Right from the start, I kinda knew I was going to like this. It opens with a simple phrase of Eno-ish synth that repeats and develops, but then there’s this crackling sound — not a hauntological vinyl crackly, mind you, but something that mutates between the hot fizz of a campfire and more of a […]
These four tracks of what I’m persisting in calling call post-footwork are a huge amount of fun. The cascading beats do their thing, blurring the lines between competitive street-dancing culture and ecstatic tribal rhythms, while curlicues of melodies that ricochet with gay abandon around a small orchestra dart in and out over the top. There […]
I first stumbled across Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe on screen, as the scandi-commune-hippy-turned-black-metaller protagonist of Ben Rivers’ and Ben Russell’s splendid A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness. I’ve since really liked the unique, hypnotic vocals and general experimental shenanigans he contributed to collaborations with Ariel Kalma on RVNG Intl’s FRKWYS series, and with Jóhann […]
This is a fascinating work from Kassel Jaeger, aka GRM head-honcho François J Bonnet. It starts out with a big fuzzy ambient woomph, which fades a bit into the background, and is then joined by a workout on what sounds like maybe tubular bells, which then continue as we move into a slightly more melodic […]
There’s something special about this. I gotta admit, I find a lot of dub techno pleasant but samey. This LP finds New York’s Kenzo Perron doing something which is, broadly speaking, dub techno, but very much doing it his own way. At times it feels like he’s deconstructing the genre a bit like Spatial did […]
This must be the most song-based record I’ve bought in a long time. Roxanne’s voice is strong and clear, with clean production and right up front in the mix. I find it rather compelling. Sometimes she’s singing over simple neoclassical piano lines; sometimes over a synth drone and some minimal strings; sometimes there is a […]
Nobody could accuse Vida of shilly-shallying about here. The first track very quickly establishes the template for this album: he and experimental vocalist Nina Dante declaim found poetry in a monotone, the two of them in perfect synchronicity so that their voices sound like two halves of a single entity, over a backing of new-agey […]
Well, now. Graham Massey out of 808 State and Brian Dougans out of Future Sound Of London (under his solo alias Humanoid), collaborating in the year of our lord 2026? Don’t mind if I do. It even has artwork by Strictly Kev and DJ Food (credited here as Openmind). The acid sounds you’d expect are […]
I’m writing back-to-back posts about solo works for cello, electronics, and occasional voice, but this is very different to the Dobrawa Czocher album last week. We’re in much more experimental territory. From the start, the cello is thumped and scraped as well as bowed. Two- or three-note motifs repeat, mutate, stretch, fade in and out. […]
In which your humble blogger, once again, falls for a nice bit of neoclassical cello. Czocher’s style leans to the dramatic: there is an urgency to the pacing, and a pulsing rhythmic element to her playing, alongside some stirring melodies. Apparently she was inspired by a recent move from Warsaw to Poland’s Baltic coast, and […]
