
STUMP were one of those ultra-Peel bands, like The Noseflutes, Bogshed, The Fire Engines, who sorta belonged to the (no doubt press-confected) ‘shambling’ movement of the Eighties – Beefheartian, collapsed, askance, freakishly fun, revealing truths about the world from an oblique perch above it all. They had an all-too-brief moment of notoriety in the public …
Track: Joy Guidry explores their ‘Inner Child’ in throaty free jazz bassoon ahead of their February long-player
NEW YORK composer, bassoonist and Berlin Prize for Young Artists nominee Joy Guidry is an artist who likes to – nope, is compelled to – dive deep into the music they investigate, be that modern composition, the high flight of free jazz, the expanse of drone, or the articulation of spoken word pieces. The artist …
Album Review: James McVinnie – Counterpoint
What is it about the tags neo-classical or contemporary-classical that often brings out that immediate ‘not for me’ reaction in people? Too much baggage, too many connotations associated with that word to the right of the hyphon. It’s musicians like organist and sound sculptor James McVinnie who can help shift mindsets . He may be …
See: Guitarist Duncan Marquiss ventures into folk motorik with the seductive ‘Drivenhalle’
ELSEWHERE a very fine guitarist with The Phantom Band, Duncan Marquiss is stepping out into the world of solo instrumental guitar in the spring with an album for folk imprint of high regard, Basin Rock. And he’s already held in such esteem in guitar soli circles that he’s picked up a support slot with the …
News: Constellation sign Kee Avil, who debuts with the burrowing, fracturing post-folk of ‘See my shadow’
MONTREAL’S Constellation, who’ve brought us so many great leftfield moments these past two decades from Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Fly Pan Am, Do Make Say Think and a host of others, have added another string to their bow with the signing of Kee Avil, the new project from hometown singer, guitarist and producer Vicky Mettler. …
Track: El Ten Eleven share the grand alien (post-)funk of ‘New Year’s Eve’ and detail a massive tour
WITH our ears still ringing and our souls still swooning while getting our heads round last year’s conceptual triple album, Tautology, (No! come back this instant! For it (post) rocks so hard and so delicately, by turns – hey, read our review and have a listen if you don’t believe us) El Ten Eleven, the Southern …
Track: Leo Abrahams pushes six strings into a pyroclastic flow of glitch on ‘Spiral Trem’
GRADUATE of the esteemed Royal Academy of Music, and a man who’s collaborated musically with a host of the truly great and good – that CV including, since you ask, Brian Eno, Imogen Heap, David Byrne, Grace Jones, Regina Spektor, Jon Hopkins and Paul Simon, and that’s just a précis; on that CV Leo Abrahams also has also …