ATTN:Magazine (Page 4)

Review: Rachel Musson – Ashes and Dust, Earth and Sky, LLudw a Llwch, Daear a Nef

Portals between the city and West Wales for saxophone, flutes, field recordings and other materials.

Crucial Listening #148: Rosa Anschütz

Caught by howling, three people at the 2pm concert, vivid colour changes. The Berlin-based singer and artist discusses three important albums.

Review: A-Sun Amissa – Ruins Era

We are, unequivocally, within a world too burned and broken to indulge any residual hopes of repair.

Crucial Listening #147: francisco lópez

Post-apocalyptic industrial environments, pseudo-music, twisted proto-typicalities. The sound artist and experimental musician discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #146: Dhangsha

The dirt aesthetic, non-relinquishable frequencies, opening up that filter. The London-based sound artist and "mutant dancehall" practitioner discusses three important albums.

Review: Asha Sheshadri – Whiplash

Transit, industrial music, ceaseless updates to understanding.

Review: Ensemble 1 – Delay Works

Spiralling 6/8 hypnosis for guitar, drums, bass. Always back to the start, never losing power.

Review: Conducive – Vanterwood Industries, Inc.

Slow-dawning dark ambient horror. The strange factory on the edge of town.

Feature: Review of 2023

An utterly non-definitive run-through of my favourite records released in 2023.

Crucial Listening #145: hyacinth.

Slowing everything down, emotionally devastating lines, the snare on Faucet. The Portland-based producer discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #144: Fortresses

Mellow ingenuity, drowned in reverb, London at its most gloomy and miserable. London-based multidisciplinary artist Sam Ashton discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #143: Jessica Pavone

Weird symphony, no crazy vibrato, Terry Riley on the discman. The violist and composer discusses three important albums.

Review: IEOGM – dolphins in cornwall

An uncanny collaboration between Marie Vermont and the concept horse, melding the domestic and the sub-aquatic.

Review: Vumbi Dekula – Congo Guitar

Joyous solo debut from the veteran Congolese guitarist, after four decades working in collaborative contexts.

Crucial Listening #142: Dorian Wood

High-altitude Bryars, trash on the walls, desperate shamans. The Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #141: aircode

Emotional rollercoasters, impossible Neo Tokyo, perfect snares. The London-based Swedish producer/sound designer discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #140: Lucie Vítková

Architectural sound, understandings of freedom, and how do we end? The composer, improviser and performer discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #139: Ava Rasti

Light in the ocean depths, doors to other worlds, respiratory cycling. The Tehran-based composer discusses three important albums.

Review: Laurel Halo – Atlas

Intermingled inner worlds for strings, saxophones, keys and sudden voice.

Crucial Listening #138: Hyunhye Seo

(Almost) falling into the water, post-dumb-house-party-bike-rides, wildness and mastery. The musician and member of Xiu Xiu discusses three important albums.

Review: Hearsay – Glossolalia

Chicago improvisatory trio for drums, cello/guitar and turntable engage in hall-of-mirrors time-meddling.

Review: José Orozco Mora – Sucesiones

A set of reduced electronic studies for the 53-EDO microtonal tuning system.

A photo of the artist Babe, Terror, in a white shirt, with trees and foliage in the backgroun

Crucial Listening #137: Babe, Terror

The science of baffling unpredictability, nuclear plants leaking beauty, the moments before the apocalypse. The São Paulo-based artist discovers three important albums.

A picture of Arnold Dreyblatt & The Orchestra Of Excited Strings, stood with their instruments against a black curtain.

Crucial Listening #136: Arnold Dreyblatt

Digging in near the bridge, one old woman, acting like the Rolling Stones. The American media artist and composer discusses three important albums.

Review: MONTY – Abol Tabol | আবোল তাবোল

Cataclysmic suggestion and fragmentary beats, in the debut EP from the Dhaka, Bangladesh-based experimental act.

Crucial Listening #135: Taylor Deupree

Music for sleep, radical electronics, biospheric amorphous spaces. The sound artist and 12k label founder discusses three important albums.

Review: Sult – Always I Gnaw

Three ferocious exercises in improvisatory vigilance for guitar, bass drum and contrabass.

Review: Aaron Rosenblum – State Fair! Vol. 1: The Midway

Three attraction operators in full theatrical flow, captured at the Kentucky State Fair back in 2013.

Crucial Listening #134: Joni Void

The joy of UK pirate radio, intoxicating production, Streets Of Rage DJ set. Montréal-based French-British producer Jean Néant discusses three important albums.

Review: Nandele & A-Tweed – Xigubo

Colonial resistance derived from Zulu and Mozambican cultures is whirled into dizzying sound design and techno vigour.

Review: Lucie Vítková – Cave Acoustics

Sound cradled in the grand echoes of churches and caves. Reflections on family, grief, legacy, transformation.

A picture of Bana with headphones around her neck, sat in front of a sequencer.

Crucial Listening #133: Bana Haffar

Phytoplankton microsound, sketched-out dead ends, perfect warbles. The North Carolina-based electronic music producer discusses three important albums.

A picture of the artist Sabiwa, sat at a table eating watermelon.

Crucial Listening #132: Sabiwa

Sunday puppet show routine, childhood anime memories, Brazilian cutlery jams. The electronic producer and performer from Taiwan discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #131: Eluvium

Scared of the wolf, emotionally-resonant Eno, the 90s Louisville scene. Modern composer Matthew Cooper discusses three important albums.

A picture of the artist Rachel Lyn in a blue fur suit, asleep on a horizontal tree branch.

Crucial Listening #130: Rachel Lyn

Oxfam treasures, panic-stricken falling, wordless stories. The multidisciplinary artist discusses three important albums.

Review: Secret Flight – S/T

Brittle fantasies for voice and electronics. Rising, falling, rising again.

Crucial Listening #129: Mira Martin-Gray

Very inviting thumbs, vanilla apologists, Monk's comeback. The Toronto-based experimental musician discusses three important albums.

A picture of the artist Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix by Alexander Perrelli, in amongst the branches of trees.

Crucial Listening #128: Liturgy

In love with a vampire, psychedelic songform subversion, composer visitations. Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #127: Ibukun Sunday

Sleepless Lagos, echoes of heaven, beastly synths. The sound artist and violist discusses three important albums.

Artwork for the record, with an abstract image of a grey mountain against a

Review: Oishi – once upon a time there was a mountain

Uncanny kinships between tape and laptop, in the debut release from Zheng Hao and Ren Shang.

Crucial Listening #126: Fire-Toolz

Beauty in djent-adjacency, solo-Jeep-screamo-touring, "bad guy" music. The multi-genre multi-instrumentalist discusses three important albums.

A picture of the artist Babak Ahteshamipour, wearing a white t-shirt and a green overshirt, against a pink background.

Crucial Listening #125: Babak Ahteshamipour

Fishing the sound, math rock imposter syndrome, maximalist gratitude. The Athens-based sound and visual artist discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #124: Kalia Vandever

Nostalgia rushes, unhurried solo guitar, Pharoah jumps in. The American trombonist and composer discusses three important albums.

The album artwork for body of immanence by Ni Zheng, showing a body on the floor covered in a thick black liquid.

Review: ni zheng – body of immanence

Grim and claustrophobic electroacoustics.

Review: DAFAKE – Quiet Geometry

A blur eternally unsharpened on the horizon line.

Crucial Listening #123: Anton Newcombe (The Brian Jonestown Massacre)

Uncomfortable DJ sets, golden ratio songs, the "best band in the UK right now". The primary member of The Brian Jonestown Massacre discusses three important albums.

Review: Fågelle – Den svenska vreden

Beautiful, wrenched songs about inner rage and the rigidity of societal codes.

Review: [something's happening] – 12.10.22

A live improvisation by the sound and text duo of Iris Colomb and Daryl Worthington, captured at Cafe Oto last October.

Crucial Listening #122: Sham-e-Ali Nayeem

Communal grief, tapes from the Halal Meat Shop, time-space departures. The Hyderabadi Muslim American poet, musician, interdisciplinary artist discusses three important albums.

Review: Camilla Pisani – Phant[as]

Inner darkness unleashed over the walls and floors, manifesting as shadow ambience and evaporated techno.

Review: Yosuke Tokunaga – 8 Quadrants

8 Quadrants by Yosuke Tokunaga Everything travels in circles. 8 Quadrants is built on overlain repetitions running at disparate speeds. Percussive sounds spin through tight-knit delays, while melodies repeat after extended exchanges between sweeping synth chords or chopped-up piano. At points there are even “beats”, manifest as skeletal trip hop

Crucial Listening #121: Colin Stetson

Ruinous beauty, hauling a bass sax up the stairs, Hendrix's face, worlds of breath. The saxophonist and composer discusses his important albums.

Review: DODE – Music for critters

Prepared piano and strange manipulations. The blurring of spaces and selves.

Crucial Listening #120: Xhosa Cole

Intuitive resonance, cataclysmic dualities, bandleader grace. The UK-based saxophonist discusses three important albums.

Feature: Review of 2022

Here are a handful of records I enjoyed last year. Yara Asmar – Home Recordings 2018-2021 (Hive Mind Records) The debut album of the Beirut-based puppeteer/video artist/multi-instrumentalist, built on recordings captured on cassette and mobile phone. These tracks hang on the edge of wakefulness, with the edges of diurnal

Crucial Listening #119: Yara Asmar

Heart wrung like a towel, Skullcandy bass, the magic of music boxes. The Beirut-based multi-instrumentalist, video artist and puppeteer discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #118: More Eaze

Visions of hell/paradise, two G's in eggs, bizarre lemonade. The composer/multi-instrumentalist from Austin, Texas discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #117: Phillip Golub

Vocal imitation games, aural cocktails, jazz-adjacent ingenuity. The New York-based composer and pianist discusses three important albums.

Review: Baltic Furs – Contemporary Ruin

Hauled together in the rubble of post-apocalyptic shock.

The artwork for Egg Meat's self-titled EP, with a picture of a mouth placed between chunks of plaster mould and spit.

Review: Egg Meat – S/T

Atomised matter. Blackout in the club.

Crucial Listening #116: Julian Sartorius + Feldermelder

Too-short tracks, dying melodies, birds mimicking electronics, the highest organ note. The musicians and collaborators discuss their important albums.

Review: Fortresses – Near

The London-based composer conjures the memory of a trip through Oregon's natural spaces.

Crucial Listening #115: Elif Yalvaç

Tim Hecker beneath the aurora borealis, nerdy icebreakers, blurs and beats. The Turkey-born, UK-based composer and guitarist discusses three important albums.

A photo of the artist Hatis Noit, dressed in black against a background of blue fabric, with feathers attached to her nostr

Crucial Listening #114: Hatis Noit

Harnessing ugliness, memories of Okinawa, Pärt in the snow. The Japanese vocal performer discusses three important albums.

Review: Roxane Métayer – Visage Zygène

Fluttering assemblages for strings, woodwinds, voice and the playful meddling of FX.

A picture of Greg Anderson looking to one side, looking at multicolored patterns on a stained glass window.

Crucial Listening #113: Greg Anderson (The Lord, Sunn O))), Goatsnake)

Miless in the city, matching Spiderland tattoos, vertiginous rabbit holes. The guitarist and label curator discusses three important albums.

A picture of the artist Ami Dang in a grey button-up shirt, holding the back of her hair and looking off to one side.

Crucial Listening #112: Ami Dang

Sad tween car journeys, dismantled pop, pioneers of Baltimore Club. The South Asian-American vocalist, sitarist, composer and producer discusses three important albums.

Review: Elaine Cheng – Mindful Matter

An eclectic array of synthesisers from London's Electronic Music Studios, fed through a process of lively trial and error.

Crucial Listening #111: Laurie Tompkins

Brazen electronic keys, odes to the rig, ripping everything out. The UK composer and performer discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #110: Rocio Zavala

Raga of the spine, stretched like honey dripping, body-recalibration drones. The Chicago-based visual and sound artist discusses three important albums.

Review: Babak Ahteshamipour – Specter, Spectrum, Speculum

Synthesisers crunched in trapezoidic arpeggiations, voices in service of nonsense.

Review: Savvas Metaxas – For How Read Now

Two eggs for breakfast precede the skitter of the unexpected.

Crucial Listening #109: Jenny Berger Myhre

Haunting organs, sitting inside tape loops, endless questions. The Oslo-based multidisciplinary artist discusses three important albums.

Review: Aleksandra Słyż – A Vibrant Touch

Microtonal drones for strings, saxophone and modular synthesiser, pressing back against the insistence to continue.

Crucial Listening #108: Chloe Alexandra Thompson

Feedback as praxis, weird fragments, the first true drone show. The Cree, Canadian, interdisciplinary artist and sound designer discusses three important albums. Chloe’s picks: Les Rallizes Denudes – Mizutani Coil – Backwards (Demos) Phill Niblock – Music Chloe’s new album, They Can Never Burn The Stars, is out now on SIGE.

Review: Jenny Berger Myhre – Here Is Always Somewhere Else

Nestled loops and wrong turnings in time.

Review: Amirtha Kidambi + Luke Stewart – Zenith/Nadir

Two improvisatory musicians camp out on the extremes in this wonderful collection for vocals and variously facilitated low frequencies.

Crucial Listening #107: Cremation Lily

Black metal vs Aphex Twin, sad tape loops, the best screamo of all time. The UK-based artist and multi-instrumentalist discusses three important albums.

Review: Scarcity – Aveilut

Black metal rendered in 72-note octaves and spectral overtones, forever reaching beyond its own limits.

Review: Rocio Zavala – Invisible Miracles

Power surging in circles, with self-made instruments using light and body-born electricity.

Review: Sun Yizhou – Heresy

No-input pre-amp and radio, whiling away time in a waiting room for nowhere.

Crucial Listening #106: MC Dälek

Earth-shifting philosophies, wordless shoegaze treasures, cinematic heartache. The MC and producer discusses three important albums.

Review: Phil Maguire – Rainsweet Stillness

Near-silence as a conduit of catalyst for ecstatic sensory fullness.

Review: Shoko Igarashi – Simple Sentences

Charming, intricate electronics running on the liquid logic of jazz.

Crucial Listening #105: Avola

Septic-tank-prog roadtrips, poop jokes written backwards, a literal anvil. The Oregon-based composer, multimedia artist, instructor and champion of friendship discusses three important albums.

Review: George Rayner-Law + Vinegar Tom – Oyster Card

Subterranean commute cacphony, four minutes total.

Review: Yenting Hsu – Flash 須臾

ASH INTERNATIONAL. “Some scientists believe that we have memories from the past and the future both. Past memories and future memories come together as a circle,” states Yenting Hsu in the liner notes for the fourth track on Flash 須臾. Even without reading any context, this record is audibly fixated

Crucial Listening #104: Maria Moles

A weaving of voices, moments of pure connection, sibling influences. The Narrm/Melbourne-based drummer and composer discusses three important albums.

Review: Daphne X – Transactions In Time

CZASZKA. Five petri dishes of electronics in cyclical stasis, produced during the first lockdown in Barcelona, Spring 2020. Most of the movement here occurs on the micro level, as synthesisers ping against eachother or chicane between steady pulses. Polymetric junctures are produced as each element adheres to its own mode

Review: FINAL – It Comes To Us All

RELEASED BY ALTER. Justin Broadrick has regularly exposed the sombre energy at the core of pop music: most obviously through Jesu’s combination of melodic earnestness and steamroller forward drive, but also in Final tracks that crushed and reversed samples of mid-00s indie pop. It Comes To Us All is

Review: KMRU + Aho Ssan – Limen

BANDCAMP. Limen illustrates how the most intense experiences arise not from unabated eruption, but by relentlessly rendering the promise of it. The energy here is one of accumulation – gathering, compressing, assimilating – with clouds darkening overhead and surface explosions pointing to a volatility that runs right to the core. Yet Limen

Crucial Listening #103: Hinako Omori

Myspace discoveries, kaleidoscopic sonics, the beam shining through. The Yokohama-born, London-based producer discusses three important albums.

Review: Terry Jennings – Piece For Cello And Saxophone

Despite the title, there is no saxophone throughout these 84 minutes – only Charles Curtis on cello, arranged in just intonation by LaMonte Young. On a quick skim of the composition’s history, versions including the intended instrumentation seem to be in the minority: an earlier configuration by Young involved Curtis

Crucial Listening #102: Biliana Voutchkova

Reaching beyond our world, the thing in all its magnificence, the butterfly on your hand. The violinist, composer, improviser and interdisciplinary artist discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #101: Stefano Pilia

Divine possession, accessing a communal psyche, opening quantum windows. The guitar player and electroacoustic composer discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #100: Yiorgis Sakellariou

Mum meets the Beatles, live environment failures, waves of transformative energy. The composer of experimental and electroacoustic music discusses three important albums.

Review: Beast Nest – Sicko

BANDCAMP. Sicko is constantly materialising. As glitches scatter, warm synth drones rise from beneath, in turn receding to reveal strings in reverse, distorted voices…these pieces are forever becoming the next state of becoming, the energy restless and goaded forward, each new moment instigating yet another foaming reaction. It’s

Crucial Listening #99: OHYUNG

Stretched instruments, drudging through the mud, Kanye on the space highway. The Brooklyn-based Asian American musician and composer discusses three important albums.

Crucial Listening #98: Eric Chenaux

Sulphur and molasses, museums and ice cream, reverence for the beautiful. The avant garde ballard-purveyor discusses three important albums.

Review: Étienne Michelet – SKULL REVELATIONS

BANDCAMP. Rich and strange evocations here from Ètienne Michelet, with saxophone/clarinet contributions from Kim Soo Min splattered like paint globs into swirled basins of electronics, stammering drum patterns, pulsing chimes and guitar. The constituent materials were recorded in a small room over the course of two months, and while

Crucial Listening #97: Obay Alsharani

Wombic alien mechanics, circuit-bent FIFA, worldbuilding soundtrack serendipity. The Syrian-born, Sweden-based artist discusses three important albums.

