It’s probably a trite observation, but the last week of October was a good one for fans of Icelandic classical music, with Jóhann Jóhannsson’s splendid Orphée and this. Other than the coincidence of the composers’ nationality, these are actually pretty different records. Where JJ’s was clearly very personal, this is explicitly collaborative, each track featuring a […]
Author: dogrando
The first thing to say is that the 15 short pieces that make up Orphée are some of the most beguilingly beautiful classical music I’ve heard in a very long time. In fact, for a moment I considered leaving this note at that one sentence: everything else seems secondary. But I’m probably being overly sentimental, so we […]
Wow, how brilliantly bonkers is this??? Vocally, Gately ranges from chirpy pop to melodramatic cabaret and incorporates eccentric yelps and shifts of tone and basically comes over like a Kate Bush for the attention-deficit generation. Musically, it’s equally full-on: synth-heavy, densely-layered, chaotic, over-the-top, and wickedly inventive. She never misses an opportunity for an extra flourish […]
Oiseaux-Tempête’s Ütopiya? was easily one of my records of 2015. So I was pretty intrigued to get hold of this. You never know quite what you’ll get with this kind of bits-and-bobs compilation, but this exceeds expectations. It opens with Eclipse & Sirocco, a number based around Christine Ott’s ondes-martenot work which starts of as ethereal […]
I don’t know where Golden Püdel’s Nina dug Scheich in China up from, but this is quite a find. The first side has three tracks of dark, intense, atmospheric, industrial techno: skittering beats, deliciously organic sounding pads, and primeval buzzing noises abound, with the whooping of oscillators being about the closest we get to a […]
Ooh, now this is really, really good. Claire M Singer, who is the musical director at the Union Chapel, has apparently been writing and performing for 14 years, but this is her first record. It’s really top notch classical drone stuff, with the traditional strings supplemented by some juicy work on the Union Chapel’s organ, […]
This is a short (28 minutes) but perfectly formed bit of intense atmospheric ambient. It’s made mostly of Kellough’s own droning string arrangements, field recordings (from Iceland and South Africa), and a bunch of processing. From the opening seconds you’d be forgiven for thinking this was going to be at the floaty end of the […]
Remember 2014, when new Aphex material (and new old Caustic Window, in particular) was really exciting? Remember 2015, when new Aphex material was kinda *shrug* and “whatevs”? Well, now it’s 2016, and perhaps I’m just about ready to treat new Aphex material on its merits, rather than harking back to the ’90s. Perhaps… Anyway, on this […]
Sam Shackleton’s prolific early singles career largely passed me by — I remember quite liking the Ricardo Villalobos remix of Blood On My Hands back in 2007, but that’s about it. In 2012, that all changed with his epic Music For The Quiet Hour, which absolutely blew me away (it still does). His main output since then […]
I was first drawn to this because I was curious about Jakobson’s Macro Cymatic Visual Music Instrument, a homemade construction which transduces the vibrations in water into sound (I won’t try to explain it any more than that, instead you should just go see it in action). Certainly there are some interesting sounds going on here, […]
dogrando writes about some records 