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Music

Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri: Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close (digital, Black Knoll Editions, April 2024)

I am a big fan of both Rafael Anton Irisarri and Abul Mogard (even if the retired Serbian factory worker story has now, I think, been thoroughly debunked) and so I was obviously excited to hear this. And what a joy it is. There are two lengthy tracks of wonderfully soul-nourishing melodic ambient fuzzy hugs. […]

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Old Saw: Dissection Maps (digital, Worried Songs, June 2024)

This is kind of a fascinating mash-up of genres. As a starting point, let’s take that kind of folk–drone crossover thing where you get hypnotically repeating banjo and pedal steel lines and a bit of fiddle over what sounds like a hurdy-gurdy but may in this instance be bagpipes. Then let’s layer in some stuff […]

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Music

Low End Activist: Airdrop (digital, Peak Oil, April 2024)

I have a feeling that ‘deconstructed’ is one of my more overused words in this blog. But I’m afraid it has to get another outing today. I guess you could describe this as dub rave. There are lots of fragments of good old hardcore in here, but they’re all chopped up and swathed in reverb. […]

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Music

Sam Lee: songdreaming (digital, Cooking Vinyl, March 2024)

A bit out of my normal orbit, this one. I didn’t find it through any of my normal sources, but — gasp! — I heard a track from it on the actual radio, and liked it enough to look out the album. I’m glad I did. I think this is the first pretty much straight-up […]

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Jlin: Akoma (digital, Planet Mu, March 2024)

Jerrilynn Patton may have started out as one of RP Boo’s most promising disciples, you only need to glance at the list of collaborators on Akoma to guess that this isn’t your standard issue footwork LP: Björk, the Kronos Quartet, and Philip Glass. Bang, bang, and banger. A lesser record could easily be overwhelmed by […]

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Magic Tuber Stringband: Needlefall (digital, Thrill Jockey, March 2024)

This record from North Carolina duo Courtney Werner and Evan Morgan defies expectations, in a rather wonderful way. The opening track, A Dance On A Sunday Night, is pretty much straight-up hoedown-ready Appalachian folk. The next track, Days Of Longing, starts off in similar mode, but then it seems to start kind of looping in […]

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Music

Korea Town Acid: In Motion (digital, self-released, February 2024)

Korean–Canadian Jessica Cho packs a lot into her 28 minutes here, incorporating elements of jungle, footwork, techno, jazz, glitch, hip-hop, and who know what else into nine thrilling blasts of straight-up ravey fun. If I say that the opening track reminded me at various times of everything from S’Express to Octo Octa, that might give […]

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Music

Rafael Toral: Spectral Evolution (digital, Moikai, February 2024)

My first thought when I heard this was ‘my, this is strange’. My second thought was ‘my, this is good!’. It’s a hard one to categorize, so let us deal in specifics. We start with a simple phrase played on a guitar: kind of lo-fi, kind of echoey. Then we get two of Toral’s home-made […]

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Music

Paranoid London: Arseholes, Liars, and Electronic Pioneers (digital, Paranoid London Records, February 2024)

Gerardo Delgado and Quinn Whalley are on a self-proclaimed mission to “save” acid house from “smiley faces, rave, and sugary excess”. I don’t know how I feel about that: I like rave, I’m happy to indulge the odd smiley face, and I’ve been known to be sucked in by sugary excess. Well, let us leave […]

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Music

My albums of 2023

It’s that annual round-up post… I listened to quite a lot of dance music in 2022, and that seems to have continued last year. I’m not sure whether that’s down to my mood moving towards the bosh, or the trends in bosh moving towards my preferences. Anyway, I very much enjoyed records by Terr, NIGELTHREETIMES, […]