Eris Drew spent lockdown raving in a cabin in the forest with her girlfriend Octo Octa. Judging by this record, she was having a lot more fun than most of us. I don’t mean that to sound envious: I find it impossible to be mean-spirited about such infectiously joyous music. ‘Cos this album of raved-up […]
My first thought when I heard this is that it combines elements and atmospherics familiar from dub, and in particular from dub techno (the first track even has an echoey vocal sample saying “dub” in case you needed a clue) with breakbeats more familiar from jungle (albeit the more laidback end). Is dub jungle a […]
Big ups to Another Timbre for putting together this entrancing set of performances of works from across Georgia Rodgers’s decade-plus-long composing career. There’s a decidedly minimal/drone flavour to this record, but there’s a wide variety of styles within that. The opening number, the punningly (I assume) titled Base, is a slow-burner for bassoon and double […]
This is a strangely wonderful thing from Israeli–French duo Ruth Rosenthal and Xavier Klaine. The first half consists entirely of Klaine’s quiet pipe-organ drone and Rosenthal’s even quieter vocals, a mostly monotone mumbling in (I think) a mixture of English, French, and Hebrew that borders on ASMR, plus the distant sound of church bells. The […]
This was a love-at-first-listen album for me. The first track, Richer Than Blood, opens with this sort of ambient crescendo of creaks and hums, and then a delightfully smudged vocal (in, I think, some flavour of Hindustani) soars over it, and that’s me gone. Jain, who was born in New Delhi and lives in New […]
A really impressive debut from this 20-year-old South African producer Sam Austin Rabede, alongside a wide range of collaborators and vocalists. The beats are, I gather, amapiano: rooted in house music, but with some really strong syncopation and tonnes of improvised-sounding frills and flourishes. (I’ll confess I’d not heard of the genre before, but then […]
This is just jaw-dropping. If I tell you it’s kind of violin-based electro-acoustic, you may think you know what to expect, but I don’t think you do. This record is packed with astonishing sounds: it wails, it thrums, it pulses, it soars, it laments, it floats. Oh, and there are some heartstring-tugging melodies, too. Elbo’s […]
I was well-disposed to this record before I listened to it because I had taken a childish pleasure in its title, which I admired for its OTT vibe which put me in mind of a nihilist Dune. So when it opened with a quietly rumbling gong (or something gongy) which you just know is going […]
Hans Op de Beeck‘s Staging Silence is a film art series in which a camera points at a table as hands come in from either side to construct and transform dioramas of various tranquil scenes, such as a wooden jetty on a moonlit lake, often out of recognizable everyday objects. Elegantly lit, and presented in […]
This arrived as a bit of a surprise to me: apparently, I had pre-ordered it, I think on the basis of a link from a Touch newsletter, and then forgotten all about it until it plonked through my letterbox. In this spirit, I have decided not to educate myself about its backstory. I can tell […]
dogrando writes about some records 