This record kind of straddles the boundary between ambient and new age. But in a good way! I mean, a Laraaji-without-the-chanting way. I read that Moles’s main influence here is Indonesian Kulintang music. At any rate, it combines various chiming gong sounds with electronic pads and washes, and it’s all rather beautiful. The most urgent […]
Now this is something rather novel and entirely delightful. Whitney Johnson gives us two long tracks (eighteen minutes apiece). Although mostly strings, these take in drone, folk-ish fiddling (with the occasional digression into folk rock — a guitar and a flute sneak in at the end), and sawing classical minimalism, and are supplemented by other […]
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My albums of 2021
I seem to have been particularly indecisive about whittling down my albums of the year to my self-imposed limit of five. On the plus side, this means that I have had lots of excuses to revisit some great music repeatedly while I made up my mind… I really enjoyed records from Claire Rousay, DJ Black […]
I saw Sunn O))) at All Tomorrow’s Parties once. There was a deeply hooded figure huddled at the front of the stage chanting while they did their drone metal thing, and there was a rumour going around that it was Julian Cope, who was also playing the festival. There was another rumour going around that […]
This is my first encounter with Robert Hood’s Monobox alias. And it’s great. Hood is, of course, one of the founding fathers of minimal techno, and you can definitely see that here, but it’s quite a bit more banging than, say, Minimal Nation. Resident Advisor call it ‘big room techno’, and I have no reason […]
Dub techno is one of those genres which I had a little flurry of interest in years and years ago, but haven’t bought much of more recently, because… well, to be frank, because there were a lot of records that were perfectly nice but which didn’t seem to give me much that I couldn’t get […]
Ooh, a new Mira Calix! I loved her Warp albums from the early noughties (One On One, Skimskitta, 3 Commissions) which were all pretty hard to categorize — a mix of glitchy electronics, naive piano before that was really a thing, field recordings, and bog knows what else — but all strangely beautiful, and quite […]
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 […]
dogrando writes about some records 