First proper post of 2020. I know, right, what am I like? I actually don’t think I heard anything that came out in January that I liked enough to buy; I ordered this in February, it didn’t arrive until early March; and then… for a while there, blogging felt kind of weird, what with, you […]
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My albums of 2019
Time for my albums of the year. It’s just about possible that this list will give a hint about what I needed to get from music in 2019: mostly calm, with a little bit of escapism. As always, there are several records I’m gutted to have to exclude. This year, that includes releases by Croatian […]
At last! I’ve been, ah, rinsing this since it came out digitally back in October, but I’ve been holding off on writing about it until I got hold of my vinyl copy, which took a while. It was worth it, since it has unusually helpful sleeve notes. Anyway, this is a kind of magical record, […]
I had an odd feeling of crossing-the-streams with this album. I listened to a bunch of Ninja Tune stuff in the mid-90s, mostly instrumental and alternative hiphop and breaks, but I think of that as a part of my musical past. So for the third album proper from Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran, who could […]
I’ll admit that my first thought on hearing the opening track here, Futō, was that maybe it was overdoing the whole close-miked piano thing a wee bit, as the creak of the mechanism was so up front in the mix. But that was soon forgotten, displaced by my second and more lasting thought: this is […]
Aw, now, this is just deliriously good stuff. It’s acidy housey breaksy rave and, well, I’m not sure whether she was even born in ’92, but Maya Bouldry-Morrison knows her stuff. There’s all the right bloops and squelches, there’s Korg piano, there’s even a motherflipping hoover. Best of all, there are dangerously infectious vocal samples, […]
In which Stephen O’Malley out of Sunn O))) and François J. Bonnet of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris’s National Audiovisual Institute have a beard-off. And the beards win. You probably expect this is going to be a weighty business, and it is, but at the same time there’s an ethereal quality to it. […]
Ah, noise. Lovely, cleansing noise. Once in a while, I find this stuff does me the world of good. Merzbow (Japanese veteran Masima Akita) is on splendid form here, assuming you think that ear-shredding howls of electronics and squeals of tortured static are amenable to the appellation of “splendid”. Vanity Productions (Christian Stadsgaard, a Dane […]
It came as a surprise to me when I realized I actually only own two records by Rafael Anton Irisarri. It Falls Apart, the 2010 release from The Sight Below, was a pretty cracking record, and it caught me at a formative moment in my listening journey, and I guess he’s felt like a part […]
For a while now there’s been a slow but steady resurgence of form of music that, for want of a better term, I’m going to call kosmische. You know the kind of thing: analogue synths, or good emulations if not, sequenced into big fat motorik swirls of sound. At it’s best, it can be rather […]
