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Music

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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Music

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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Music

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 […]

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Music

Anna von Hausswolff: Källan (Betatype) (12″, Touch, November 2016)

What with the excellent recent records from Claire M Singer and Bethan Kellough, Touch have been on a pretty stunning run of form recently, and this release absolutely keeps up the good work. As with Solas, the composer is doing some awesome melodic drone work on a pipe organ, in this case the astonishing Acusticum organ […]

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Music

Jon Mueller: Tongues (LP, Rhythmplex, May 2016)

You may want to be sitting down for this one. Right from the start of the A-side (the 15-minute long How You Look When You’re Not Looking) we’re thrown into some seriously heavy ritualistic shit. According to the liner notes, Mueller “conceived” this (it’s hard to believe that it’s scored) and plays bass drums, voice, […]

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Music

Giacinto Scelsi, Chris Watson & Joe Browning: Scelsi EP (LP, SN Variations, March 2016)

The first side consists of a Duo for Violin and Cello by Giacinto Scelsi, a drone piece with just a tiny leavening of melody, excellently played by Aisha Orazbayeva and Lucy Railton. It’s got a mystical power to it and it’s quite subtly uplifting, excellent stuff. On the flip side are two Scelsi-inspired works. Chris Watson’s […]