Review: DRMCNT – RX-BOUNCES

BANDCAMP. Deeply satisfying electronic beatwork here from Rhys Llewellyn (drummer in Hey Colossus), using a minimal hardware setup to plunder the possibilities within sleights of syncopation, indulgent kick resonance and exquisite hi-hat tones. Prime example: “Galdem” starts out with an unworkable lurch of a beat, before a deft swivel of

Crucial Listening #96: Jack Chuter

Gargling fire, empty samplers, ruined picture discs. Crucial Listening host Jack Chuter shares his three important albums.

Crucial Listening #95: Victoria Shen (evicshen)

Totality in music, lyrical homicide, destroyed Barbie dolls. The experimental music performer and instrument-maker discusses three important albums.

Review: Xena Glas – Body

BANDCAMP. Derived from Xena Glas’ lived experience with autism, the five tracks of Body are named after specific sites where the effects of autism announce themselves, each at the juncture between the internal and external: “Eye” references the plethora of ideas and emotions conveyed through eye contact; “Feet” and “Hand”

Review: Nyokabi Kariũki – peace places: kenyan memories

SA RECORDINGS. The push and pull of disparate distances. These tracks are gathered from elements of emotional significance to Nyokabi Kariũki, all within her home of Kenya – the ocean at dawn, a stroll through a farm, voices of family, contributions from close friends, the interwoven languages of home and heritage

Hard Return: African Ghost Valley – SEASONS

13 January 2022 Incredible new EP from this Canadian/European duo, all stemming from the synth melody that pervades the entire release. In fact its ubiquity is primarily in spirit, with the levitating drone of “SEASONS NEEDLE” and the radio interference of “SEASONS EENT” infused with its beautiful searchlight swirl.

Review: Uraño – BARRAGE

BANDCAMP. What an opening riff. Like a degraded film loop of someone falling down a right-angled staircase, drums and bass stumble and slam into the wall on repeat, occasionally dragged into chaotic celluloid divergences, somehow returning to the main refrain each time. Where some groups affiliated with the “noise rock”

Crucial Listening #94: Martin J Thompson

VHS basslines, definitive ambient, record shopping in Woolworths. The London-based musician and anarchist discusses three important albums.

Feature: Records Of 2021

Like all end-of-year lists, there’s nothing definitive about this one. Neither is it in any particular order. Essentially, here’s a selection of records that pop into my head when I think about the music I’ve enjoyed throughout 2021. I’ll probably end up adding a whole bunch

Crucial Listening #93: Yan Jun

Everybody against everybody, the left hand of the Qin master, tin can Beatles. The Beijing-based musician and poet talks about three important albums.

Crucial Listening #92: Olivia Block

Liturgical lullaby, canine concrète, a chess game that never ends. The Chicago-based media artist and composer talks about three important albums. Olivia’s picks: Alèmu Aga – Éthiopiques 11: The Harp Of King David Beatriz Ferreyra – Huellas Entreveradas Morton Feldman – For Samuel Beckett Honourable mention: Kim Jung Mi – Now Olivia’s

Review: Todeskino – Debutante

CRUEL NATURE. The debut album of Düsseldorf’s Todeskino (which possibly translates as “death cinema”) opens with beauty and sadness in neoclassical widescreen: choir pads swirled in synthesised strings, piano notes like droplets into unstirred lakes, melodies that wring the emotive polarity of major and minor keys. The record continues

Crucial Listening #91: Emma Ruth Rundle

Spontaneous trips to Genoa, bloop speakers, big Tori energy. The LA-based musician and visual artist discusses three important albums. Emma’s picks: Sibylle Baier – Colour Green Shape Of Despair – Monotony Fields Tori Amos – Boys For Pele Emma’s new album Engine Of Hell is out now via Sargent House. Head

Review: MonoLogue – MICRO

CONTROVENTO / STALLO / MOVIMENTO Marie e le Rose remarks that this trittico (three-part operatic suite) is partly a tribute to their favourite GRM musicians and an attempt to channel their “compositional thinking”. This is apparent in the precise movement of electronic sound – how they dart around the listener’s head – with

Review: Phill Niblock – NuDaf

XI RECORDS. NuDaf diverges from other Phill Niblock pieces I’ve experienced. I’m used to hearing a certain linear progression with his work – slow and inevitable, often manifesting as the microtonal melting of an opening chord, dragging the piece from unity into disarray. And while these 65 minutes become

Review: Elena Kakaliagou – Hydratmos

DASA TAPES. The title of this record is the Greek word for “vapour”, and each of these one-take pieces for French horn is a contemplation on this transitional state between water and air. Just as in evaporation, this elegant concept disperses itself into many manifestations. Kakaliagou’s whispering acts as

Crucial Listening #90: Byron Westbrook

Perceptual geographies, Dylan’s near misses, Coltrane’s unresolved places. The LA-based artist and composer discusses three important albums. Byron’s picks: Maryanne Amacher – Sound Characters (Making The Third Ear) Bob Dylan – Planet Waves John Coltrane – Sun Ship Byron’s fabulous new record, Mirror Views, is out now via Ash

Crucial Listening #89: BACKXWASH

Weird industrial synths, rapping over alarm clocks, Kubrick with 2 bricks. The Zambian-Canadian rapper and producer discusses three important albums. Ashanti’s picks: Janet Jackson – The Velvet Rope Death Grips – The Money Store Danny Brown – The Atrocity Exhibition Check out the BACKXWASH website here. She’s also on Twitter and

Event: Knifedoutofexistence + Fleshlicker + VIIOFIX + Viimeinen + Upward @ Otto Print & Coffee House in Bournemouth, 02/11/2021

Turlin + ATTN:Magazine present: * knifedoutofexistence Cracks Below The Surface by knifedoutofexistence Electronics, voices, and colliding surfaces, straining upward through a blanket of feedback and malformed fidelity. FLESHLICKER (HNW set) Traumatic Amputations by FLESHLICKER Compounding the grain from every VHS horror tucked at the back of the cabinet, recast on this

Crucial Listening #88: Raven Chacon

Ever-heavier tape trades, music for twenty radio stations, new urgencies. The composer, artist and improviser discusses three important albums. Raven’s picks: Mr Bungle – Disco Volante José Maceda – Ugnayan Moor Mother – Fetish Bones The latest record by Endlings – Raven’s band with John Dieterich – is out now on Whited Sepulchre.

Review: Paula Schopf – Espacios en Soledad

KARAOKE KALK. These 16 minutes were assembled from sound walks captured in Schopf’s birthplace of Santiago de Chile, from which she has twice departed: firstly in a flight of exile during the 70s, and again to move to Berlin in the 90s. Returning home is often complicated. Schopf makes

Crucial Listening #87: Cecilia Lopez

More mayonnaise, electrified tango, unapologetic folk. The musician, composer and multimedia artist discusses three important albums. Cecilia’s picks: Charly Garcia – Clics Modernos Violeta Parra – Composiciones Para Guitarra Eduardo Rovira – Sonico The audio documentation of RED(DB) is out now via Relative Pitch Records. Head over to Cecilia’s website

Review: Stephen Vitiello With Brendan Canty – S/T

PLAYNEUTRAL. These five pieces by Stephen Vitiello (guitar, modular synth, piano) and Brendan Canty (drums) are constantly toying with the notion of synchronicity. From a superficial perspective, Vitiello is seldom aligned with the repetitious clarity of Canty’s grooves: on “Piano 1” he rains haphazardly upon the beat like shards

Crucial Listening #86: Domingæ

Record warehouse paradise, lullabies finished in hell, destroying synchronicity. The musician and filmmaker discusses three important albums. Domingæ’s picks: Jackson C. Frank – Blues Run The Game Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica Ryuichi Sakamoto – async Domingæ’s new album Æ is out now via Sacred Bones. Her Linktree is here and

Review: Jamaica!! Meets Sly & The Family Drone – Celebrating The End Together In The Good Time Swamp

BANDCAMP. All proceeds go the The Gate. Porosity is the key. On gig night, Sly & The Family Drone might rock up as a group of three players or maybe nine, splaying themselves among the audience so that everyone in the room is essentially swept into honorary membership. Jamaica!! have

Crucial Listening #85: Nyokabi Kariũki

Lost souls in a fishbowl, lushness and harmony, sanza psychedelia. The Kenyan composer and performer discusses three important albums. Nyokabi’s picks: Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here Kelsey Lu – Blood Francis Bebey – Psychedelic Sanza 1982-1984 Nyokabi’s new single, Galu, is out now via SA Recordings. It’s part

Review: Stephan Barrett + Sylvia Hallett – River . Pathway . Static

COLLIDING LINES. Side A of this record, coming courtesy of Sylvia Hallett and Stephan Barrett (with contributions from Helen Frosi and Wes Freeman-Smith), centres on the “hidden details of worlds we miss in the everyday”: experiences that are in opposition to those anomalous and large-scale events that we, broadly speaking,

Crucial Listening #84: Robert Curgenven

Cannonball of musicians being shot at a staircase, flying across the top of the mosh, sunlight in the white room. The Ireland-based, Australian-born artist discusses three important albums. Robert’s picks: Naked City – Grand Guignol Ministry – In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Showing Up Folke Rabe – What?? Robert’s

Radio: Hard Return on CAMP – 11/08/2021

Tracklist: ex.sses – soft tongues ex.sses – buried ex.sses – resurrections Akira Sileas – LUDER MIX Buffy Sainte-Marie – Little Wheel Spin And Spin Julian Sartorius – Locked Grooves (extracts) Cypro – Cycle

Crucial Listening #83: crys cole

Resonating glass, the arsehole of Western music, shopping mall avant garde. The nomadic sound maker discusses three important albums. crys’ picks: Annea Lockwood – The Glass World Of Anna Lockwood Walter Marchetti – Antibarbarus Bernhard Günter – Univers Temporel Espoir crys’ contribution to Boomkat’s Documenting Sound series is called Other Meetings and

Review: Minna Koskenlahti – Toinen/Other

BANDCAMP. In addition to the instrument/texture setup referenced in the accompanying text (frame drum, traditional Spanish tambore, wooden whistle, paper, plastic, metal), the other prominent sound on Toinen/Other is Koskenlahti’s own breath. On “Tunto/Sense” it’s a nasal breeze skimming over the thumps and scurrying fingers,

Review: Deli Kuvveti – Even After

ACTIVE LISTENERS CLUB. What am I actually hearing? Even After opens with what appears to be an orchestral drool: fidgeting ride cymbal, brass microtonally mingled with woodwind, squiggles of guitar lead and feedback, arcs of choral voice. Yet those flecks of electronics throw doubt over the whole thing. Is this

Crucial Listening #82: Lauren Sarah Hayes

Out-of-time ska, home alone raves, smashing together American music. The live electronics improviser discusses three important albums. Lauren’s picks: Lunachicks – Jerk Of All Trades Andy C – Nightlife Van Dyke Parks – Song Cycle Give yourself a proper treat and listen to Lauren’s record Embrace, released on SUPERPANG. There’s

Review: hyacinth. – Hold Onto Love

THE JEWEL GARDEN. For a record that pulls so heavily on hold music, an image of the sea from the perspective of the shoreline couldn’t be more apt. Both provide objects for wayward attention (hold music in the void of pure waiting between events of overt purpose, the sea

Review: Wilted Woman – Gekachelt

ANTIBODY. Elizabeth L Davis presents three tracks that spill out of the lines they draw for themselves. Energetic moderation and rhythmic rigidity become barriers against which Gekachelt is constantly pressing, with tape delays and electronic extranea smeared all over the grid, skimming the edge of eternally-escalating feedback before ducking back

Crucial Listening #81: Geneva Skeen

Top string of the harp, transcendent worldbuilding, catharsis in composing. The LA-based artist and composer discusses three important albums. Geneva’s picks: Ursula K. Le Guin + Todd Barton – Music And Poetry Of The Kesh Grouper + Roy Montgomery – Split Swans – The Great Annihilator Geneva’s new longform work, Turning Of The

Crucial Listening #80: Jen Kutler

XXX alcohol, forgone resolutions, avalanches of brutality. The multidisciplinary artist and performer discusses three important albums. Jen’s picks: Joseph Spence – Good Morning Mr. Walker Stephen Layton – Whitacre: Cloudburst And Other Choral Works Opeth – Blackwater Park Go spend a bunch of time on Jen’s website and Instagram. Sonified Physiological

Review: Jaleh Negari – Weaver ~

BANDCAMP. We know that we can bridge the gap between languages by a process of translation: the imperfect equivalence of concepts that allows us to understand, in an approximate form, what might be communicated by someone else speaking in a different tongue. For Weaver ~, Jaleh Negari broadens its application to

Crucial Listening #79: Dalibor Cruz

Slipping into the bloodstream, reassembling the alien spacecraft, addictive polyrhythms. The Honduran-American producer discusses three important albums. Pablo’s picks: Muslimgauze – Hussein Mahmood Jeeb Tehar Gass Paul Schütze – New Maps Of Hell Los Roland’s – Solo Exitos Vol. 2 The new Dalibor Cruz album, Riddled With Absence, is out now

Review: Genrietta – Park Kulturi

DRAGON’S EYE. Genrietta’s debut EP is named after a subterranean metro station in her originating city of Moscow, which was opened in 1935 with the first phase of the city’s metro line. Track titles make further references to specific locations in the vicinity, such as “Bitsa” (one

Review: Biliana Voutchkova – Seeds Of Songs

TAKUROKU. “It is the first time that I create a completely new composition by imagining and collaging together various unrelated sounds” states Biliana Voutchkova. Created primarily in the latter months of 2020, Seeds Of Songs can indeed feel like an erratic assemblage of fidgeting vocalisation, distant echoes, tinkling glass, hybridised

Crucial Listening #78: Kevin Martin (The Bug)

Jaw on the floor, zoning into spirituality, bastardised reggae basslines. The multidirectional musician and producer discusses three important albums. Kevin’s picks: Gil Mellé – The Andromeda Strain OST The Necks – Sex Public Image Limited – Metal Box Kevin’s soundtrack to Tarkovsky’s Solaris comes out June 25th on Phantom Limb.

Review: Bahía Mansa – La Orilla en la Que Habito

HISTAMINE TAPES. Centred on the dwindling biodiversity of the El Membrillo wetland in Chile, these two extended pieces look to “create awareness of the spaces in which the human, the animal, and the botanical converge”. They render audible the damage unleashed by encroaching human acts (housing developments, the dumping of

Review: NOMON – Card II

BANDCAMP. Percussionists Shayna and Nava Dunkelman refer to their setup as “Rorschach-like”, in reference to those symmetrical inkblots used in psychological tests into emotion and character. I expect this describes the physical mirror-image arrangement of their instruments, but it also lends to the idea of percussion as conduit of the

Review: Beachers – The Interview

CZASZKA. The title of this record refers to an evening spent cutting back and forth between two radio talk shows, bringing the voices of one programme into liason with the other. Beachers thereby illuminates the countless lines of dialogue that exist within radio: between presenter and guest, between on-air speaker

Crucial Listening #77: Marshall Trammell

Going beyond the bandstand, simultaneous multidimensionality, searching for fire. The music research strategist and insurgent learning workshop co-ordinator discusses three important albums. Marshall’s picks: Prokofiev – Peter and the Wolf (Disney animated version and accompanying reading) Earth Wind & Fire – All ‘n All Ornette Coleman – The Shape Of Jazz To

Review: lauroshilau – live at Padova

BANDCAMP. We begin on a magic rim. The cymbals of Yuko Oshima stir with restless potential, peering over the edge; the saxophone of Audrey Lauro leaks like the heavier outbreaths of someone on the verge of waking up; the electronics of Pak Yan Lau dance like the glow of oncoming

Crucial Listening #76: Charmaine Lee

Toilets on heads, high frequency feedback devastation, hot pink harsh noise. The New York-based vocalist from Sydney, Australia discusses three important albums. Charmaine’s picks: Derek Bailey / George Lewis / John Zorn – Yankees Yan Jun + Hsia Yu – 7 Poems And Some Tinnitus Masonna – Noskl In Ana – Rare Tracks Collection Charmaine’s

Review: The Worm – Furry-Tarot-Dori

BANDCAMP. Immediately, Furry-Tarot-Dori conjures the image of a village community: perhaps all living in houses that stud the hillsides, perhaps in Medieval dress, perhaps roaming as one communal spirit and chasing pipers as they gallop across the fields. And yet synthesisers? Lopsided drumkit lurches reminiscent of 90s Pram records? Forthright

Crucial Listening #75: Mathieu Ball (BIG|BRAVE)

Drumsticks into sawdust, ripping off Harvey Milk, going crazy for the Blind Owl. The BIG|BRAVE guitarist discusses three important albums. Mathieu’s picks: Rockets Red Glare – S/T Harvey Milk – A Small Turn Of Human Kindness Blind Owl Wilson – S/T The latest BIG|BRAVE album, Vital is out

Review: Phil Maguire – ijzer en staal

VERZ. While Maguire’s previous work, Bairds of Gartsherrie, was a broader reflection on his family’s hometown of Coatbridge, ijzer en staal focuses on the physical process that quite literally powered the town’s history: the creation of iron and steel. The former release is imbued with an outward

Crucial Listening #74: Yuko Araki

Thrash at the rehearsal room, transcending cheap music, collapsing nature and artifice. The analog noise artist discusses three important albums. Yuko’s picks: Slayer – Reign In Blood Pink Floyd – The Dark Side Of The Moon Monolake – Gobi. The Desert Yuko’s new record, End Of Trilogy, is out now on

Review: Derek Piotr – Making And Then Unmaking

BANDCAMP. “Things I hold onto make me want to change, but the more I change the more I find myself holding on,” sings Piotr during “Invisible Map”, his voice perched on a fingerplucked guitar that curls in like an autumn leaf. While exemplary of the album’s affection for a

Review: Hannya White – No Preview

BANDCAMP. Among my favourite moments on No Preview are when Hannya White starts whistling. That idle spill of high pitch, a kite cut free and released quivering into the updraft – the sound of someone away with themselves, rising above synthesiser presets that crash into eachother like hunks of splayed and

Crucial Listening #73: Chris Corsano + Bill Orcutt

The opposite of politeness, sucky sucky bloodsuckers, ego destruction on the subway. The two improvisatory collaborators discuss their important albums. Chris’ picks: Caroline Kraabel – Now We Are One Two Art Ensemble Of Chicago – Chi-Congo Bill’s picks: Jaynez Cortez And The Firespitters – There It Is Ronald Shannon Jackson – Pulse The

Review: MUSIC RESEARCH STRATEGIES – Eleven Postures

SIGE. Formerly found in the incredible improvisatory duo Black Spirituals alongside Zachary James Watkins, percussionist Marshall Trammell is presented here in different collaborative company: firstly within the rich echoes of the Tribune Tower in Oakland, and secondly alongside visual scores generated through his public art installation during his residency with

Crucial Listening #72: Ka Baird

Snot-caked pants, wild banshee shit, the cadence and emphasis of Robert Ashley. The New York-based composer and multi-instrumentalist discusses three important albums. Ka’s picks: Love – Forever Changes Sonny Sharrock – Black Woman Eliane Radigue – Songs Of Milarepa Ka’s new album, Vivification Exercises I, is out now on RVNG Intl.

