After my first couple of listens, the impression I was left with was a really dense prog, all swirling psychedelic synths and heavy rotating basslines, leavened by the sophisticated sweetness of Weaver’s vocals (her background in folk really coming through). And, indeed, that’s a decent description of about half the tracks, including the first two […]
Author: dogrando
This album finds the Manchester-based collective (I count eleven members, plus guests) exploring the wilder edges of the folk world, and pretty great it is, too. Musically, there are elements of proggy psychedelia, brassy big-band soul jams, bluesy rock stomps — alongside some rather lovely melodic folk. Naturally, the instrumentation reflects this range, and alongside […]
Combining classical music and electronica sounds like a great idea in theory, but in my experience it’s often pretty underwhelming in practice. Not so this collaboration, recorded live at the Palazzo Delle Papesse Centro Arte Contemporanea in Siena, Italy, initially released in 2005, and here re-released on beautiful double LP. Bernocchi’s electronics — at times straight-up […]
I’m pretty excited about this record, which is doing something genuinely new with the modern classical / ambient form (which, while basically my favourite thing in the world a few years ago, was starting to show signs of becoming just a little bit tired recently). This is collaboration, recorded over two years, between Diana Yukawa on […]
Minimalist composer James Tenney (an early member of the Philip Glass Ensemble) wrote Koan: Having Never Written A Note For Percussion for experimental percussionist John Bergamo in 1971. It is for a percussion instrument (he doesn’t specify which) and consists of a single note, initially quadruple-pianissimo, then with a crescendo to a quadruple-fortissimo, then with a […]
Less “while my guitar gently weeps”, more “while my guitar gently bleeds out onto the canvas”. This rare 1990 recording (originally under his Guitar Roberts alias) has been remastered for this release by Taylor Deupree, which is a hint that we’re in for something a bit special. This is just recognizably blues, but of the […]
The “thrilling ten minutes of proper dark industrial techno awesomeness” which is You Show Great Spirit, from the three-track Through The Window on Blackest Ever Black, was my standalone track of 2013. My quibble with that records was that the title track, basically making one noise (albeit a very awesome one) for almost 18 minutes, slightly outstayed […]
This record isn’t exactly going to be a surprise to anyone who knows Basinski. It’s basically three or four bars of a simple piano melody, looped and recorded and re-recorded and allowed to decay, so that the interplay of the imperfections slowly builds. This is less monumental and less freighted with meaning than my last […]
Fascinating… Nuclear armageddon never sounded so good. The vocal on this decidedly retro treat is a 1975 recording of Leonard Nimoy reading Ray Bradbury’s gently post-apocalyptic 1950 short story There Will Come Soft Rains, which begins as a description of life in a futuristic automated house (internet of things, anyone?) but gradually reveals first that […]
From about a minute in, it’s pretty clear we’re in for a treat here. The Xerrox project has always been at the lush ambient end of Alva Noto’s output, so different from the razor-sharp glitch of, say, Unitxt. But this he’s outdone himself here: there is a huge depth of emotion just humming out of […]
dogrando writes about some records 