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Music

Amosphère: Cosmogonical Ears (digital, Hallow Ground, June 2025)

Amosphère is a “Chinese-born, Paris-based composer and multidisciplinary artist”. And on this record, she has provided three very thoughtful pieces for us to delve into. Land Of Eternal Delight immediately captured my interest with its curious, wheezing sound. It features hand-made ceramic instruments, flute, and apparently trumpet although that’s quite well disguised, all cycling over […]

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Eliane Radigue: Trilogie De La Mort (digital, Experimental Intermedia, 1998)

A rare back-catalogue purchase for me. Eliane Radigue is obviously someone I’ve listened to loads and loved, but I’ve never actually bought any of her work because of some vaguely-motivated feeling that I should prefer to shove my pennies in the direction of new releases. But I find myself coming back to this particular record […]

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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 […]

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Kali Malone: Does Spring Hide Its Joy? (digital, Ideologic Organ, January 2023)

How much drone is too much drone? Well, if it’s this good, I’m inclined to say that three hours is not enough, ‘cos after immersing myself in this I have felt a kind of loss when it stops. This is a collaboration between Kali Malone on oscillators, Lucy Railton on cello, and Stephen O’Malley out […]

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Ellen Fullman & Theresa Wong: Harbors (LP, Room 40, August 2020)

If you’re like me, then you’ll read that this record features Ellen Fullman on long string instrument and Theresa Wong on cello and electronics and you’ll immediately try to imagine what a long string instrument might be. Just how long are the strings you’re imagining? Pretty long? If you’re like me, then you’re probably falling […]

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France Jobin: Death Is Perfection, Everything Else Is Relative (LP, Editions Mego, July 2020)

This is the kind of record you want to turn up loud and just let it wash over you. It’s two tracks, each just under twenty minutes, of glacial Buchla 200 drone. It hums and it shimmers and it throbs and it crackles gently. Sometimes the changes snap in and out abruptly; other times they […]

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Music

Golem Mecanique: Nona, Decima et Morte (LP, Ideologic Organ, March 2020)

Stephen O’Malley (of Sunn O))) fame, and boss of the Ideologic Organ label) tells a cool story about his first meeting with Karen Jebane (aka Golem Mecanique) at an exclusive-sounding French festival where “some mad acoustician geniuses have built massive concrete amplified horns into the hillside to project sound against the cliff, activating the landscape’s […]

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François J. Bonnet & Stephen O’Malley: Cylene (2LP, Editions Mego, September 2019)

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. […]

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Music

Norman Westberg: After Vacation (LP, Room 40, July 2018)

Ahhhhh! Swans-chappy Norman Westberg has been playing with his guitars and his effects pedals and has come up with a lovely sort of ambient drone thing which immediately sweeps you away in a sort of floaty haze. Little plucked melodies drift in and out of the gentle waves of texture. It reminds me a little […]

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Music

Aclds: Fuadain Liesmas (CD, Entr’acte, January 2018)

I want you to imagine a giant robot, lost in a world it does not understand, holding a more aleatoric Morton Subotnick in one hand and a noisier Autechre in the other hand and trying to figure out how they work, while the mad scientist who built this poor creature plays fragments of The Caretaker […]