Review: Kumi Takahara – See-through

FLAU. On “Nostalgia”, the third track on Takahara’s debut record, two piano-playing hands pass eachother like strangers on the stairs. They appear peripherally aware of one another, yet otherwise swept into their own daydreamt trajectories, as one hand ambles down and the other saunters up. The piece depicts this

Review Machinefabriek – With Drums

BANDCAMP. I can only assume With Drums was an absolute delight to work on. For sure it’s a thrill to listen to. From an artist whose records often suggest a steady-handed sculptural process comes this: a rough bundle of clatter and whim, doubtless assembled with the same care as

Crucial Listening #71: Sarah Feldman

12 seconds of Stockhausen, high-altitude Frank Ocean, the power of SOPHIE. The Vancouver-based composer and music educator discusses three important albums. Sarah’s picks: Karlheinz Stockhausen – Kontakte Frank Ocean – Blonde SOPHIE – Oil Of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides Sarah’s YouTube channel is called Sounds Good – find that here – while her

Review: ex.sses – RELIC

CHERCHE ENCORE. Everything that stretches outward is bent inward and vice versa. The beats on RELIC point aesthetically to the club yet kinetically to nowhere, evading motion altogether as the syncopations multiply to form a flat expanse of cancelled-out emphasis. Whispers are pushed so deep inside the ears as to

Crucial Listening #70: Paul Nataraj

Sitting in a room, Hip Hop Connections, looking for a breadfruit tree. The Blackburn-based artist, radio DJ, podcast producer and lecturer discusses three important albums. Paul’s picks: De La Soul – 3 Feet High And Rising The Congos – Heart Of The Congos Alvin Lucier – I Am Sitting In A Room

Review: Chloe Yu Nong Lin – Pi Sound 琶聲

MONASTRAL. Despite the presence of electronic patches and overdubbing, Pi Sound 琶聲 showcases the interaction between Chloe Yu Nong Lin and her instrument – the pipa, or Chinese lute – first and foremost. Her gestures move between soft strums that mimic petals falling, sudden staccato notes like pinpricks through closed curtains, knocks

Crucial Listening #69: Pisitakun

Releasing your giant, rural music in the city, stealing the cat from the temple. The Bangkok-based artist discusses three important albums. Pisitakun’s picks: Pornsak Songsaeng – สาวจันทร์กั้งโกบ Jing.com – มันส์ ม่วน คัก Buddhist chants – Malai chant / Giant chant Check out Absolute C.O.U.

Review: Aloïs Yang – MLMC Live At Punctum

901 Editions. The visual simplicity of Aloïs Yang’s Micro Loop Macro Cycle installation is, in fact, an introductory provocation to a billion different questions and consequences. The piece consists of a block of ice suspended in the air by rope, dripping intermittently into a glass bowl on the floor

Review: Divide And Dissolve – Gas Lit

WEBSITE. The first few listens to Gas Lit assert, above everything, a stark duality: the earthen heaviness of guitar and drums, whose gestures are like geothermal springs calling upon the most ancient energetic potential, and the bright sprawl of the sky, painted through saxophone loops and reverb that spill like

Review: Rhonda Taylor – AFTERPARTY

BANDCAMP. Recorded during the first days of the “stay at home” order in New Mexico last year, this collection of improvisations for saxophone and voice captures that now-familiar transition state: after the categorical loss of normality, prior to fully comprehending the new mode of existence. This feels like Taylor’s

Crucial Listening #68: Senyawa

Invocations for judgement and destruction, sons of nature, reimagining the music of Indonesia. Wukir Suryadi and Rully Shabara discuss three important albums. Senyawa’s picks: Gugus Gema – S/T Sawung Jabo/Iwan Fals – Dalbo Church Universal And Triumphant, Inc. Featuring Elizabeth Clare Prophet ‎– The Sounds Of American Doomsday Cults Alkisah

Review: Holy Similaun – Ansatz

OOH-sounds. Ansatz is crammed full of fight scenes. Dizzy edits, swords unsheathed, the whoosh of missiles flying wide, grunts of pain, the clunk of metal armour dented by hulking metal cleavers – all backdropped by broken beats that stand like stubborn metal foundations of buildings otherwise ruined. Beyond these explosions of

Review: Jen Kutler – Sonified Physiological Indicators Of Empathy

WEBSITE. While the ultimate source of this record is the sounds of violence, the output often verges on the lush: voices, prepared piano and field recordings entangled and unfurled like clusters of wild flowers. Several stages of translation reside in between. The record was made by playing clips of violence

Review: Mira Martin-Gray – Stick Control For The Air Drummer

FULL SPECTRUM. This album essentially captures the execution of several snare drills from George Lawrence Stone’s 1935 percussion training book Stick Control For The Snare Drummer, described by the author as aiding improvement in “control, speed, flexibility, touch, rhythm, lightness, delicacy, power, endurance, preciseness of execution and muscular coordination”

Crucial Listening #67: Daniel Menche

Battling the beast of boredom, choosing the bloodstream over the live stream, being cooler than Santa Claus. The Portland-based abstract sound musician discusses three important albums. Daniel’s picks: Alvin Lucier – Music On A Long Thin Wire Die Kreuzen – S/T Diamanda Galás – Litanies Of Satan Daniel’s wonderful new

ATTN: Favourites Of 2020

In no particular order, here are 25 records I particularly enjoyed this year. Aho Ssan – Simulacrum KMRU – Peel Laura Luna Castillo – Tuberose Speaker Music – Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry Yves Tumor – Heaven To A Tortured Mind King Rambo Sound – Strange Reality 奇妙な現実 Menzi – Impazamo Atariame – Completeness Pantea – Things BLÓM – Flower Violence

Crucial Listening #66: Laura Luna Castillo

Ethereal spatiality, appropriated memories of home, millennial mythos. The multimedia artist from Mexico discusses three important albums. Laura’s picks: Golden Living Room – Welcome Home Core Of The Coalman – Mystery Odes Bath Consolidated – Narryer Gneiss Terrane Laura’s latest record, Tuberose, is out now on Whited Sepulchre. Listen/buy on

Review: Cecilia Lopez + Wenchi Lazo – BISPONIBLE

BANDCAMP. Everything is fair game. In the absence of a self-censorship that usually mediates the traversal from “thinking” to “doing”, the electronic improvisations of Lopez and Lazo capture very flash of fiery whim: the most clunky keyboard melodies, the most garish phaser sweeps, the sudden leaps in volume, the false

Review: Dagmar Gertot – Os Lacrimale

CYCLIC LAW. Built upon beckoning glossolalia, the songs of Russian performance artist Dagmar Gertot feel as though they’re on the very brink of accruing meaning. She proclaims vowels with the grandeur of someone about to recite poetry, yet she never moves into the formation of words. The instruments (accordion,

Review: Helena Ford – Wir Brauchen Angst. Und Schade

PAN Y ROSAS. Donate to Assata’s Daughters here Spread over an extended duration that conveys the sheer length of time it takes to transition, the two hours of Wir Brauchen Angst. Und Schade dwells entirely between disappearance and emergence. These pieces often fixate on wisps, traces and brittle high

Crucial Listening #65: Ashley Paul

Lockdown dance parties, loosening the Nutcracker’s limbs, finding space to breathe. The songwriter and saxophonist discusses three important albums. Ashley’s picks: Jonathan Richman – I, Jonathan Duke Ellington – The Nutcracker Suite Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society – Mandatory Reality Ashley’s excellent new record, Ray, is out now on

Review: UAN0001

BANDCAMP. Embedded in the repetition of these reduced synthesiser refrains is the insistence to listen again. There’s always more to hear, even within the context of so little. The listener mind snags upon a different rhythmic emphasis after two minutes, flipping the picture sideways; jagged details blunt themselves through

Review: Dakn – too low, too far

Bilna’es بالناقص Resembling a water-logged device attempting to revive itself – whirring, slipping, failing – this debut record from Dakn seems to showcase circuitry rendered audible through damage, drawing attention to those little motors that used to cycle silently inside their casing, all now straining against a system too broken to

Crucial Listening #64: Camila Fuchs

Consolidations of love, breaking fourth walls, strength with machines. Camila de Laborde and Daniel Hermann-Collini discuss their important albums. Camila Fuchs’ picks: Jenny Berger Myhre – Lint Leila – Like Weather Flying Lizards – Fourth Wall The KLF – The White Room Spacemen 3 – Recurring The duo’s new record, Kids Talk Sun, is

Review: Nemeton – Mantra For A Falling Leaf

BANDCAMP. Nemeton notes that this 54-minute piece was composed using a polyrhythmic sequence with a very slow clock. This refers both to the duophonic Moog synthesiser that sweeps and recedes, but also to the silences of various sizes that splay like canyons between the notes. Where the synth travels through

Review: Laura Luna Castillo – Tuberose

WHITED SEPULCHRE. Imagine Tuberose as a mobile hung from the ceiling. The entire structure rotates gently, while the individual branches find their own rhythm, spinning in opposing directions and at disparate speeds, connected and contradictory. There is no singular depiction of mood or time. Instead, the elements – sporadic dots of

Crucial Listening #63: Forest Management

Resonances in empty libraries, unseen Mingus vibing, high school post-rock discoveries. John Daniel discusses three important albums. John’s picks: Charles Mingus – Ken Burns Jazz Do Make Say Think – Goodbye Enemy Airship The Landlord Is Dead Stars Of The Lid – Avec Laudenum Check out the Forest Management website here, and

Review: Lars Rynning + Suren Seneviratne – Magnetism

BLOXHAM TAPES. All profits from this release will be donated to Black Lives Matter. It’s nothing new, but we’re more aware of this fact than ever: collaborating digitally offers the possibility of intimacy, even if it takes on a completely different form. What we lose in being unable

Review: pantea – Things

ACTIVE LISTENERS CLUB. “Magic happens in the space between Listening and the listener, where there is only verbs.” This is taken from the text accompanying Things, whose title is perfect in being a placeholder for possible objects: a recognition of an outline, an entity, yet to be specified. And so

Crucial Listening #62: FRKTL

Beautiful choreography, explorations of cinematic spaces, cassette collections in the back of the photograph. Sarah Badr discusses three important albums. Sarah’s picks: Fairuz – Maarifti Feek Roly Porter – Aftertime Toumani Diabaté + Ballaké Sissoko – New Ancient Strings The latest FRKTL album, Excision After Love Collapses, is available over at Bandcamp. You

Review: Babe, Terror – Horizogon

BANDCAMP. Horizogon feels like standing in a hallway between various open doors, absorbing the sounds of separate lives as a happenstance symphony. A warped vinyl of sombre choral music spills out from one room. Pastoral orchestral tones seep out of another. A jazz group practice tentatively down the hall. Synthesisers

Review: Ryoko Akama – Grey (Gray)

INSUB. In an interview about Grey (Gray), Bonnie Jones refers to her remote collaboration with Rodolphe Loubatière as building “this new kind of surreal space. It’s not the room, it’s not our bodies…it’s actually a kind of hyperspace that is more or less based on a

Review: Kirill – Ah

NEW YORK HAUNTED. All profits from this release go to Support for Belarus. More information here. Three tracks (and a bonus alt mix) of pounding, hissing distorted techno from Belarus. Every sound here has been doubled in size, with beats chafing against the synthesisers and leaving all textures with tattered

Crucial Listening #61: MJ Guider

Banning all cymbals, post-hardcore road trips, low frequency earworms. The New Orleans musician discusses three important albums. Melissa’s picks: Peter Gabriel – 3 (Melt) Unwound – Fake Train Björk – Post The new MJ Guider record, Sour Cherry Bell, is out now via Kranky. Check it out on Bandcamp, and be sure

Review: Miki Yui – Aperio!

HALLOW GROUND. The first track on Aperio! is like rolling something around the palm. Turning it over, feeling the indents and protrusions on every side. Gradually, an everyday object transforms into a miracle of craft through persistent attention alone. A synthesiser surges in and out, splitting into two notes and

Review: Alejandro Morse – Aftermath

DRAGON’S EYE. The surface of Aftermath is crusted and cracked. Rock ruptured by the upward thrust of magma flow. Electronics glow along the fracture lines – synthesised strings, choral pulses – while a thick distortion smothers and presses down. Pocks and protrusions emerge as these vertical forces exploit the weak spots

Crucial Listening #60: Tavishi

The omnipresence of data, Bandcamp soul/sound-searching, goofy classical. The scientist, artist and community organiser discusses three important albums. Sarmistha’s picks: Moor Mother – Analog Fluids Of Sonic Black Holes R. D. Burman – Padosan OST Maria Chavez – Plays Pan Daijing – Lack Check out Tavishi’s music on their Bandcamp or

Review: mHz – sometime after two, somewhere else

leerraum. Described by Mo H. Zareei as “a reflection on living in suspense between two geographies, two time spans, and two selves”, this 33-minute composition is akin to watching a torchlight sweep over a wall in a ceaseless figure of eight. A single synthesiser chord undergoes gentle modulations of tone

Review: Ellen Fullman + Theresa Wong – Harbors

ROOM40. If Fullman’s Long String Instrument can be likened to the sea – splayed drones that glisten and undulate, filling up the entire field of experience – Wong’s cello is a lone entity looking out upon the water, her bowed tones carving through the coastline on a slant, like the

Review: Hamed Mafakheri – Durations

FLAMING PINES. Inspired by his childhood recollection of war while growing up in Tehran, Mafakheri’s Durations is a perfect illustration of how memory can smear the details while retaining every ounce of the original sentiment. Depictions of explosions or passing aircraft are reduced to blurred silhouettes, with echoes conveying

Crucial Listening #59: Only Now (Kush Arora)

Dub reggae masterclass, cacophonous veganism, ambient treasure troves. The musician and producer discusses three important albums (and an honourable mention). Kush’s picks: Skinny Puppy – Too Dark Park Various – Jah Warrior Showcase Volahn – Aq’Ab’Al Honourable mention: Pete Namlook + Jonah Sharp – Alien Community Part 1 + 2 Find Only Now

Review: Saturn And The Sun – The New Age Is Shit

STELLAGE. Some repetitive beats are an incitement to move, whereas others terminate movement entirely. The New Age Is Shit tends to the latter. The album starts in a dead end and only pushes itself further into the wall. Distortion deadens the energy, coating the drum machine in concrete, dragging at

Crucial Listening #58: KMRU

Waves of timelessness, electromagnetic chandelier recordings, Minilogue improvisations. The Nairobi-based sound artist discusses three (well, four) important albums. Joseph’s picks: Ana Roxanne – ~ ~ ~ Chris Watson – El Tren Fantasma Rival Consoles – Persona Honourable mention: Idrissa Soumaoro – Djitoumou The new KMRU record Peel is out now on Editions Mego. KMRU is on

Review: Tomoko Hojo + Rahel Kraft – Shinonome

LINE. So much artistic work is made around the hallucinatory potential of the night, but what about the dawn? Shinonome is a reminder that the emergence into daylight brings with it a uniquely porous consciousness. Just as the sun has yet to rinse away the darkness completely, the listener emerges

Review: PARSA – Musique Grossière

SUPERPANG. Musique Grossière translates as “coarse music”: apt for a record that feels like a 2020 iteration of Cronenbergian horror prosthetics. Synth tones bulge out of computer screens, wet and plastic, smeared and grinned by the refraction of curved glass. Computer artefacts (code errors, whirring computations) are rendered in bloated

Review: Nazanin Noori – FARCE

ENMOSSED. The plot of these two extended sides is as follows: two groups of people argue over a pothole in the road, with the event presented from the perspective of the road and then from the pothole. Whether or not this plot is actually contained within FARCE is by-the-by. The

Crucial Listening #57: J. Zunz

Fearless four-track improvisations, spiritual jazz recurrence, manipulations of passing time. Lorena Quintanilla discusses three important albums. Lorena’s picks: Los Llamarada – Gone Gone Cold Phil Cohran & Legacy – African Skies Éliane Radigue – Trilogie De La Mort The new J. Zunz record, Hibiscus, is out 21st August via Rocket Recordings. Check

Review: Amnertia – Scheiner's Observation

BANDCAMP. Here we have a collection of tracks originally recorded between 2004 and 2012. Some were fully assembled as early as 2007, while others have been pulled out of the archives and assembled only this year. Within these pieces, we have looped voices that re-tread the past onto the present;

