experimental
TRACK: Steph Richards – ‘Underbelly’: marvellous free jazz trails LP – with accompanying scents …
STEPH RICHARDS – the composer, free jazz trumpeter and bandleader who’s worked with artists as diverse as St Vincent, Yoko Ono and Anthony Braxton, knows a thing or two about how to envelop the senses. But for her new album, Supersense, she’s taking a step further into the multi-sensory, even the synaesthesic – working alongside …
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 …
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 …
SEE: Ohio art-punks Fruit LoOops mash heads hard with ‘Pretty’
IF YOU like your music LOUD, conceptual, chaotic and confrontational, maybe it’s about you let yourself through the basement back door and into the world of Cincinnati’s Fruit LoOops. Melt-Banana the kinda band you like to kick back to of an evening? Boredoms? Ah yeah. Step this way. Fruit LoOops meld intensity and noise-percussion in …
ALBUM REVIEW: Ezra Feinberg and John Kolodij – ‘Ezra Feinberg and John Kolodij’: four deep acoustic atmospheres
YOU MAY know the names involved in this self-titled collaborative LP, brought to you by the twin instrumental and exploratory talents of Ezra Feinberg and John Kolodij; you may not. But if you have any interest in the more textured zone where post-rock has bumped into its good friend, post-classical, even out-folk; the world of …
PREMIERE: Babe, Terror – ‘Salina Lumen’: Caretaker-style eerieness from a locked-down São Paulo
BABE, TERROR, the nom-de-musique of São Paulo’s Claudio Szynkier, is a serious sort of name. That juxtaposition: your babe, your loved one, terror. Oh. … but then these are serious times, and if you think we’ve got it bad in the UK currently, then try the Brazil of the Brazil of an emergent populist, Covid-denying …
ALBUM REVIEW: Fritz Pape – ‘From My Guitar At Homes’: inventive sonic studies for the ambient-minded
FRITZ PAPE began his musical journey under the alias Zijnzijn Zijnzijn!, under which banner he undertook to create impenetrable, even frightening, waves and barrages of guitar, right up in your face a la Swans or Boredoms. With an eye to the trail laid by Glenn Branca, he’s also been known to put together ensembles of …
ALBUM REVIEW: Less Bells – ‘Mourning Jewelry’: absolutely affecting drone-post classical forged in loss
JULIE CARPENTER, who records for Texas’ home of boundary-pushing out-rock and drone beauty Kranky, has journeyed from musical academia at the University of North Texas, through session work as a violinist for bands such as Eels, to finding her own musical self as Less Bells. She released a graceful and beautiful set, Solifuge, for the …
See: Anna von Hausswolff reveals new album, plus new video for ‘Sacro Bosco’
If you are looking for gothic atmosphere, dark waves of sound and focused experimentalism then Anna von Hausswolff is waiting for you. Last seen supporting Sunn O))) in full band mode, this singular artist is set to add yet another layer to her eclectic catalogue with the release of ‘All Thoughts Fly’ on 25th September …
SEE: Ólafur Arnalds returns with the beautiful noir of ‘Back To The Sky’
IF YOU like your music to come with an architecture of gorgeously constructed post-classicism, an experimental and conceptual edge, yet still have enough presence in the world of contemporary pop that you can at least make the shapes of humming along to it, then Ólafur Arnalds is absolutely your man. The Icelandic composer, who found …