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Music

William Basinski + Richard Chartier: Aurora Terminalis (digital, Line, January 2025)

Yo yo yo, it’s another Basinski, this time in working with Richard Chartier, and blow me if it isn’t another flipping masterpiece. For the most part, this is a more classically minimal affair than the Basinski / Schaefer collab from a couple of years ago. The opening two minutes of this are the exception: they […]

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Music

Bara & Isa: (ii) (digital, Warm Winters, November 2024)

Floating somewhere between lo-fi folk, the dreamiest of dream pop, new-age, ambient, and some kind of medieval devotional music, this is a hard one to pin down. But why try to pin it down, when it floats so beautifully in its ambiguity? Bara and Isa apparently started work on this during lockdown, way back in […]

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Music

My albums of 2024

Annual round-up time again. Just sneaking this into the first week of January… Another banging year for dance music, retro and modern. Honourable mentions here go to Paranoid London, Korea Town Acid, and Low End Activist (even though, okay, it would be a push to call that last one banging per se). Obviously I listened […]

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Music

Mariska Baars / Niki Jansen / Rutger Zuydervelt: Hardanger (digital, LAAPS, November 2024)

I guess this record could be considered a bit of retro, if you’re the kind of geeky individual who can get nostalgic about a kind of electroacoustic drone music which was ‘popular’ in (I would say) the early ’10s but isn’t made so much any more. Reader, I am that geeky individual. So… Improvised tunes […]

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Music

Kaya Fyah: 1994 (Born In The Jungle) (digital, Supa Subs, November 2024)

The title of this record is a reference to the fact that Kaya Fyah was born in 1994, which was essentially the year that jungle emerged as a popular form. (Apparently this makes her thirty — subs please check, ‘cos that doesn’t sound right at all…) Oh, and her dad just happens to be Congo […]

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Music

Alva Noto: Xerrox, Vol. 4 & 5 (digital, Noton, June 2020 & November 2024)

Obviously I lovelovelove Alva Noto. And I lapped up the first three volumes of the Xerrox series. In particular, I raved about the third installment, and I consider Xerrox Isola to be eight minutes of music that are about as close to perfection as any I’ve heard. Four summers ago, I very much enjoyed number […]

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Music

Lex Amor: Forward Ever (digital, Modern Oak, October 2024)

I described Lex Amor’s debut, Government Tropicana, as “super laid-back”. Well, I think she’s mellowed in the intervening four years. This is positively horizontal. Her vocals take more of a back-seat, and in particular the low-key pyrotechnics of the freestyle tracks on that mixtape are dialled right back here. To the fore are hazy atmospheric […]

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Music

Kelly Lee Owens: Dreamstate (digital, dh2, October 2024)

I’m pretty sure this (Owens fourth album, and the first since her eponymous debut that I’ve shelled out for) isn’t the classiest thing I’ve been listening to recently. Resident Advisor, say, were decidedly sniffy about it. Well, nuts to it. From the cheery trance of the opening track, Dark Angel, to the strings-and-piano electro-folk of […]

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Music

Winter Family: On Beautiful Days (digital, Murailles Music, September 2024)

Chevaliers, the last LP from this French–Israeli duo (okay, they say they are from “Jerusalem and Lotharingia”, the latter of which existed in some form between 855 and 959 C.E. and straddled modern-day France and Germany… but they also say that they’ve lived in Lorraine, which ended up in the French side… and she sounds […]

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Music

Sarah Davachi: The Head As Form​’​d In The Crier​’​s Choir (digital, Late Music, September 2024)

Oh wow oh wow oh wow. This is astonishing work from Davachi. If you are into pipe organ-heavy drone then it is must listen. Actually, I think it’s a must relisten, because it’s easy to miss stuff the first time around. The album is just over an hour and a half long, so I realize […]