Feature: Delete Your Spotify Account

It’s both familiar and thoroughly sinister. In an article that details many of the ways in which major streaming services are crushing musicians – the pitiful revenue allocation, the bias toward superstars at the expense of independent artists, the algorithmic re-enforcement of the music industry’s very worst prejudices – VICE

Review: Pink Room + SEPL – Transition

NOISEFABRIK. It’s not clear what this transition falls between. With the release being recorded by Thierry Arnal and Sophie Jeannin under lockdown, it’s potentially a reflection on our global adjustment to the pandemic, as the pre-virus world shrinks into the rear-view and the world after exists as an

Review: Ai Aso – The Faintest Hint

IDEOLOGIC ORGAN. The voice of Ai Aso hangs on a single vowel, quivering like bird wings adjusting on the wind. Each pluck on her acoustic guitar is framed by the tips of fingers halting notes prematurely, or creaking up the fretboard to prepare for the next chord. Each gesture on

Review: Eve Maret – Stars Aligned

BANDCAMP. The album title is perfect. It’s a great aesthetic fit with the dazzle of Eve Maret’s synthesisers, which glitter like thousands of astral lights during her flights of electronic pop and unravel like comet trails during extended ambient passages. It also suggests a very fragile form of

Review: Atte Elias Kantonen – Studies In Audio Fabrics

GRANNY RECORDS. Studies In Audio Fabrics collates five sound pieces that press into the realm of the tactile, produced using the array of analogue synthesisers housed at Willem Twee Studios in the Netherlands. Listening to the album, it’s arguably easier to conceive of the sensory traversal occurring in the

Crucial Listening #56: Steve Von Till

Volcanic psychedelia, flanger sweep obsessions, monuments in the mountains. The musician, poet and teacher discusses three important albums. Steve’s picks: Pink Floyd – Live At Pompeii African Head Charge – Off The Beaten Track Jóhann Jóhannsson + Yair Elazar Glotman + Tilda Swinton – Last And First Men Head over to Neurot Recordings to

Review: ssabæ – Fractal Archipelago

WABI-SABI TAPES. Tempo is a matter of perspective. Just how the progress of a single day runs concurrent to the arcs of larger, slower transformations, each track on Fractal Archipelago is a zone where all rates of movement can be simultaneously perceived: urgent pulsing beeps, steady plonks of synthesised bells,

Review: Tatsuya Nakatani + Rhonda Taylor – City Of Rocks

FULL SPECTRUM RECORDS. The extended, high-pitched tones of Rhonda Taylor’s saxophone are like hands clasping upward at the sky. Swerving and heat-drunk, she manages to imply the presence of a vast landscape through a vertical wisp of sound – not by filling the space, but by capturing the sense of

Crucial Listening #55: Claire Rousay

Listening to assholes, inner/outer presentations of self, power chords over trap beats. The Texas-based artist discusses three important albums. Claire’s picks: Lil Peep – Come Over When You’re Sober Pt. 1 Sun Kil Moon – Among The Leaves OIivia Block – Karren Head over to Claire’s website for information

Review: Strangerous – Death By Anticipation

BANDCAMP. “Everything needs to change. Everything needs to change.” With each loop of the spoken sample, the sentiment drains out of the statement. Each sound on the opening 17-minute piece is inducted into a tight, manic orbit of endless repeating. The falsetto voices start to pulse like a siren, static

Review: Jiyeon Kim – Long Decay And New Earth

THE TAPEWORM. The two sides of Long Decay And New Earth document the rehearsal of a piece on 28th December 2019 and its performance on the 29th. The source material comes from Jiyeon Kim’s piano mixtape, which was released under her 11 moniker last year. Before even pressing play,

Review: Suren Seneviratne – blue thirty-five

BLUE TAPES. While there’s nothing cryptic about the setup here – a Korg SQ1 sequencer, a circuit-bent Yamaha MU-15 tone generator, a cluster of disrupted MIDI patterns – Suren Seneviratne’s compositions seem to dangle like unfinished sentences, cut short of communicating the entire message. Describing this fleeting release is only

Crucial Listening #54: Lea Bertucci

Excursions into outer jazz, marbles against metal, empty Tokyo streets. The New York composer, performer and sound designer discusses three important albums. Lea’s picks: Charles Mingus – The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady Bernard Parmegiani – De Natura Sonorum Keiji Haino – Black Blues Lea’s latest album Acoustic Shadows is

Review: Aidan Baker – Soil

UTILITY TAPES. Within this tattered quilt of idling guitar loops, crumpled static and starchy interference, no single sound is permitted to dominate. Waste products are processed to pull their inner tonality to the fore, as tuneful as the plucked melodies with which they intermingle. Intention and happenstance are blurred into

Review: Sofía Salvo + Gustavo Obligado + Marcelo von Schultz – MOTOR

NENDODANGO RECORDS. Just as a river is both a static presence on a landscape and an entity of constant flux, MOTOR melds two modes of movement into one. Sax players Sofía Salvo (baritone) and Gustavo Obligado (alto) often work in extended strands of sound – the former excavating moaning overtones from

Review: Inaya Natë – MOSS

BANDCAMP. MOSS is a flashing perimeter. 19 minutes of electronics rendered in a dazzle of alternating colours and lights. Movement and illumination cradling an empty centre. The synthesisers are spatially arranged into a living sphere, stimulated by the pattering rhythm that presses itself upon the air. The shape persists even

Crucial Listening #53: Okkyung Lee

The case for BTS, a complicated relationship to jazz, drunken birthday improvisations. The cellist, composer and improviser discusses three important albums. Okkyung’s picks: Kim Hyun Chul – Vol. 1 Duke Jordan Trio – Flight To Denmark Pieter Wispelwey – Ligeti’s Sonata For Violoncello Solo Okkyung’s latest album Yeo-Neun is out

Review: Conatus – Empty Spaces

BANDCAMP. What is it that binds the instruments on Empty Spaces? Certainly not a common tonality. Delphine Dora’s piano splays like a tenuous constellation of stars, each note like a wry harmonic rebuttal to the one prior, while the contributions of Žils Deless-Vēliņš – forming variously as plucked guitars, hushed

Review: Deep Thoukus – S/T

BANDCAMP. Guitarist Daniel Meyer Grønvold and drummer Kyrre Laastad are barely touching. That’s the beauty of their improvisations as Deep Thoukus. The instruments skim against one another, each a pondskater to the other’s rippled water, making brief and intermittent contact – enough to push away and coast for a

Review: Elnath Project – Feedback Works

WEBSITE. HUMANHOOD RECORDINGS (RELEASED JUNE 3RD). Each pass of the loop is not simply a repetition, but a process of compounding. The object grows in size and intricacy with each cycle. This applies to Alessandro Ciccarelli’s method of routing his mixer output back through the input, through which he

Review: Wojtek Traczyk – Runo

PAWLACZ PERSKI. How exactly has the double bass been prepared for the purposes of Runo? Wojtek Traczyk doesn’t say. I imagine the alterations based on the sound alone, and it’s not a pretty picture: the body of the instrument speared by metal girders and splattered in oil, bleeding

Crucial Listening #52: J.J. Anselmi

Black Sabbath backseat boombox, clearing the room with Melvins, 100 miles of Neurosis. The author of Doomed To Fail: The Incredibly Loud History Of Doom, Sludge And Post-Metal discusses three important albums. J.J.’s picks: Black Sabbath – S/T Melvins – Gluey Porch Treatments Neurosis – Through Silver In Blood J.

Review: Kris Force – Cascade

SILENT RECORDS. Cascade speaks to the strange feeling of presence that clings to mountains when they are seen from afar. They hum, inaudibly, as they loom out of the landscape, still quivering with the same tectonic forces that pressed them into the sky. Authors such as Nan Shepherd have verged

Review: Competition – Repetititive Music

SLIP. Repetition triggers a slow inversion of first impressions. The elegant becomes overwrought; the whim becomes a declarative act. It’s through this process that the majestic opening sentiment on Repetititive Music – a loop of ascending strings, like an ornate mansion staircase – degrades with every repeat. The paint starts to

Review: Amy Reid – Isolated Bliss

ATLANTIC RHYTHMS. Composed when Amy Reid was living on the island of Monhegan off the coast of Maine, the 19 minutes of Isolated Bliss are a bittersweet ode to the futility of escape. With time, the spotless simplicity of an elsewhere – the bright sun, the glittering water – start to accrue

Review: T. Gowdy – Therapy With Colour

CONSTELLATION. The album title plainly describes T. Gowdy’s main interest here, although the music within takes an understated approach to the attainment of therapeutic states. Too often, records that explicitly seek to be meditative leave me feeling like a surgical subject, with all musicality forcefully bent toward the primary

Crucial Listening #51: Aho Ssan

Lost and hopeless, Gaspar Noé colour palettes, ghosts in the city. The Paris-based musician discusses three important albums. Désiré’s picks: Earl Sweatshirt – I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside Roly Porter – The Third Law Burial – Untrue Stream/download Aho Ssan’s Simulacrum over on Bandcamp. He’

Review: Asunción + ihä – Lof

DISEMINACIÓN / MEDIO ORIENTE Recorded live at LOF in Santiago back in August 2019, these two collaborative pieces by Chilean exploratory stalwarts Cristian Sánchez (Asunción) and Ignacio Moreno Flux (ihä) emanate like strange glows nested upon the horizon line. Both synthesiser and guitar are rendered in luminous liquid tones, loosened from

Review: Yasuyuki Uesugi – Blocking Information In My Brain Causes Lethargy

BANDCAMP. Performance, in this case, is simply an echo of its preparation. Once Yasuyuki Uesugi has set the parameters of his equipment, his input is reduced to simply determining the beginnings and ends of these pieces (all of which occur as an abrupt cut, giving each the impression of being

Review: Léa Boudreau – Chaos contrôlé

MIKROCLIMAT. All of the sounds on Chaos contrôlé come from circuit-bent toys, which is fabulous for numerous reasons. For one, it provides a renewed purpose to these bundles of wiring and colourful plastic, rebelling against the consumerist cycle of cheap manufacture, short product lifespan and regular replacement. It also means

Review: Atariame – Completeness

BANDCAMP. Like water running through my fingers, my efforts to hold and examine each melody are futile. No sooner have I latched onto Atariame’s acoustic guitar than it fades out, as if wandering distractedly into the next room over. Sometimes my attempts are disrupted by fogs of electronics and

Crucial Listening #50: Ingrid Plum

Choral jet engines, childhood dictaphones, not giving a fuck. The vocalist, composer and improviser discusses three important albums. Ingrid’s picks: Ruby – Salt Peter Roomful Of Teeth – S/T Tanya Tagaq – Animism You can check out Ingrid’s ongoing project Dulme on her website or over at Bandcamp. Her improvisatory

Review: Sex Funeral – Forgotten, hardly written

BLUE SANCT. Sex Funeral started as the Iowan basement jams between Matthew Crowe and Bob Bucko, Jr., with no particular plans to carry the music out into the open. While they’ve since released a bunch of records and started gigging on the regular, their output hasn’t shaken its

Review: Yiorgis Sakellariou – Nympholepsy

BANDCAMP. The voice of Savina Yannatou babbles and subdivides, spreading rapidly from the centre to the edges, becoming a palpitating flock of sharp inhales and tumbling tongues. One definition of nympholepsy is “divine frenzy”, used by the ancient Greeks describe the state triggered when someone is possessed by the nymphs.

Review: en creux – PHASE

FALT. The electricity is fresh and harsh. Boiling hot and jagged at the edges. PHASE is a documentation of now, here, devoid of mediation, devoid of the corrective measures of overdubbing and re-recording, devoid of softening echoes and abstractive FX chains, devoid of the cooling effect of excessive human touch.

Review: Sebastian Maria – L.L.

BANDCAMP. I wear L.L. like a headband. Sebastian Maria achieves a sound that stretches beyond the horizontal, with synthesisers held taut and curled around the back of my skull. It presses inward, too tight for comfort, with rhythms so immediately internalised that I mistake them for my own pulse.

Review: Saphileaum – Samosi

SOUNDCLOUD. The sweeps of violet and white on the album cover are perfect, given that Samosi conveys the surreal magic of walking through clouds at high altitude. Reality softens under low oxygen, sunlight shatters into its prismic constituents across the mist, while the very act physical ascension is enough to

Crucial Listening #49: Siavash Amini

Monolithian matter, melting Arvo Pärt in a pan, finding the hidden trumpets. The Tehran-based composer discusses three important albums. Siavash’s picks: Keith Jarrett (with Jan Garbarek) – Luminessence Alfred Schnittke – Requiem Kevin Drumm – Sheer Hellish Miasma Keep pace with Siavash’s activities on Twitter. His collaboration with Saåad, titled All

Review: ndr0n – Black

TRUTHTABLE. For a record constructed using algorithmic and generative techniques, the opening minutes of Black are suspiciously straight-forward. An electronic beat skims along in a groovy 4/4, accompanied by a synth drone that sweeps the back wall like a searchlight. Despite the cold monotony of ndr0n’s texture palette,

Review: SWAN MEAT – FLESHWORLD

BANDCAMP. Press play and be yanked – and I mean yanked, hard – down through Megadrive cartridge slots, ascending beyond the strobes and perspiration rain of claustrophobic basement clubs, hurtling into the blur of shopping malls with their garish cocktail of consumerist stimulus, before smashing through skylights to greet flocks of augmented

Review: BIAS – D.A. #001 - A.D. 2020

DUST ARCHIVE. If we can represent our linear understanding of past, present and future as a single horizontal line, the objective of Dust Archive is to chart the diagonals that lead to misremembered histories, alternate realities and prophecies that are never liberated from the cocoon of mere theory. The imprint

Review: KP Transmission – Beatrice

BANDCAMP. It is alleged that, in reality, Dante met Beatrice only twice: once at the age of nine and again when they were both in their late teens. The rest of their encounters took place within his poems and dreams, where these fleeting interactions became extrapolated by the forces of

Review: Angel Archer – S/T

BANDCAMP. This trio understand that the essence of a truly transcendent experience is ambiguity: a material disobedience that ignores the boundaries that confine and corporeally categorise. That’s why the guitars refuse to hold shape and swirl like water instead. It’s why the voices eschew clear communication to slip

Review: shedding – Flocking KF Variations

FLUF. 62 tracks, none of which breach the 30-second mark, designed for shuffle playing. If a linear album is like a roll of parchment, Flocking KF Variations is a rattling sack: each piece a marble randomly extracted from the bag, inspected briefly for the swirls of colour inside, then tossed

Screening: Bait @ Otto Print x Coffee House in Bournemouth, 20/02/2020

ATTN:Magazine presents a screening of Mark Jenkin’s “Bait”, which has been heralded as ‘One of the defining British films of the decade’ (Mark Kermode, The Observer). Venue: Otto Print and Coffee House Tickets £6 (buy in advance – limited capacity): https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/attnmagazine-presents-bait-2019-at-otto-print-x-coffee-house-tickets-90183185335 Trailer: https:

Review: Soft Tissue – S/T

PENULTIMATE PRESS. The sounds are scuttled and scrunched. Kid-friendly keyboards cluster into high-pitched chords, running like teardrop rivers amidst the tickles and taps of insect legs or twisted tape. This is a collaboration negotiated through the very tips of fingertips and caffeine twitches of its players, Feronia Wennborg and Simon

Review: Martina Bertoni – All The Ghosts Are Gone

BANDCAMP. Total change is only possible through the obliteration of the current form. It cannot be appended to the existing entity. Old shapes need to be broken down and wielded as raw source material once more, reduced to a powder of pure possibility, released from the structures that force creation

Review: 11min – snow

GRUENREKORDER. It’s disarming to hear a piano played like that. I mean it as a high compliment, but the melody on opening track “snow” carries the slow, plodding concentration of a grade 1 practice exercise. It’s simple to the point of being tuneless, and perhaps that’s the

Review: Edu Comelles – Still Life

FLUID AUDIO / FACTURE It’s hard to tell whether Still Life is pulling itself apart or bringing itself together. The album is partly a magnet for the worn and estranged – sounds that carry the impression of having trekked 15 miles to arrive here, tattered and glitched, slumping down on shaking

Review: BASE – AETYPML...

SOLIUM. Or to use its full title: and even though you put my life through hell just hand me your sins I will carry them as I still feel pain where you wounded me. Or to break it down further: 18 tracks that lurch forward on aching bones, each slumping

Crucial Listening #48: Cory Allen

Finding the source, German vocoder waltzes, memorising every sprinkle. The musician, author and podcaster discusses three important albums. Cory’s picks: Alice Coltrane – Journey In Satchidananda Atom™ – Liedgut J Dilla – Donuts Cory’s new book is called Now Is The Way: An Unconventional Approach To Modern Mindfulness. You can get

Review: Kindohm – Meme Booth

CONDITIONAL. I’m staring at the DAW as the hours slip by, looping the same rhythmic section over and over again. The perfect synth tone is here somewhere. With each repeat I try a new one. A little more bounce maybe? Perhaps if it were distorted? Less abrasive? Is that

Review: Nathalie Stern – Nerves And Skin

CRUEL NATURE. Each of these songs is a glimpse of eternity. Their incarnation on Nerves And Skin lasts only a few minutes apiece, but their recurrent elements – cyclical harmonies, synthesiser loops – could continue forever, bearing witness to the flux of the landscape around them over the course of months and

Review: Fani Konstantinidou – Winter Trilogy / The Big Fall

MOVING FURNITURE. The bellows collapse. There is an expulsion of air, but then so much more: a low drone that pools like water, with overtones that dance upon the surface as prism light. The thick, fermented aroma of several vanished years, of history and heritage, the scent like a matted

Crucial Listening #47: Jessica Ekomane

Reaching for trance states, peer-to-peer discoveries, the myth of technological neutrality. The Berlin-based artist discusses three important albums. Jessica’s picks: György Ligeti / Pierre-Laurent Aimard – Works For Piano Missy Elliott – Miss E…So Addictive Alva Noto – Xerrox Vol. 2 Jessica’s album Multivocal is out on Important Records. Check out

Paternity

You’ve probably noticed that ATTN has gone quiet over the past month. In case you’re not receiving the newsletter (sign up here if you’re keen), last month my baby boy was born. All of my energy is being poured into fatherhood at the minute. The experience is

Crucial Listening #46: Kyoka

Vocal frequency doppelgängers, selling souls to the devil, kick roll anthems. The Berlin-based producer discusses three important albums. Kyoka’s picks: Frank Bretschneider – EXP Tricky – Maxinquaye Eomac – Bedouin Trax Listen to the fabulous new Lena Andersson record over at the Raster Bandcamp, where you can also find solo releases by

Review: J. Pavone String Ensemble – Brick And Mortar

BANDCAMP. We open on the ocean. The entire sensory field is richly smacked by rippling blue. Just as the mood of the water can be reinterpreted if the observer simply adjusts the point of focus – locking upon the menace of a rolling wave, then shifting to the placidity of tiny

Event: Good Weather For An Airstrike + Minus Pilots + Upward @ OTTO Print x Coffee House in Bournemouth, 14/11/2019

ATTN:Magazine and Champion Version present an evening of graceful dispersal. FACEBOOK EVENT. GOOD WEATHER FOR AN AIRSTRIKE The solo project of Tom Honey. Smeared expanses and colourful uplift. MINUS PILOTS Matt Pittori (percussion) and Adam Barringer (bass). Streams of cinema and tilted time. UPWARD Jack Chuter’s solo project.

