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 […]
Author: dogrando
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 […]
In which Christian Fennesz applies the techniques he usually uses on his guitar to a bunch of recordings of fellow Austrian Gustav Mahler (and his guitar). This inevitably invites comparison with Matthew Herbert’s working over of the composer’s tenth symphony for Deutsche Grammophon’s Recomposed series. I have to say, the comparison does this work no favours: […]
This is Keith Kenniff’s first album as Goldmund since 2011’s Civil War song cycle All Will Prosper, although this harks back more to 2010’s Famous Places. Which is to say that these are short improvisations for solo piano (17 tracks here in 46 minutes), swathed (to a greater or lesser extent) in ambient swooshiness and backed […]
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My albums and tracks of 2015
For some reason, I found picking my top 5 albums of the year particularly hard this time around. My long-list was 18 records long, and it was a struggle to get it down to 14, then 10, then 6. And in the end, I dropped the lovely Xerrox (Vol. 3) only because Alva Noto had made the […]
I have a bone to pick with the normally impeccable Sub Rosa concerning their re-release of Broken Music. They describe these pieces as being “widely regarded as important sound art documents”, which suggests that they are of only historical interest, and risks obscuring the important fact that they sound freaking amazing. As a rule, I […]
dogrando writes about some records 