Right, then, time for my self-indulgent annual round-up. For the first few months, 2014 looked like being a lean year… but things picked up big-time, I got majorly obsessed with new discoveries several times over the winter, and it ended up being really tough to pick my top 5 albums. First noteworthy result is that, […]
Bit of a mixed bag this one. There are some up-tempo drum’n’bass jobs which range from good fun (Neutralize) to irksomely overblown (Hypervelocity, whose pretentious pseudoscience gets my goat). There are a couple of down-tempo almost trip-hop jobs which do nothing for me (Superimposed). There are some mid-tempo atmospheric filler jobs which are nicely produced […]
I recently made the case that Steve Gunn is best when he’s acoustic. I’d like to enter into evidence this little gem of a collaboration with Mike Gangloff (of Pelt and the Black Twig Pickers). The two share an interest in both Appalachian and Indian music, and on this record sees them spending a night […]
It was looking for a moment there like I wasn’t going to get a single 2014 release from the wonderful Raster-Noton. But only because I nearly forgot about this little gem from the summer. Which would be rubbish, because this is fab. It’s got that precision-engineered glitch we expect from the label, but it’s also […]
I’ll be the first to admit that my tastes are inconstant and my feelings about music contingent on all sorts of other stuff other than what’s on the disc. There are plenty of records which I listen to and I kind of recognize that me-of-N-years-ago would have loved it, but now-me doesn’t quite have space […]
Aw, now this is a treat. Mark van Hoen and Louis Sherman have made an album rich in analogue synth sounds. There’s something very 70s about this music — there are bits which sound strikingly like Vangelis — but there’s also a very hopeful feel. It’s a kind of nostalgic futurism. It also has melodies, […]
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Objekt: Flatland (CD, Pan, October 2014)
The plus column: This is an ace album of proper electro-flavoured techno. It’s sonically and rhythmically rich, it’s got a lovely balance of hard thumpy bits and bloopy melodic bits, and it has that exciting feeling of being like what people thought the future was going to be like back when people thought the future […]
I’m not normally comfortable with people describing music as “difficult”. If I find a record difficult, doesn’t that say as much about me and my experiences as it does about the music? So I’m going to stick with saying this: I doubt many people would classify Terra Null as easy listening; I certainly don’t. However, it […]
Just your regular duo: Duane Pitre plays bowed guitar and piano, Cory Allen plays piano, harmonium, and 49-stringed drone harp. Hang on, what? The drone harp was custom-made by sound artist Allen, it more or less sounds like the name suggests, and it’s rather magical. It’s also worth mentioning that at least one of them […]
I’m going to find it tough writing about this without going all swooningly lyrical. This gorgeous double LP is swathed in warm, twinkling piano which gives me a lovely warm feeling right from the first notes. Then there’s the contrastingly simple but beautiful melodies played on either piano, clarinet, or strings. The harmonies and the […]
dogrando writes about some records 