Review: Mára – Here Behold Your Own

SIGE. There is a clear divide. Before and after. Much of the material on Here Behold Your Own captures the time prior to the birth of Faith Coloccia’s son, with its development and release tracking her journey into motherhood. The record itself is split into two sections – the eight

Crucial Listening #45: Pharmakon

Mischievous imps, spirit animals of the ethos, uncomfortable trance states. The New York noise musician talks about three important albums. Margaret’s picks: The Stooges – Fun House SPK – Auto Da Fe Whitehouse – Bird Seed The new Pharmakon album is titled Devour. Head over to Sacred Bones or the Pharmakon Bandcamp

Review: Aseptic Stir – Year Of Detachment

KLAMMKLANG. It’s impossible to perceive the entirety of the human body at once, whether referring to one’s own body or the body of another. Observing the body from the front means that the back is hidden from view. To hold someone’s hand is not to feel the

Review: Chow Mwng – Bo Rane

BEARTOWN RECORDS. Bo Rane is best described as a leakage. It’s not cathartic or antagonistic. These improvisations for acoustic guitar, voice and other have a dribbling quality to them, like a viscous liquid running out of the nostrils and bubbling at the corners of the mouth. This is what

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 26 (01/09/2019)

Host Jack Chuter asks musicians to share a story about a profound live music experience, from a Daft Punk stadium spectacular to a 30-hour experimental music marathon. BONUS: Here’s Belly Full Of Stars talking about a profound live music experience: TRACKLIST: Territorial Gobbing – Machine Learning To Scowl – 2019 Sam

Review: Hüma Utku – Gnosis

KARLRECORDS. What is contained within the thick fog of Gnosis? At points I can discern traces of chanting voices, or the hiss of winds rushing through stone tunnels, or the echoes of a lost music. They congeal in the dark, loitering like a residue of the ancient past, smothering space

Crucial Listening #44: Emil Amos (Holy Sons, Grails, Om)

Quadrophonic 8-track playback in a 1982 pimped-out trailer. The musician and podcast creator discusses three important albums. Emils picks: Joni Mitchell – Court And Spark Bread – The Best Of Bread Pavement – Watery, Domestic Check out the Holy Sons website and Bandcamp to keep in the know on Emil’s various happenings,

Review: Bureau Berlin – High-Time Seizure

SOUNDS ET AL. Tipped out, tumbling down: chunks of rock, percussion in tatters, miscellaneous household trash, colourful ribbons of saxophone. High-Time Seizure is an avalanche of whatever happens to be at hand, hurling drum samples after frenzied bass improvisations, kicking bells and cymbals over the edge, terrified at the prospect

Review: Belly Full Of Stars – brokendatapool

LISTEN. brokendatapool is a support group for the sonically undesirable: a place of congregation for sounds that have been wounded by the world’s crueller tendencies. Broken office furniture is recast as an idiosyncratic timekeeper. The rubble of processed piano motifs is scattered like fragrant powder. There’s also a

Review: Six Microphones – S/T

LINE. The premise is incredibly elegant: six microphones are pointed at a set of loudspeakers, while an algorithm adjusts the amplitude of the microphones over time. Hums of feedback thicken in the air, negotiate a constellation between themselves, then reform as dictated by the change in microphone sensitivity. No players

Ongoing: R. Elizabeth – Every And All We Voyage On

NIGHT SCHOOL. INDEX 1: 14 August 2019 1: 14 August 2019 Everything becomes absurd over time. With enough repeats, the most beautiful melody is drained to a husk of arbitrary angles and surfaces. Paradoxically, incidental details can also accrue profound weight when placed on infinite loop. Accidents become rituals. On

Crucial Listening #43: Oren Ambarchi

Pigs in shit, breezy French vibes, humorous absurdity. The Australian composer and multi-instrumentalist discusses three important albums. Oren’s picks: Pat Metheny – Offramp Annette Peacock – X-Dreams Godley & Creme – Freeze Frame Oren’s latest solo record, titled Simian Angel, is out now via Editions Mego. His website is over here

Ongoing: Mariam Rezaei – BLUD

FRACTAL MEAT CUTS. INDEX: 1: 03 August 2019 2: 08 August 2019 1: 03 August 2019 There are days when life conspires against you. The car refuses to start. An absent-minded colleague knocks their tea over your laptop. You gouge a hole in your t-shirt during an attempt to shuffle

Ongoing: Enablers – Zones

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 10 July 2019 2: 17 July 2019 3: 01 August 2019 4: 08 August 2019 Enablers have always had moments where raw force seems to overpower the outline of their music. Precision falters as they collectively play host to a sudden overcharge, subsumed by the voltage of

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 25 (04/08/2019)

In a panoramic examination of how single artistic objects can shape the trajectory of life, Jack Chuter asks artists to discuss one book or film that has a profound impact on them. Tracklist: Mariam Rezaei – 9 DARTED LINE – 2019 Gravespit – Queen Anne’s Lace – 2019 Nour Mobarak – Neurodiversity – 2019 Cassie

Ongoing: E-Saggila – My World My Way

SOUNDCLOUD. INDEX: 1: 17 July 2019 2: 31 July 2019 1: 17 July 2019 Smash a glass or crush a piece of fruit, and the debris explodes far beyond the object. Shards and juices form a ragged halo over the surrounding surfaces. This type of impact is rife throughout My

Crucial Listening #42: Derek Piotr

Instant messenger trades, high fives with Björk, keeping the windows up. The Poland-born, New England-based composer and producer discusses three important albums. Derek’s picks: St Vincent – Actor Björk – Medúlla AGF – Head Slash Bauch Derek Piotr’s new album, titled Avia, is released on August 2nd. Find out more information

Everything Changed: A Catalogue Of Important Listening Experiences

If you’ve heard the ATTN podcast Crucial Listening, you’ll be familiar with my interest in important listening experiences. There have been a number of occasions when I’ve heard an album that has triggered, or accompanied, a profound change in the course of my life. Perhaps it rebuilt

Crucial Listening #41: Sly & The Family Drone

Putting on shows for weird bands, saxophone machines, mad distorted riffs. Tireless noisemaker Matt Cargill discusses three important albums. Matt’s picks: This Heat – Deceit Mindflayer – Take Your Skin Off Ultralyd – Chromosome Gun The excellent new album by Sly & The Family Drone, titled Gentle Persuaders, is out now. Head

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 24 (07/07/2019)

Host Jack Chuter presents music and contemplations by exploratory musicians from all across the globe. This month, the theme is imprint: artists talk about a place, person or event that influences the way they think about working with sound. Tracklist: Lilien Rosarian – Good Morning Oak Tree – 2019 Yudan Zou – A

Crucial Listening #40: Helm

Fish stock concrète, groovebox epiphanies, Kerrang cover-mounts. The London-based experimental musician discusses three important records. Luke’s picks: Pet Shop Boys – Discography: The Complete Singles Collection Napalm Death – Scum Adam Bohman – Music And Words The magnificent new Helm record, titled Chemical Flowers, is out now on PAN. Check it out

Ongoing: Dalot – ΛΗΤΩ (Leto)

TIME RELEASED SOUND. INDEX 1: 30 May 2019 2: 06 June 2019 3: 11 June 2019 4: 26 June 2019 1: 30 May 2019 /content/images/wordpress/2019/05/ZOOM0276.mp3 2: 06 June 2019 The past is irretrievable. If I revisit a place that was important to me during

Ongoing: NUM – False Awakening

PAST INSIDE THE PRESENT. INDEX: 1: 23 May 2019 2: 29 May 2019 3: 06 June 2019 4: 26 June 2019 1:23 May 2019 We begin with the voice spilling out from the throat. As a mere wisp to begin with, like a candle flame. Gradually it fans outward,

Ongoing: Manja Ristić – The Black Isle

FLAG DAY RECORDINGS. INDEX: 1: 12 June 2019 2: 15 June 2019 1: 12 June 2019 Initially I am drawn to four presences. The first, and most prominent, is the landscape. The waves collapsing into the rock. Birdsong forming archways overhead. The clink and chatter of a restaurant. Children playing.

Crucial Listening #39: Faith Coloccia

Brilliant tabernacles, drugs without drugs, teenaged gurus. The artist, composer and graphic designer discusses three important albums. Faith’s picks: Swans – Soundtracks For The Blind Einstürzende Neubauten – Zeichnungen Des Patienten O.T. Earth – Hibernaculum Head over the Faith’s blog for updates on her work, along with links to her

Ongoing: dTHEd – Hyperbeatz vol. 1

BORING MACHINES. INDEX: 1: 08 May 2019 2: 15 May 2019 3: 22 May 2019 4: 09 June 2019 1: 08 May 2019 This music resonates with me, but not on the level of conscious comprehension. The rhythms abide by a stuttering logic that transcends my own computational prowess, adherent

Crucial Listening #38: Graham Dunning

Vinyl destruction, phony voices, dancing in the attic. The musician, artist and mechanical techno assembler discusses three important albums. Graham’s picks: Milan Knizak – Broken Music A Guy Called Gerald – Attic Attack [1986 – 1988] Helena Celle – If I Can’t Handle Me At My Best, Then You Don’t Deserve

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 23 (02/06/2019)

A selection of new exploratory music, accompanied by the artists talking about how they knew their track was completed. TRACKLIST Enablers – Bill, In Consideration – 2019 p.vivax – Kettle – 2019 Mira Martin-Gray – Kissing Infinity – 2019 Furchick – Pretty Cricket – 2019 Rosa Anschütz – Rigid – 2019 Dalot – Beirut (Dust Fall) – 2019 Tsone – A

Crucial Listening #37: Earth

Breathless openings, reassembled DNA, talking through the guitar. The Seattle-based duo talk about three important albums. Dylan’s pick: King Crimson – Starless And Bible Black Adrienne’s pick: Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds – Abattoir Blues / The Lyre Of Orpheus Dylan’s pick: Jimi Hendrix – Band Of Gypsys Earth’s

Ongoing: Burning Axis – S/T

HOMINID SOUNDS. INDEX: 1: 11 April 2019 2: 25 April 2019 3: 10 May 2019 4: 16 May 2019 1: 11 April 2019 This album is sea sickness. A constant, giddy tilting. The summoning of mirage through weakness. The inner, churning weight of feeling utterly stranded, fated to sway and

Ongoing: Het Interstedelijk Harmoniumverbond – S/T

KRAAK. INDEX 1: 18 April 2019 2: 27 April 2019 3: 10 May 2019 4: 16 May 2019 1: 18 April 2019 Like rakes dragged through soil, the four harmoniums carve deep grooves through the air. Their paths intersect and rippling lattices are formed, with drones negotiating the division of

Crucial Listening #36: Chaines

Fez spoilers, triphop Americana, musings on completionism. The composer and multi-instrumentalist talks about three important albums. Cee’s picks: Darren Korb – Bastion OST Disasterpeace – Fez OST Tomáš Dvořák – Machinarium OST Connect with Cee via Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, and support their work on Patreon. Be sure to check out their

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 22 (05/05/2019)

Host Jack Chuter asks musicians to describe the environment in which they make their music: the physical spaces, equipment and ritualised behaviours that accompany the act of creating sound. TRACKLIST: Chris Otchy – Minimum Feed Lilt Elision – Vicente Lavie – Luvbirdz NacHut Report – Międzyczas Corey Fuller – Hymn For The Broken Phantoms

Crucial Listening #35: Sarah Hennies

Discovering secret treasure, making 183 of something, songs of gender transition. The percussionist and composer discusses three important albums. Sarah's picks: 1) Baudouin Oosterlynck – 1975-1978 2) Maher Shalal Hash Baz – Return Visit To Rock Mass 3) Antony And The Johnsons – I Am A Bird Now Head over to

Feature: The Gravity Of Time – Listening To Long Music

The sensation is akin to standing at the top of a mountain and looking out. The ecstatic failure of trying to ingest the sheer expanse of the earth below and knowing that it unravels far beyond what I can see. Or conversely, standing at the foot of a mountain and

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 21 (07/04/2019)

ATTN’s Jack Chuter presents a selection of sonic curiosities and invites each of the artists featured to talk about the experience of recording one particular instrument. Expect happy accidents with piles of clothes, last chances with borrowed lutes and erased presets for bass-heavy harmonisers. Tracklist: Amma Ateria – Vielä Aymeric

Crucial Listening #34: Patrick Shiroishi

Coltrane ‘n’ whisky, Magma in real time, pure multiphonics. The LA-based composer/saxophonist discusses three important albums. Patrick’s picks: 1) John Coltrane – Interstellar Space 2) Magma – K.A. 3) Little Women – Throat You can keep up to speed with Patrick over on his official website or on Bandcamp. Crucial

Ongoing: Shiva Feshareki – New Forms

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 07 February 2019 2: 16 February 2019 3: 07 March 2019 4: 07 April 2019 1: 07 February 2019 Don’t be fooled. Sound is not a fluid running through your fingers. It’s actually a putty. You can clasp it, press your palms into the cold

Ongoing: Liz Meredith – Repro

SPLEENCOFFIN. INDEX: 01: 13 March 2019 02: 21 March 2019 03: 07 April 2019 01: 13 March 2019 We open with a piece that resembles an old film loop shivering upon a projector screen. Greyscale light and splattered interference. The viola heaves like the sea, the long harmony cracked by

Ongoing: Nkisi – 7 Directions

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 24 January 2019 2: 31 January 2019 3: 07 March 2019 4: 30 March 2019 1: 24 January 2019 In the mind’s eye, 7 Directions is a gigantic wheel. It spins at such a pace that a familiar optical illusion starts to take place: a much

Crucial Listening #33: Jeff Emtman (Here Be Monsters)

Fluffernutters, theremins on the chase, absent plus-ones. The artist and podcaster discusses three important albums. Jeff’s picks: 1) Malibu Ken – S/T 2) The Knife – Shaken-Up Versions 3) Noname – Telefone Check out Jeff’s incredible podcast, Here Be Monsters, over here (or subscribe via your podcast app). His personal

Ongoing: Forest Management – Passageways

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 20 February 2019 2: 07 March 2019 3: 21 March 2019 1: 20 February 2019 It’s difficult to convey the significance of home. These places are often unremarkable when reduced to space and material, indistinguishable from the buildings that stand on either side. Plain to the

Crucial Listening #32: Khyam Allami

Unprecedented Oud, the phenomenal character of the Čahārgāh, blending tradition and technology. The Iraqi multi-instrumentalist discusses three important albums. Khyam’s picks: 1) Jamil Bashir – Ud traditionelle en Iraq – évocations modales – Arabesques 4 2) Mohammad Reza Shajarian – Dastan 3) Wendy Carlos – Beauty In The Beast Keep up to speed with

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 20 (03/03/2019)

A playlist accompanied by “serving suggestions”: instructions for optimal environments and circumstances for listening to each piece, including contributions from the artists themselves. Narrated, as always, from the farmlands of Throop in Dorset. TRACKLIST: Ian Fleming – Desolate Pinprick In A World Of White – 2019 Julia Reidy – Imminently – 2018 Demen – Illdrop

Crucial Listening #31: Monika Khot (Nordra, Zen Mother)

Dried up drones, wounded song, psycho experimentation. The Seattle-based musician discusses three important albums. Monika’s picks: 1) Jocelyn Pook – Flood 2) Swans – The Great Annihilator 3) Igor Wakhevitch – Docteur Faust Be sure to check out Nordra on Bandcamp or via her official website. Same with Zen Mother – Bandcamp or

Crucial Listening #30: Kate Carr

Damaged format, barcode translations, exploring the Fens. The London-based sound artist talks about three important albums. Kate’s picks: 1) Oval – 94diskont. 2) Ryoji Ikeda – Dataplex 3) Simon Scott – Below Sea Level You can check out Kate’s music over at Bandcamp or find out more on her website. Crucial

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 19 (03/02/2019)

Double-gravity drunkenness, stomach electricity and other such states of human experience, narrated from the farmlands of Throop in Dorset. TRACKLIST: Ben Shemie – I Know You Feel The Same – 2019 Berlau – Bagatela 1 – 2018 Helena Gough – Tephra – 2010 Richard Moult – Part I (from Celestial King For A Year) – 2011 Heavy Lifting

Ongoing: Louise Vind Nielsen – This Tape Machine Destroys Time n.11

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 03 January 2019 2: 13 January 2019 3: 31 January 2019 1: 03 January 2019 This release is the 11th instalment in a year-long, 12-part series on Copenhagen’s MAGIA label, with various artists all responding to a question posed by Ignacio Córdoba: “what would happen if

