I don’t even pretend to be able to keep up with the output of Sunn 0))) main-man Stephen O’Malley. I happened across this, though, and it’s smashing. St Francis Duo are O’Malley and his old mucker Steve Noble. The LP consists of two tracks, clocking in at just under twenty minutes each, of intense, doomy […]
Author: dogrando
A variety of synth stuff on this intriguing album. The Singing Bile is, as its title wonderfully suggests, kind of sludgy yet melodic, a murky but sweet ambient number. Little Jammy Centre has a sort of wheezing drone, an echoey but jaunty little melody which is sort of like pop at one remove, and towards […]
The first side consists of a Duo for Violin and Cello by Giacinto Scelsi, a drone piece with just a tiny leavening of melody, excellently played by Aisha Orazbayeva and Lucy Railton. It’s got a mystical power to it and it’s quite subtly uplifting, excellent stuff. On the flip side are two Scelsi-inspired works. Chris Watson’s […]
The opening track here is a lovely bit of deep house with what sounds like maybe a bass clarinet noodling over it, which is obviously going to make me prick up my ears. Elsewhere, there’s are tracks reminiscent of Selected Ambient Works, others reminiscent of Artificial Intelligence, one fantastic shuffling melodic techy housey number which […]
I got slightly obsessed with this record, and I’m not quite sure why. I don’t normally get on with jazz, and know little about it; and I buy very little in the way of proper songs, especially by singers who sound trained in any kind of formal classical tradition. But this is amazing! I don’t […]
I have to admit, this record frustrates me at times, as it doesn’t seem to be making the most of the producer’s obvious talents. But there are enough good bits here to make this a keeper. Presented as 13 tracks but effectively a 27 minute continuous mix, it manages to pull in grime, techno, industrial, […]
I’m going to call this “environmental ambient”, a term I may or may not have just invented, and by which I mean that it strongly evokes a particular scenario — in this case, the Swiss Alpine setting of Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel Der Zauberberg (aka The Magic Mountain). It does this through a mixture of field […]
This is just top notch melodic classical drone ambient. Irisarri has been at this for a while (I’m quite fond of It Falls Apart, his 2010 album as The Sight Below) and he just seems to keep getting better. There’s that gently pulsing humming noise, the drawn-out strings layered subtly over the top, just the right […]
This starts out magnificently. Sassafras Gesundheit — quite apart from being an amazing title — is a 13 minute workout centred around an infectious circular melody on some kind of analogue-sounding synth, a jazzy burbling bass clarinet, and a kind of scratchy fiddling. This is all enhanced with a packed toybox of bangs, clanks, bloops, […]
Sometimes, I really don’t make life easy for myself. It’s very hard to know what to say about this record. There are two 18-minute tracks, but each is in several apparently unrelated parts. Along the way it incorporates (in no particular order) melodic synth music, sparse modern classical using a variety of different piano sounds […]
dogrando writes about some records 