Here’s one to file under “strange but strangely wonderful”. The first 11 minutes of the A-side is Reluctant Swimmer, an ambient experimental thing which seems to be done on a prepared guitar, all scrapes and bloops and rattles: it sounds oddly like you’re inside some kind of arcane machine but in a much softer, more […]
Author: dogrando
Like many folks, I guess, I got into Bing & Ruth when RVNG released Tomorrow Was The Golden Day in 2014, and only caught their self-published debut City Lakes when RVNG reissued it in 2015. Like many folks, I guess, I gushed unashamedly about TWTGD for its lush, twinkling, warmth — but I also like the slight element of (relative) raucousness […]
We last encountered Eraldo Bernocchi in these pages collaborating with Harold Budd on the wonderful Music For Fragments From The Inside. Here he’s playing with Dr Prakash Sontakke, who I’m sure you already know is India’s and classical Hindustani music’s foremost exponent of the Hawaiian lap steel guitar. Sontakke seems to take the lion’s share of the […]
As I’ve mentioned before, you don’t expect a new William Basinski album to be a radical departure: almost imperceptible evolution is more his thing. But this does feel like a little bit of a step forward. The self-titled A-side is 17 minutes of tape loops supplemented by a Voyetra 8 synth and other electronics, apparently […]
A nicely spiky bit of modern classical shizzle: lots of urgent-sounding strings, a bit of clattering percussion, layers of atmospheric electronics. The mood ranges somewhere between the sinister and the spooky. There are bits where the melodies seem eerily familiar — I could swear that Aunchron is quoting something super-famous but I’m too ignorant to […]
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My albums of 2016
So, that 2016, huh? It would seem shallow to comment on the year musically without mentioning that, in a wider sense, it’s been a pretty momentous and frankly shitty twelve months. But I don’t want to get into politics here, so let’s leave it at that. The other popular theme of 2016 has been the […]
Resident Adviser advise us that “It’s hard to think of a geekier scene than algorave”. A cynic might suggest that “think” might be more accurately replaced by “make up” — but, what the heck, it’s still technically the season of goodwill, let’s go with it. At any rate, this rather juicy little number is the […]
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Erik K Skodvin out of Deaf Center. The last release I bought (although there’ve been a couple I’ve missed) under the Svarte Greiner alias was Kappe way back in 2009 (before I’d started this blog). I’m happy to report, though, that this is stunningly good. The A-side, […]
Oren Ambarchi has amassed a very impressive set of collaborators for this record — I shan’t list them here, you can get that and all sorts of technical information on the label’s site. Even more impressive is how he’s managed to weave all that together and end up with something not only cohesive but with […]
What with the excellent recent records from Claire M Singer and Bethan Kellough, Touch have been on a pretty stunning run of form recently, and this release absolutely keeps up the good work. As with Solas, the composer is doing some awesome melodic drone work on a pipe organ, in this case the astonishing Acusticum organ […]
dogrando writes about some records 