Crucial Listening #29: Alan Courtis

Pre-hispanic traditions, classical guitar genius, major label rebellion. The Argentinean musician discusses three important albums. Alan’s picks: 1) V/A – Musica de los Aborigenes (music by Native Indegenous Tribes from Argentina) 2) Agustín Barrios– The Complete Guitar Recordings 3) Luis Alberto Spinetta – Spinettalandia y sus amigos You can check

Ongoing: Me, Claudius – Good Diz, Bad Bird

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 05 December 2018 2: 10 December 2018 3: 24 December 2018 4: 16 January 2019 1: 05 December 2018 These strange constructions toddle away from me, doubling-back on themselves to throw doubt upon their ultimate direction, occasionally flashing me a wry and knowing glance as I sit,

Ongoing: Tendencyitis – AA0020

INDEX: 1: 13 January 2019 2: 16 January 2019 1: 13 January 2019 Flicked spittle, scrunched aluminium foil, choirs of ripped fabric, the squeaks of shuffling polystyrene blocks. I pull all of these textures out of the landfill of mixer feedback, and then mutter to myself about how it’s

Crucial Listening #28: Bjarni Gunnarsson

Energetic phenomena, Romanian spectral music, hidden pulsations. The Icelandic composer talks about three important albums. Bjarni’s picks: 1) Seefeel – Succour 2) Ana-Maria Avram + Iancu Dumitrescu ‎– Soleil Explosant 3) Helena Gough – Mikroklimata Bjarni’s official website is here. Lueur is out now on Tartaruga. Crucial Listening is also available as

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 18 (06/01/2019)

Revellers in flowing fabric. Drinking shots at the velodrome. A thematic playlist centred on parties of a different kind, narrated from the farmlands of Throop, Dorset. TRACKLIST: Jiboia – Diatesseron – 2018 Mazut – I Am Become Death, The Destroyer Of Worlds – 2018 Moon Relay – #`´`´`´/ – 2018 Spartak – On Conditions – 2014 Orgue Agnès – Le

Feature: Review of 2018

I begin my review of 2018 with a lyric taken from a song released in 2015 (after all, it’s worth noting in these end-of-year articles that recency isn’t a prerequisite to present pertinence). The line comes partway through “Stonemilker” by Björk, her sentiment buoyed by the ricochet of

Ongoing: Sofheso – Archive

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 14 November 2018 2: 22 November 2018 3: 05 December 2018 4: 11 December 2018 1: 14 November 2018 2.04gb zipped. 28 wav files. 137 minutes of audio. Thousands of tiny sonic fragments, trimmed and enhanced and repeated, stacked into precarious pillars and cobbled into crooked

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 17 (02/12/2018)

Music to the touch. Soundscapes to ramble through. Two thematic playlists narrated from the farmlands of Throop, Dorset. TEXTURE: Sofheso – 0109 (from Archive) – 2018 Fleshlicker – Scratching – 2018 Hesitation – Etruscan Rooking – 2018 Masayuki Imanishi – 8 (from Worn Tape) – 2018 Andrea Taeggi – Gylany – 2018 Audrey Chen – Heavy – 2018 Ipek Gorgun – Seneca – 2018

Ongoing: Sumac – Love In Shadow

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 22 August 2018 2: 29 August 2018 3: 12 September 2018 4: 22 November 2018 1: 22 August 2018 The expansion of time offers more than just the expansion of terrain. Within the vague realm of “heavy music”, we readily conflate long duration with the vast: bigger

Ongoing: Moon Relay – IMI

HUBRO. INDEX: 1: 04 October 2018 2: 11 October 2018 3: 25 October 2018 4: 14 November 2018 1: 04 October 2018 I saviour my first experience to a new Moon Relay record. Because this music is rife with misdirection, the initial attempt to comprehend the record is messy – characterised

Ongoing: Audrey Chen – Runt Vigor

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 6 September 2018 2: 12 September 2018 3: 19 September 2018 4: 06 November 2018 1: 6 September 2018 An illusion is at work. I lose the ability to distinguish between the inside and the outside. Sometimes the microphone is directly inside Audrey Chen’s mouth, picking

Ongoing: Katharina Ernst – Extrametric

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 25 October 2018 2: 30 October 2018 3: 06 November 2018 1: 25 October 2018 Ding-ding, ding-ding, ding-ding, ding-ding. A blunt metallic chime runs throughout the first track on Extrametric. Even as the surrounding landscape utterly transforms, the chime persists – unphased by the changing direction of gravity’

Ongoing: Fleshlicker – S/T

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 13 September 2018 2: 19 September 2018 3: 04 October 2018 4: 30 October 2018 1: 13 September 2018 Offloading machine gun fire into a manhole cover. Microphone damaged by bullet deflection. Screams from adjacent cells, echoing in through the air vent grill. Three minutes and I

Ongoing: Laurel Halo – Raw Silk Uncut Wood

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 4 August 2018 2: 10 August 2018 3: 15 August 2018 4: 23 August 2018 5: 25 October 2018 1: 4 August 2018 In these early stages, my most resonant listening experiences of Raw Silk Uncut Wood have been outside. Ambling through the town centre, with the

Feature: Peering Into Eternity – Thoughts On The Fadeout

Meshuggah were my favourite band throughout my teens. I’d already developed a love of metal music from the age of 13, but the addition of Meshuggah’s rhythmic complexity – unusual time signatures placed directly alongside a straight 4/4 beat – resulted in the perfect combination for me. Guttural impact

Ongoing: Vanessa Tomlinson – The Space Inside

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 20 September 2018 2: 26 September 2018 3: 04 October 2018 1: 20 September 2018 Some harmonics will only emerge if the player is patient and gentle, waiting to be unlocked by a very precise gesture. Other harmonics are present instantly but reside at the deepest depths

Feature: Podcasts On Sound And Listening

Podcasts are my other love. As well as ATTN’s own Crucial Listening podcast, you may know that I co-host a podcast called Episode Party: a biweekly show where Freddie Harrison and I invite guests to swap podcast recommendations with us. Since we started, my podcast consumption has ramped up

Ongoing: Black Spirituals – Black Access/Black Axes

BANDCAMP. INDEX: 1: 15 August 2018 2: 16 August 2018 3: 23 August 2018 4: 5 September 2018 1: 15 August 2018 I struggle to think of this as the final Black Spirituals album as a duo, given that I’ve always visualised their music as eschewing the notion of

Feature: Music Without Edges – Thoughts On Digital Listening

If I leave the default settings on Spotify untouched, the music will play forever. Playlist endings become doorways into algorithmic autopilot, and I’m swept into a stream of recommended tracks. Activate the five-second crossfade and the silences disappear completely. Sound is ceaseless. Endings mingle with beginnings. Music loses its

Slowing Down / Starting Again

At some point, ATTN got away from me. I was writing about too much music, and the site started to outpace the optimal conditions for deep listening. At the time, I didn’t even realise it was happening. After all, the problem is self-affirming; as well as denying myself the

Crucial Listening #27: Christina Vantzou

Sneaking into the galaxy bar, bubbles in the park, 69 occurrences of time. The Brussels-based composer talks about three important albums. Christina’s picks: 1) Laurie Spiegel – The Expanding Universe 2) Vangelis – Opéra Sauvage 3) Hiroshi Yoshimura – Green Read more about Christina and her music over on her website and

Crucial Listening #26: Ziúr

Raw character, true divas, emergency dentistry. The Berlin-based producer and DJ discusses three important albums. Ziúr’s picks: 1) Still – I 2) Grace Jones – Nightclubbing 3) TV On The Radio – Young Liars Keep up with Ziúr on Facebook, Bandcamp, Twitter, Soundcloud and Instagram. Crucial Listening is also available as a

Interview: Gel

While it’s possible to draw lines of connection between the music of Copenhagen’s Karis Zidore and her work as a dancer – the soft sense of timing, the spontaneous tumbles of reflex – one can also see how these pieces explore the opportunities of immaterial presence. By processing micro-sampled extracts

Crucial Listening #25: Kelly Jayne Jones

Electroacoustic viscera, recurrent symbolism, crying through synthesis. The Manchester-based artist discusses three important albums. Kelly’s picks: 1) Tigran Mansuryan – The Color Of Pomegranates OST 2) Luciano Berio + Cathy Berberian – Visage 3) Arca – S/T Check out the dates for Kelly’s collaboration with Matana Roberts over at Outlands, and

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 16 (30/04/18)

The final ATTN radio show. Thank you for listening. TRACKLIST 1. Soft Blade – Pesnya Volchonka 2. memorygarden禅 – ブルーsky 3. Mech – Sub-Clouds 4. Kotra – The Capital Of Death–Contorted City 5. Chaines – Knockturning 6. Laura Steenberge – Rip Van Winkle 7. Gel – Down 8. Lauren Tosswill – Shape Note 9. OOAME – Bagatelle 10.

Crucial Listening #24: Matana Roberts

Vitamins for the brain, learning from the masters, adventures in language. The composer and saxophonist discusses three important albums. Matana’s picks: 1) Hannah Marcus – Desert Farmers 2) Karlheinz Stockhausen – Momente 3) Derek Bailey + Joëlle Léandre – No Waiting Find out more about the Outlands tour over here, and keep up

Crucial Listening #23: Massimo Pupillo (Zu, URUK)

Coconut hooves, grotesque distorted shapes, the healing force of the universe. The bass player and composer discusses his important albums. Massimo’s picks: 1) Arvo Pärt – Tabula Rasa 2) Coil – Horse Rotorvator 3) Current 93 – Imperium 4) Einstürzende Neubauten – Halber Mensch Massimo Pupillo is on Facebook, while URUK can be

Interview: Philip Sulidae

There’s no sense in discussing field recording in terms of listening and passivity. What I love about Ramshead – the latest album by Australian sound artist Philip Sulidae – is the active role of its recordist. For one, Philip is an audible presence amidst these recordings of Australia’s Kosciuszko National

Interview: Lotto

At a certain point, the music of Lotto takes the wheel. The players are no longer the instigators. The idea gains autonomy through repetition, responding to the resonances of the room as it grows, sending subliminal commands back to the trio of guitar (Łukasz Rychlicki), bass (Mike Majkowski) and drums

Review: Laura Steenberge – Harmonica Fables

The adjustments are miniscule. A redirection of the breath; a slight constriction of the vocal cords. Steenberge tilts back and forth between harmonica and humming, often blending the two into a stream of harmonies, as vocal frequencies press against the rasp of blown notes. Her inward breaths are whole and

Crucial Listening #22: Six Organs Of Admittance

Lobster spaceships, unleashing the beast, flying capos. Ben Chasny talks about three albums that informed his Hexadic System. Ben’s picks: 1) Khanate – Things Viral 2) Fushitsusha – The Caution Appears 3) Morton Feldman – Triadic Memories For more on Six Organs On Admittance, head over to the official website or the

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 15 (27/03/2018)

Monique Recknagel of Berlin-based label Sonic Pieces discusses working with fabric and having intimate collaborative conversations. Also: a selection of pieces centred on the piano. Keep up to date with Sonic Pieces on Bandcamp and Facebook. TRACKLIST PART 1: PIANO 1. Left Hand Cuts Off The Right – II (from Desired

Interview: My Cat Is An Alien

Given that My Cat Is An Alien’s output instigates the abandon of our conventional space-time, it’s somewhat appropriate that this interview is over a year in the making. In fact, the below discussion manifests as a beautiful chronological zig-zag: starting with the brothers’ collaboration with French guitarist Jean-Marc

Review: Delphine Dora + Sophie Cooper – Divine Ekstasys

Sound as smoke; an effortless rising, expanding and swirling. Instruments melt into eachother as they billow into the air. Falsetto voices curl around the soft streams of trombone, or sink into organ drones like a body collapsing into fabric. There is no tension in this collaboration. No restraint, no compromise.

Review: Sidi Touré – Toubalbero

It’s a miracle that any of these songs come to an end. The momentum of Sidi Touré is circular and frictionless, with intricate guitars whirling around syncopated beats, and bass picking the exact movements to apply and relieve weight. The songs spin like pinwheels on a cool breeze that

Interview: Lauren Tosswill

There is a switch on Lauren Tosswill’s microphone. On/off. This binary transition has become synonymous with the ease of doing something (i.e. “…with a simple flick of the switch”), but Tosswill’s music is all about the forces that accumulate on either side of that divide. There

Review: Kate Carr – I Ended Out Moving To Brixton

As obvious as it sounds, I am struck by the fact that Kate Carr exists within her music. I hear the boundary between her edges and the space around her; a phantom emptiness in the centre of the stereo frame that traces the outline of her head. After all, to

Review: Loose-y Crunchè – Unruly Top

There are times when Unruly Top hits an impasse. I’m thinking of the latter half of “Funk Table”, which is a gradual haemorrhaging of energy and rhythmic flair – running the groove flat through repetition, until those semi-automatic handclaps and blistered synth chords seem to persist because they can’t

Review: Trrmà – S/T

The drums on this record are incredibly rich. The kit spreads all around the stereo frame, arranged in a semi-circle of cymbals and toms and snares, all of different timbres and tunings; some bouncing and reverberant in tone, others kept to a taut crack, all of them cradled in the

Crucial Listening #21: Mark Fell

Synth jams in the coal shed, collective escape, drum machine rebellion. The Sheffield-based artist discusses three important albums. Mark’s picks: 1) African Head Charge – Off The Beaten Track 2) Alternative TV – Vibing Up The Senile Man (Part One) 3) Unique 3 – Jus’ Unique Keep up to speed with Mark’

Interview: Chaines

The King is the debut full-length from Cee Haines (aka Chaines), and it’s constantly questioning itself. The dimensions of space contract and expand in an organic, ventricular way; time loiters and becomes stagnant, or sprints forth with urgency; identity changes under observation, with the voice shifting in pitch and

Review: Slobodan Kajkut – DARKROOM

DARKROOM begins with the sound of circulating air. Winds probing the corners of barren corridors. It’s the sort of hiss that can incite hallucinations if one dwells within it for too long: traces of human voice, the rasp of passing traffic. Before too long I realise that I am

Review: Soft Blade – Zerkalo

I listen to Zerkalo as a set of digital files, although the aesthetic is 100% weathered tape. These electronic rhythms sound like they’re throbbing upward through a layer of mud. The synthesisers and cymbals feel blunted and unsteady. There is a distance between Zerkalo and I; both the distance

Interview: Siavash Amini + Matt Finney

When I contemplate the collaboration between vocalist Matt Finney and Siavash Amini, I think about edges. Beginnings and endings. On the surface, it seems easy to set the boundaries of their individual contributions. Finney’s words are contained to a brief, one-minute cluster near the beginning of each piece. Amini’

Review: Yair Etziony – Deliverance

Central to this album is the idea that deliverance can find you anywhere, at any time. In unglamorous locations. Amidst the flow of other events and thoughts. It’s like a chemical output, produced when all of the elements of life fall serendipitously into a very particular constellation. On Etziony’

Review: Sharon Gal – Delicious Fish

The thread of the voice can lead back to either the body or the spirit. On Sharon Gal’s “Etude For Three Voices V”, the thread forks and leads to both simultaneously, as the composition captures both the falter of human expression and the immaculate transcendence of congregative choral song.

Interview: Saphy Vong (Chinabot, LAFIDKI)

Chinabot is a platform and collective created to change the dialogue surrounding Asian music, founded by Cambodian-born/London-based artist Saphy Vong. The platform put out three releases in 2017 which, through both the spectacular colours of the artwork and the ecstatic energy of the music within, channelled Chinabot’s celebration

Review: Eric Chenaux – Slowly Paradise

These songs are honey. A sweet, continuous oozing across an uneven surface. All shapes are vague, witnessed through the soft focus of relaxation and summer lethargy, bulging asymmetrically as they outwardly pool. The guitar chords are dipped in dissonances that complicate their sentiment – streaks of hope across melancholy, drops of

Crucial Listening #20: Julia Wolfe

Glacial orchestras, floaty head voices, critique among friends. The New York composer discusses three important albums. Julia’s picks: 1) John Luther Adams – Become Ocean 2) Caroline Shaw – Partita For 8 Voices 3) David Lang – Little Match Girl Passion Keep up to date with Julia Wolfe on her website. Tones,

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 14 (27/02/18)

Stephen McEvoy of the FLUF label discusses self-restraint, tinnitus and time in reverse. Also: a playlist of grubby guitars. You can also find Stephen’s Tuuun project over at tuuun.org or on Twitter. His project based on resynthesised tinnitus sounds, titled Twenty Ongoing Tones, is up on Bandcamp here.

Review: Sam Price – Rubicon

There’s something deeply satisfying about hearing drums and electronics wired into eachother. Human limbs rap against the soft membrane of synthesiser textures. Fizzing chords fold themselves around the contours of the head and the chest. Snarls of static kick up off the cymbals, like layers of dust agitated by

Review: Mech – Sub-Clouds

I’m peering at the rhythm through a mist. I catch sight of silhouetted hi-hats and the blur of bass drums, aware that most of the structure is hidden from me. Syncopations allude toward those drums that I cannot see, as beats stand lop-sided and gravity defiant, with surfaces vanishing

Crucial Listening #19: Norman Westberg

Laughing coats, booing the Blockheads, roller-skate disco. The New York guitarist discusses three important albums. Norman’s picks: 1) Nico – Chelsea Girl 2) Black Box – Dreamland 3) Lou Reed – Berlin Norman Westberg’s website is here, and be sure to check out those beautiful limited editions on his Etsy store.

