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 […]
I would imagine that, for composer and sound artist Matthew Patton, being given access to the late, great Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s studio hard drives after his death (at the age of just 48, and in his prime) must have been both thrilling and an intimidating responsibility. The record he has produced feels respectful, and also happens […]
I feel kind of bad that my first four purchases of the year have all involved artists who I already know and love (albeit one of them with a new-to-me collaborator, and one in a new-to-me solo guise). But this is Irisarri in his pomp, and I wasn’t going to pass that up, was I? […]
Caterina Barbieri is a firm favourite of mine. Her contributions to this are instantly recognizable, all cascading loops of lovely analogue synth. There is a split between fast-mode Barbieri and slow-mode Barbieri, in Patterns Of Consciousness terms. It’s good stuff. Bendik Giske is new to me, and I have to say that, while jazzy saxophone […]
These two twenty-minute tracks from the mighty Christina Vantzou may be the most deep-listening-oriented work of hers that I’ve encountered. In fact, I confess that the first time I heard it, I had it on while I was concentrating on something else, and it kind of slid by without my really noticing. I’m glad that […]
David Moore is well-loved around these parts as the main fella out of Bing & Ruth. Here he is in a solo guise, tickling the ivories rather delightfully. In places, he is rather restrained, allowing the chords to hang in space. More often, we get the dense clouds of arpeggios which B&R fans will know […]
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My albums of 2025
Hello. I’m actually getting my albums of the year written the correct year for once. Woohoo. For the first time in ages, there’s no straight-up ambient, drone, or modern classical in this list. That’s despite some very strong releases. Claire M Singer’s latest was astonishingly good and would absolutely have made it if she hadn’t […]
Well, this bangs extremely pleasingly, doesn’t it? Charlotte de Witte has been producing proper hard techno for a decade — I first came across her in 2020, and raved about that 12″ — but this is her first LP. It is proper hard techno, and it is really really good. Most of the tracks here […]
dogrando writes about some records 