Review: OOAME – Milanese Nwas

OOAME winds it up, and then lets it run. Milanese Nwas is built from custom software and digital synthesis, resulting in an auto-generative music that flickers and dances of its own accord. The press text talks about this material in terms of “artificial wildlife”, likening the lively, self-instigated behaviour of

Review: Plinter – Gino

Gino is a cat. “The most funny and friendly cat I ever [did] see”, according to Plinter. At just a year old, Gino was somehow poisoned and died shortly after. This album is a tribute to both his life (bouncy, mischievous electronics and kitten farts), death (swarms of static and

Review: Obasquiat – Strugatsky

The bass guitar is often at the centre. It’s the mediator between rhythm and melody, helping me establish my sense of up and down within the music. It’s also often the source of satiation that brings fullness and coherence to the act of instruments in dialogue; when everything

Interview: African Ghost Valley

I am overwhelmed by African Ghost Valley. Their improvisation is like a light shined directly into my eyes – a deluge of present tense, as if trying to salvage as much of the NOW as possible before it perishes into the past. Their releases come thick and fast – at the time

Review: Erik Levander – Couesnon

Levander catches the balance just right. Computer processing isn’t used to transform the sound of vintage clarinet, but to explore it. Processing is a scalpel. A magnifying glass. A thermal camera. It isolates the warmth of breath gushing down the cylinder, or seeps in between the fibres of the

Review: Mazut – Atlas

The beats here are pure concrete. Techno for cold, hard surfaces. Yet it’s crucial that these beats are robust, otherwise Atlas – just like its mythical globe-carrying namesake – would be crushed under the weight that rests upon its shoulders. In this case, the rhythmic propulsion plays support to all manner

Interview: Sound Awakener + Dalot

On the new collaborative record between Vietnamese artist Sound Awakener (Nhung Nguyen) and Greek artist Dalot (Maria Papadomanolaki), I hear the imprint of both physical distance and immaterial intimacy. Little Things was created during an 18-month exchange between the two artists, during which they traded sonic materials and shared their

Review: Dominic Lash + Seth Cooke – Egregore

I’ve learned that the word “egregore” is an occult term, used to describe the autonomous nature of the “group mind”. It’s the idea that collective thought – i.e. the coming together of several people around a common objective – produces a distinct, immaterial entity in itself, transcending the mere

Crucial Listening #18: Yann Novak

Post-rave drives, bunk bed fevers, making a happening. The LA-based sound artist discusses three important albums. Yann’s picks: 1) Allan Kaprow – How To Make A Happening 2) F.U.S.E. – Dimension Intrusion 3) The Weeknd – Echoes Of Silence Check out Yann Novak’s website here, and read more

Review: Kotra – Freigeist

It’s the electronic equivalent of a clenched fist. A bundle of low drones pressing inward, squeezing into other another, spluttering as the tension becomes too much, buzzing like a pitched-down tesla coil. And like a clenched fist, this knot of drones is a point of unstable energy consolidation. It

Interview: Boris

I am forever captivated by Boris. I can’t think of many other bands that harness such a playful relationship with identity and legacy, either by releasing records that run against the trajectory of their previous work – such as those inexplicable turns into pop or bursts of psychedelic punk – or

Review: Night Cleaner – Even

This is the scene in my head. There’s a party going on down the hallway. I haven’t been invited. Instead, the music throbs through my bedroom walls. I lay stranded in the dark, trapped between the time I went to bed (three hours ago? Four?) and the unreachable

Review: memorygarden禅 – districtアトランティス

It’s far too easy to articulate tranquil music in terms of water and floatation. When one encounters a record like districtアトランティス, the analogy feels so pertinent that those other, more casual usages start to feel like lazy approximations. The instruments on the latest memorygarden禅 record seem to be genuinely

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 13 (30/01/2018)

Jack Chuter is joined by Remo Seeland of Swiss label Hallow Ground, who provides a playlist and discusses the instigation of visions through listening. Also – a collection of sounds, places and memories from 2005 – 2017. You can also find Hallow Ground on Bandcamp and Facebook. TRACKLIST PART 1: LISTENING MEMORIES

Interview: Zeno van den Broek

There’s a wonderful calm to Zeno van den Broek’s latest album, titled Paranon. Partly that’s the inherent softness of those sine waves. Whether listening over speakers or on headphones – which make for drastically different experiences – the record graciously adapts to the space rather than assaulting it, pooling

Review: Mika Vainio + Ryoji Ikeda + Alva Noto – Live 2002

Live 2002 is an arrangement of electricity. Adjustments in voltage. Right-angled circuitry. Carefully modulated levels of interference. The three artists negotiate these changes between themselves – one locking into a pulsing bass loop, another sending shudders of static over the top in intermittent waves, another transmitting high-pitched beeps to the edges

Review: kutin | kindlinger – DECOMPOSITION IV: Variations On Bulletproof Glass

CLANG. Echo. The nightclub is empty. The speaker cables have frayed. There is no continuous dance beat throb, muffled by bodies and moisture, sending the walls into a nauseated heave. Instead, there are chunks of sound freefalling in the dark. They crash against the floor like chandeliers, echoing violently into

Crucial Listening #17: We Will Fail

Stolen travel, beautiful noise, trips to Planet Autechre. The Warsaw-based artist discusses three important albums. Aleksandra’s picks: 1) Alva Noto – Xerrox Vol. 1 2) Autechre – Tri Repetae 3) Thomas Köner – La Barca You can check out We Will Fail on her website and over on SoundCloud. The Refined Productions

Interview: Maximilian Latva

I’m not surprised when Maximilian Latva says that he listens to several punk and extreme metal tracks at the same time. I’m also not surprised to hear that he creates his music amidst a fire hazard of tangled cables and pedals. His latest album on Art First Records,

Review: Juan Antonio Nieto – Airports & Hotels

Nieto talks about mixing these sounds, which were captured at airports, hotels and on aeroplanes all over the world, in a way that tries to maintain “the spirit they had at their origin”. Yet of course, visits to these places are often marked by disorientation – the unrest of travel logistics,

Review: SHEDIR – Falling Time

There’s a track on Falling Time called “Skyness”, which translates as “the essence of what it means to be the sky”. The audio matches this premise perfectly: synthesisers carried upon the breeze, cloud-like bundles of bass frequency, white noise whooshing in panoramic circles. It’s a process of embodiment

Review: Midget! – Ferme tes jolis cieux

For Midget!, identity is a slippery thing – not a fixed state of being. It slinks into the margins between solid objects, changing shape to keep pace with environmental change and undulating mood. In other words, identity is a process, borne out through the lifelong stream of decisions and reactions, negotiating

Interview: Daniela Orvin

Daniela Orvin is a musician and photographer based in both Berlin and Tel Aviv. At one point in our interview, she notes that all of her photographs are self-portraits – even those that depict landscapes, or objects, or tree stumps. Similarly, her debut release on Gravity’s Rainbow Tapes – Untitled (2014-2016)

Review: DunJIN – The Conqueror Worm

On The Conqueror Worm, the air is always thick. With distorted drones, with the diffusion of funeral bells, with shapeless fogs of low frequency. Discoloured and unclean. Somehow it feels like a warning, like the darkness of emergent cloud cover before the rain comes down. Given that the album finds

Crucial Listening #16: Richard Chartier / Pinkcourtesyphone

Computer matrimony, floating outside of time, lounge music for fluorescent light tubes. The Los Angeles-based artist talks about three important albums. Richard’s picks: 1) Kraftwerk – Computer World 2) :zoviet*france: – Shadow, Thief Of The Sun 3) Pan Sonic – Vakio / Philus – Tetra The wonderful new Pinkcourtesyphone album “Indelicate Slices” is

Feature: Review of 2017

2017 has been ATTN:Magazine’s best year. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the past 12 months have been my most prolific: over 200 articles were published on the site in 2017. I poured more time into the site than ever before, and the way I spent this

Review: Masayuki Imanishi – Worn Tape

When the terrain of possibility stretches outward in all directions, sometimes the most profound action can be to stay completely still. Worn Tape is a record built from the sounds that decorate the daily life of its composer, Masayuki Imanishi: a mixture of radio emissions, field recordings and carefully captured

Interview: Nancy Kells

The energy of Richmond artist Nancy Kells flows both inward and outward. Inward: the hums, chants and ethereal resonances of her solo music as Spartan Jet-Plex, which both maps out the intimacy of her living room and the swirling, inarticulable monologue of the inner voice. Outward: the collaborative drive of

Review: QST – The Silent Cookbook

I don’t dance to this record. I run my hands across it falling in love with its beautiful slopes and paintwork sheen. I admire it from all sides, catching my reflection in the tinted windows, quietly excited by the elegant curvature and tiny symmetries. Using an interpretation of ambient

Review: Mun Sing – Witness

These are more than just percussive sounds. These are physical dents in the speaker cones, caked in the distortion of the mechanism they’ve just blown apart. Somewhere beneath the noise, I hear the resonances of objects I recognise: dulled and rusted kitchenware, the patter of hand drums, ripped up

Interview: Isnaj Dui

My first experience of Isnaj Dui was actually when I performed on the same bill. It was a few years ago now, but I vividly remember her looping flute melodies over the buzz of jack cable interference. Yet the mood of her performance is even more potent in my memory:

Review: Vlimmer – IIIIIIIII

There is optimism here. Deep in amongst the murk – keyboards and voices drowning in their own echo – there is always a melody pressing up through the centre of Vlimmer. And even if the harmonic definition is often obscured by the fog, I can nonetheless hear the extravagant intent of these

Crucial Listening #15: Zachary James Watkins

High vibration resonance, nostalgia in dub, ecstatic dancing. The Oakland-based composer discusses three important albums. Zachary’s picks: 1) Linton Kwesi Johnson – LKJ In Dub 2) Sun Ra – Atlantis 3) Éliane Radigue – Naldjorlak I II III You can find Zachary’s music over on Bandcamp. For more on Black Spirituals,

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 12 (26/12/2017)

A playlist of music inspired by the interviews, reviews and podcasts that featured on ATTN in 2017. ***** MIXCLOUD LINK WILL BE POSTED HERE WHEN AVAILABLE ***** Tracklist: 1. Phil Maguire – Brak 1 2. Midwife – Song For An Unborn Sun 3. Byron Westbrook – What We Mean When We Say Body Language 4.

Interview: Martina Lussi

I spend 35 minutes in a state of uncertainty. Selected Ambient is the latest album by Switzerland’s Martina Lussi, and despite the fixed nature of the recorded format, these four compositions seem to be pressing against the solidity of their capture. Different instruments and spaces emerge from within the

Review: Suzuki Junzo – Shizuka Na Heya De Ashioto Wa

When I think about the most potent psychedelic rock, there’s a counterbalance at play. As well as the visceral drive that powers the ascension into space, there’s a sense of submission – freewheeling into the momentum, coasting upon the waves of phaser and echo. Human muscle is the spark,

Interview: Circuit Des Yeux

I slipped into Reaching For Indigo quickly. So quickly that it unsettled me slightly. Even at its most mellow (the sustained organs and slowed time of “Brainshift”, the descendent fluttering guitars of “Black Fly”), the latest album by Circuit Des Yeux shakes me urgently by the shoulders. After all, the

Review: Cristián Alvear + Makoto Oshiro + Shinjiro Yamaguchi + Hiroyuki Ura – Lucky Names

There’s something helpless about that electronic metronome pip on opening track, “Repeat And Memory”. For large stretches of the piece, it seems to be measuring duration for its own sake, disobeyed by the sporadic rumble of passing traffic, unaligned to the four musicians as they shuffle and cough in

Crucial Listening #14: Shiva Feshareki

Ever-ascending love, walls of bass, deep listening on the Northern line. The London-based composer/experimental turntablist discusses three important compositions. Shiva’s picks: 1) James Tenney – For Ann (Rising) 2) Pauline Oliveros – Rattlesnake Mountain Proving Grounds 3) Photek – Ni Ten Ichi Ryu You can check out Shiva’s work on

Live: Colleen + Slows @ St John on Bethnal Green in London, 09/12/2017

Tonight begins in water. Plunging down beneath the surface, rising to take several frantic breaths, then diving back down again. Slows alternates between the harsh clarity of the air – synthesisers diced into crisp, rattling pellets – and the rumble of ocean pressure. Eventually he stops coming up for air. The more

Review: Andreas Brandal + Continental Fruit – S/T

These electronics are clogged sinuses in winter. Throbs and bloated tinnitus hums, clogging the free-flow of thought. Gelatinous and unstable, pressing inward against my head. Amidst all this, a voice mumbles through the veil of an overdosed medicinal recovery. I only catch the occasional word, and coupled with the dry,

Interview: The Body

It would be incredibly dull – futile, even – for collaborative records to simply harvest the obvious common ground between the participants. On the second collaboration between The Body and Full Of Hell, titled Ascending A Mountain Of Heavy Light, I hear them feeling around the edges for some of the more

Review: Lucía Chamorro – Luna Anfibia

At times during Luna Anfibia, Lucía Chamorro reverse-engineers the process of composition. Instead of shaping the sounds themselves, there is a sense of tinkering with the mind and ears used to receive them: clogging the ear canals with water so that guitar loops and birdsong arrive muffled, goading the listener

Review: Gail Priest – Heraclitus In Iceland

My fantasies about natural landscapes can be relentlessly optimistic. And of course, these places can be invigorating. I’ve never been to the northern Icelandic coastal town of Olafsfjordur, but through the field recordings that bluster and foam through Heraclitus In Iceland, I generate an idyllic picture: boisterous winds rolling

Interview: Patrick Shiroishi

When I hear Patrick Shiroishi’s solo saxophone on his album Tulean Dispatch, I hear someone using the instrument to articulate the extremities of emotion and experience. Those unstable groans reach beyond the semantic boundary of words such as “despondency” and “dread”. Those erratic spasms of arpeggiation – which twirl and

Review: Manuella Blackburn – Petites Étincelles

These collages are like the obsessions that infiltrate dreams. Imagine, for example, that you have an epiphany about the beauty of photography. You spend the daytime taking photos or diving deep into the literature on lenses, shutter speeds, photographic film and aperture. And so sleep becomes an overspill for these

Crucial Listening #13: Audrey Chen

Blockhead rainbow afghan, improvisational philosophy, biological instruments. The Berlin-based improviser talks about three important albums. Audrey’s picks: 1) i’d m thfft able – Endless Blooper 2) Lê Quan Ninh – Ustensiles 3) Susan Alcorn – And I Await The Resurrection Of The Pedal Steel Guitar You can discover Audrey’s work

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 11 (28/11/2017)

Michael Brown (List Of Moths) joins ATTN:Magazine to talk about creation in solitude, ambiguous movements and his debut EP on Turlin. Also – a selection of pieces centred on the theme of dancing. TRACKLIST PART 1: DANCING 1. Sourin – Rikka 2. Yeah You – Pace 3. Shit And Shine – Wespennest 4.

Interview: How To Cure Our Soul

I wish I could make music like this. Music that parades the illusion of stillness to the idle on-looker. Music that, in actual fact, celebrates the very impossibility of stillness, cherishing the tiny fluctuations in frozen guitar drones and field recordings. Not only that, but this is music that appreciates

Review: ORE – Belatedly

We invariably talk about sound as an aerial presence, but the tuba on Belatedly drives down into the earth beneath. Like a cruise liner sinking into quicksand; melancholic yet somewhat majestic in descent, executed with a graceful acceptance that the journey was always going to end this way. This record

Review: Aquarelle – Leave Corners

Immediately, Aquarelle wields a very distinctive compositional technique. He fills space and then vacates it. This creates a very different kind of quiet; one that still bears the imprint of its former occupier, quivering with the residue of sounds recently departed. Just how harsh lights leave glowing silhouettes in my

Interview: Jozef van Wissem

There is paradox within the music of Jozef van Wissem. He understands the power of fixating on small details for long periods of time. That’s why the lutist plays the same three-chord melody for 10 minutes straight; I’m guided towards a heightened state of listening, shedding my awareness

Review: Jabu – Sleep Heavy

Sleep Heavy sounds like singing into a fire. Serenading the flicker of distorted keyboards as they swell and recede. Bedecked with the crackle of burning logs (or, as we tilt in and out of this analogy, the cobbled journey of the needle around the vinyl groove). The voices are caught

Review: Sourin – Kakyou-佳境

There is serenity on Kakyou – 佳境. Even when distorted drums and bass are ripping a hole through the album’s midriff, the stereo edges remain tranquil – little flowers of unfurling piano and guitar and chime, sometimes with choral voices poured over like water. At these edges, Sourin pays tribute to

Crucial Listening #12: Hanne Hukkelberg

Creation in solitude, human connection, rhythms in collision. The Norwegian composer / singer discusses her three important albums. Hanne’s picks: 1) Moses Sumney – Aromanticism 2) Kelela – Take Me Apart 3) Espen Reinertsen – Nattsyntese Hanne is currently on tour for her new album Trust, which you can buy over at Musicglue.

Interview: An Trinse

I first discovered London’s An Trinse (aka Stephen McLaughlin) when he supported Sarah Davachi earlier this year. While both artists occupy that broad plain of electronic sculpture, Stephen’s set made for an interesting point of contrast. Sarah’s music expands like liquid poured on a flat surface, graceful

Interview: Do Make Say Think

Stubborn Persistent Illusions has been my car album since it came out back in May this year. I’ve drummed out “Horripilation” on my steering wheel more times than I remember. It’s an album to which I feel viscerally connected: the percussion on the “Bound And Boundless” can be

Review – Tomoko Sauvage – Musique Hydromantique

Everything is water. Not only is opening track “Clepsydra” created from the resonances of “waterbowls” – Tomoko Sauvage’s porcelain bowls filled with water, which are then amplified by hydrophones – but the very movement of her music feels inspired by water in various states. This piece is like rain dripping through

Review: Jukka Kääriäinen – Demoiselle

The phrase “live with no overdubs” is always exciting to me, particularly when I’m confronted with music that suggests the opposite: the careful arrangement of dozens of tiny guitar fragments, each shaped over the course of a dedicated recording take. For Demoiselle to truly have been recorded live with

Review: Heinali + Matt Finney – How We Lived

Magnitude is everything. The poetry of How We Lived is in how tales of human woe are swept into the streams of greater atmospheric change. Cosmic change, perhaps. Matt Finney’s spoken account of a wretched family car journey is difficult to inhabit. Yet when set afloat upon Heinali’s

Radio: Resonance Extra – Happened #1

Ahead of the Taiwanese Experimental Music showcase at Cafe Oto on November 4th, this episode sees Happened and ATTN explore the ever-growing experimental music scene in Taiwan. Through conversations with venues, institutions and organisations from across the community, Lucia H Chung and Jack Chuter consider how the scene has changed

Crucial Listening #11: Aidan Baker

Unrecognised chaos, underwater grunge, deceptive ambient movements. The Berlin-based musician discusses three important albums. Aidan’s picks: 1) Big Black – Songs About Fucking 2) James Plotkin & Mark Spybey – A Peripheral Blur 3) Stina Nordenstam – Dynamite You can find Aidan Baker over on Tumblr and on Bandcamp. There are also

Interview: Aloïs Yang

We’ve reached the final artist interview in our TAIWANESE EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC event preview. Once again, I implore you to come join me at London’s Café Oto on Saturday November 4th, where Happened will be presenting four Taiwanese artists that all have their own unique means of working with

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 10 (31/10/2017)

Ian Hawgood of the Home Normal label joins ATTN for a playlist and an interview. Also – an extended conversation with one of the founders of Ting Shuo Hear Say: an organisation and community based in Taiwan, centred on sound art and the act of listening. HOME NORMAL TRACKLIST: 1) Federico

Interview: Yeah You

As someone with an 80-mile motorway commute, I really appreciate how Yeah You convey the sense of movement. When traveling by car, the travellers are ultimately stationary – instead, it is the landscape that hurtles through us, with colours, pedestrians and logos melting into the speed and pirouetting around the edges

Interview: Chiyou Ding

The ATTN preview of Taiwanese Experimental Music continues. On 4th November at Café Oto, Happened will play host to four Taiwanese artists that bring an exploratory energy to their interaction with sound, technology and performance. I’ve already had two wonderful conversations with event organiser Lucia H Chung and media

Review: Mia Zabelka – Cellular Resonance

There is no gradual assembly. No slow gathering of tones, no slow deepening of harmonic sediment. Instead, pressing play on Cellular Resonance is like stumbling upon an ancient tree in the middle of a forest, standing before a structure that has endured years of growth and self-nurturing before I arrived.

Interview: Yen-Tzu Chang

Last week, I kicked off ATTN’s preview of the Taiwanese Experimental Music event, taking place at London’s Café Oto on 4th November. Artist and event organiser Lucia H Chung discussed the conception of the event and the boundaries of improvised performance. You can check out that thoroughly enjoyable

Review: List Of Moths – S/T

It’s common for the stranger iterations of dance music to be the reserve of the basement club. Concealed from the idle interest of passing civilians, shut out from the nourishment of sunlight, reinterpreting the fragments of mainstream cultural dialogue that drip through the ceiling. For this debut EP by

Crucial Listening #10: Aaron Turner

Playing with earthlings, disrupting linear time, the St Anger challenge. The Washington-based musician discusses three important albums. Aaron’s picks: 1) The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Electric Ladyland 2) Metallica – …And Justice For All 3) Caspar Brötzmann Massaker – Home Honourable mention: Neil Young – Dead Man OST Aaron is @aaronbturner on Instagram,

Interview: Byron Westbrook

Sonic tactility is a strange thing. We can talk about how Byron Westbrook’s new record, Body Consonance, mimics the sensation of being plucked and flicked from the inside. At times I can feel the weight of his electronics pressing down against my head, soft and slightly moist. The surface

Review: Roger Tellier Craig – Instantanés

I feel exhausted after listening to Instantanés. There are moments where I feel compelled to grab a notebook and start jotting something down: the shape of certain sounds in my head, the exact timings of those bursts of birdsong (a task rendered near-impossible by the number of digital emulations of

Review: Mingle – Ephemeral

The rhythms are the only solid objects here. Structurally, they’re beautiful – assembled from dozens of tiny electronic samples, each providing its own syncopated inflection or rigorous emphasis. Dub-slow and deliberate. As they recur, the advancement develops a sense of urgency: ticking like a gigantic robot clock, galloping across the

Review: Claire M Singer – Fairge

Claire M Singer reveals that the ocean is present within Fairge. The title comes from the Scottish Gaelic word for “the sea” or “the ocean”. Water ripples across the album cover. And with that, I am swept into thoughts of the water as her music gathers from layers of cello,

Interview: Lucia H Chung

On 4th November at London’s Café Oto, event organiser Happened will be presenting Taiwanese Experimental Music: a showcase of four musicians from Taiwan, all of whom have their own unique method of upturning the conventional means of manipulating, consolidating and presenting sound and performance. Of course, the term “experimental”

Review: TELE.S.THERION – Luzifers Abschied

I see textures, but not objects. I hear machines and voices, but I don’t know their intentions. The pounding of metal surfaces. The wail of unoiled joints and seams. The groans of overlain incantations. TELE.S.THERION refers to itself as “acousmatic black metal” – hideous sound without visible source,

Review: nula.cc – Midnight Sun

I’m compelled by the way this work is framed. These are not records or albums, but “filecasts”: transmissions of compiled information, updating the recipient on any developments since the broadcasts prior, summarising the current state of play. Each cast is a selection of audio tracks, images and texts, much

Crucial Listening #9: Pete Simonelli

Dispatches from space, tuning downward, chasing Coltrane. The Enablers vocalist talks about three important albums. Pete’s picks: 1) Pere Ubu – Dub Housing 2) Mississippi Fred McDowell – Live At The Gaslight, November 1971 3) John Coltrane – Interstellar Space You can check out Enablers over on Bandcamp. Crucial Listening is also

Interview: Rotten Bliss

With every single sound on The Nightwatchman Sings – the long awaiting debut album of Rotten Bliss – I am gifted a glimmer of history and circumstance. Never enough to help me know, but enough to make me question. Part of this is down to the array of fidelities, instruments, FX and

Review: Fumio Miyashita – Live On The Boffomundo Show

The special energy of this record’s opening half, recorded and broadcast live on LA’s The Boffomundo Show back in 1979, is the result of a twofold process. Firstly: cramming Fumio Miyashita’s synthesisers, percussive instruments and objects into the small room of Theta Cable Studios in Santa Monica

Review: Cavalier Song – A Deep Well

Mark Greenwood’s voice is chasing itself. The vowels hang open; tired or slightly drunk I don’t know, but the slack of the open mouth is a beckoning for the next sudden vision, or the next flare of sensation, not so much ejected from the mind as claimed from

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 9 (26/09/2017)

Anna and Kristina of the Stoscha label discuss crafting a compilation, the process of collaboration and the advantages of co-ordinating their operations from their respective homes of Frankfurt, Germany and Malmö, Sweden. Also: a playlist of voices. PART 1: VOICES 1. Captain Beefheart – “81” Poop Hatch 2. Agnes Hvizdalek – Index

Review: EXO_C – LABOYATTA

There are two layers to LABOYATTA. First: the electronics. Dry and corroded, clenching and oozing, caked in interference that clings to the surface like a crust of mud and foil. These thumps and hums are the album’s forward thrust, but only just – taking lead from dub’s contradictory mixture

Interview: Leafcutter John

Unconscious Archives Festival opened last night. It’s a series of sonic and audiovisual events taking place across London until the end of September, gathering together artists for performances that instigate collisions between old and new media, artist and audience, performer and venue, technology and curious, interruptive circuit-bender. The lineup

Crucial Listening #8: Jessica Moss

Concerto storytelling, iso-polyphony, ensembles of weirdos. The Montreal-based violinist selects three important albums. Jessica’s picks: 1) Gil Shaham – Sibelius / Tchaikovsky: Violin Concertos 2) Various – Cry You Mountains, Cry You Fields (Traditional Songs & Folk Music From S.E. Albania) 3) PJ Harvey – Let England Shake Check out Jessica’s

Review: Starving Poet – Eradicate Ex Machina

Ah! Finally. Music that acknowledges the death of “thinking straight”: a fraught, fidgety dollop of short attention span and clamouring priorities, built from the debris that clings to the nooks of consciousness: the residue of yesterday congealed into the idle passing of now, with visceral flashbacks of last night’s

Interview: Haco

There’s a point in this interview where Japanese artist Haco refers to her voice as being “see through” and “like mist”, which is perfect. In fact, the whole of Qoosui is driven by this tentative adherence to form, pouring guitars into basins of field recording and evaporated electronics, speculating

Review: Ben Zucker – o ur gab

What if Zucker was to perform these pieces live? How close would I have to stand to hear a tongue squashing itself against the front teeth, or to feel every audial ridge of those injured pigeon coos, or to sense Zucker’s mouth changing shape as he emits a mere

Review: Bosaina – New York April – July 2013 / Two Names Upon The Shore

Fiction makes it all seem so simple. In novels and cinema, coherent narratives are intrinsically woven into the fabric of life; profound symbolism rises to the surface of its own accord, prosaic rhythms temper the transitions between jubilant highs and counterbalancing contemplative lows, and endings always arrive at moments that

Interview: Anji Cheung

I listen to so many artists that wield a vivid sense of atmosphere, but London’s Anji Cheung goes one step further. Through a process of negative exposure – wafting sound into the spaces between imaginary walls and imaginary objects – she generates sonic spaces that are rich and tactile enough to

Review: Rhythm Baboon – Baboonism

Percussion crushed up like coke cans, trampled under passing pedestrian traffic, who in turn try to hold conversations among the din of ambulance sirens and car horns and white noise winds, burying the throb of bass drum that runs underneath like the forgotten reminder of passing time. It’s a

Review: John Butcher – Resonant Spaces

“If you don’t aim to play to your own ideals, then everybody is sold short. Otherwise you might as well hand people a questionnaire as they come in, asking them what they want you to do.” This is taken from Biba Kopf’s interview with saxophonist John Butcher, conducted

Crucial Listening #7: Sarah Davachi

Psychedelic breakfast, compositional commentary, just intonation autopilot. The Montreal-based composer discusses three important albums. Sarah’s picks: 1) Pink Floyd – Atom Heart Mother 2) Alastair Galbraith – Cry 3) Terry Riley – Shri Camel You can check out Sarah’s music/updates via her website, on Facebook and over at Bandcamp. Crucial

Review: Adam McCartney – OEK

“The name [OEK] is a reference to the Tuvan word for yurt, or quite simply to the idea of home.” When I contemplate how “home” might be articulated through music, my mind lazily skips straight to held major keys. Unambiguously positive, reassuringly consistent sounds. A refuge from the unmediated turbulence

Interview: Chelsea Wolfe

The latest record by California’s Chelsea Wolfe – titled Hiss Spun, released on Sargent House – often illuminates the physical burden of living. Fuzzed out guitars are dragged along by a lethargic rhythmic drive, like a body driven down by the weight of organs and skeleton and contemplation, pushing forward through

Review: Új Bála – Breatharian High Society

“Compared to my previous tape this one is one step closer to the dancefloor,” states Gábor Kovács (aka Új Bála). As far as I’m concerned, this one is ready for the dancefloor. Let’s roll it out. The album has a visceral pulse, distorting as it rattles the innate

Review: Sharif Sehnaoui + Adam Golebiewski – Meet The Dragon

Wrenched hard. We begin with the sound of surfaces and strings pulled taut – hoisted up, stretched out, left hanging in cruel postures and quivering with muscular fatigue. I barely recognise these shapes as instruments. Instead, I see wood panels splintered and snapped; guitar strings spilling like hair; hands and bows

Interview: Nomadic Female DJ Troupe

What is meant by nomadic here? Perhaps it’s referring to how Francine Perry, Lisa Busby and Ruthie Woodward aren’t tethered to the traditional framework of performance, free to roam away from the stage into the crowd, beyond the reaches of mains electricity, detached from all consideration of timetables

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 8 (29/08/2017)

Phoene Somsavath discusses the origins, experiences and ideas behind FRM-AT: a record label, booking agency and event series based in Glasgow. Also: an interview with my brother about listening and memory. The show will be broadcast 10pm BST on 29/08/2017, via Resonance and Resonance Extra. Listen here: Resonance:

Review: Enderie – Tape 1

The rhythm persists. Despite the clangs of construction work just outside the window; despite an obnoxiously loud television pushing muffled voices through the wall; despite the dangerous wiring the causes synthesiser electricity to jump and skip as the voltage lurches around the circuit. Central to Tape 1 is a sense

Review: Mike Caratti + Rachel Musson + Steve Beresford – Hesitantly Pleasant

The instruments are stacked on top of one another to form an anthropomorphic sculpture: bass drums and brush snares for bandy legs, piano keys stacked to form a spine that ripples and writhes, topped with a saxophone that’s like a head too big for the shoulders upon which it

Live: Sarah Davachi + An Trinse + Recsund @ Rye Wax in London, 10/08/2017

Down the back alley that leads away from Peckham High Street. Snaking left. Then right. Another alleyway now. I’ve probably gone too far. Wait – there’s a sign. Down a set of steps. Basement, darkness. This isn’t the last time that I’ll be tentatively navigating a route

Crucial Listening #6: David Grubbs

Post-punk hurled at a wall, intellectual slapstick, the loops of life. The Brooklyn-based composer and author discusses three important albums. David’s picks: 1) Circle X – EP 2) Tony Conrad – Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain 3) Luc Ferrari – Presque Rien No. 1 ‘Le Lever du jour au bord

Review: Luna + Tarnovski – S/T

This record was built upon an “impromptu collaboration in front of a sleeping audience”. As musicians, how do you navigate that? Obviously there’s the sense that to wake the crowd from slumber would be undesirable. Rude, even. Yet unlike other experiences of being in the vicinity of someone asleep

Interview: Ewa Justka

With the music of Ewa Justka, I’m not just exposed to the sounds emitted by her home-made electronic instruments. I feel rocked by the circulating voltage; blasted by the excess heat that pulses out of the mangle of wires and transistors. Ewa describes her own music as “weird acid

Interview: Nordra

Seattle’s Nordra is constantly transforming. Throbbing electronics collapse into dismally prophetic horns; into voice under digital stutter; into sludge guitar unmoored from percussive drive. These mutations are not just the product of mastery – Monika Khot has an incredible knack for extracting serenity from catastrophe, or resolution from ambiguity, or

Review: As Above | So Below – The Unassumed

The oud and the banjitar. Alone in the pitch black. The only sensory presence here is the dialogue between these two instruments: one reeling out a line of plucked melody, the other concurring and querying through intermittent improvisation, joining in and dropping back, following the instinct that commands when to

Interview: Jelena Glazova

Jelena Glazova came to my attention just last month, following the release of her split release with fellow Latvian artist Marta SmiLga. As soon as I learned that her music uses the voice as primary source material, I started to hear these sounds – streams of bad wiring, alien glissandos, foams

Review: Scot Ray + Vicki Ray – Yar

We open with a track called “Zero Doesn’t Exist”, which is an excellent title for an improvisation by two siblings. While improvised music encourages a greater focus on the present tense, it remains a product of past circumstance, enacting the reflexes that have developed over the course of a

Interview: Midwife

The songs of Denver-based artist Midwife – aka Madeline Johnston – are lights in the fog, warm and expansive, with choruses cutting through the drear of hampered fidelity. Distortion smothers voices. Guitars crumble into analogue decay. There’s something both brutal and wonderfully sincere to how these pieces must persist, like flickering

Interview: Aluk Todolo

It’s the music of endless spiral staircases. Of running away from an unseen threat. We can talk about Aluk Todolo’s amalgam of krautrock, black metal, improvisation, jagged noise and surging surf rock, or we can address the fact that something within their sound isn’t quite right. Their

Crucial Listening #5: Jon Mueller

Year-long fixations, psychedelic culture and dramatic minor keys. The Wisconsin-based composer/percussionist discusses three important albums. Jon’s picks: 1) Uriah Heep – The Magician’s Birthday 2) Faun Fables – Family Album 3) Psychic TV – Dreams Less Sweet You can find out more about Jon’s work over at Rhythmplex and

Review: Stef Ketteringham – More Guitar Arrangements

Legs and arms are in motion. In fact, I imagine that Stef Ketteringham’s whole body is in motion. This movement is a product of performance. Every strum ripples outward toward the toes and fingertips, which recoil at acoustic dissonance and collapse upon the bass drum. But it works the

Review: Quimper – Wake Up Gastone

Headphones. Wake Up Gastone sounds like a record that was written and recorded while wearing headphones the whole time. Privately, in a locked room. Perhaps this lock was only released when the record was finished, incubated in a solitary space and pieced together under dim lighting, hidden from the unfathomable

Interview: Yiorgis Sakellariou

Yiorgis Sakellariou is a composer of experimental and electroacoustic based in London. Within his music, I hear an acute understanding of how to fabricate a rich, interconnected environment. Despite the fact that his audio is drawn from a whole array of locations and sources – field recordings made around the world,

Review: Stoscha – Klink

Klink is an electronic music compilation. It’s also a strange day out in a future metropolis. The buildings – gigantic, vibrantly coloured tower blocks – are constantly reshaping and shuffling around the city. They respond to accommodate transient human interest by reconfiguring their own architecture, rendered in digital bricks that dialogue

Review: Mike Majkowski – Days And Other Days

Electronic or acoustic. It’s always so hard to tell. Likely, it’s both: synth drones pulsing through thin sheets of wood, string friction augmented by digital processing, airflow perpetuated by machinery. Chimes are smeared into eerie dollops of bronze, resonating for far too long. Voices babble and drip – half

Review: Nac/Hut Report – Grey Zone Collapse Nostalgia

This could have been an anthemic record. The guitars and voice are joyous. They ascend through simple arrangements of major chords – idealistic, emotionally fulfilled, deeply in love – projecting a pop music that celebrates life at its most rich and viscerally simplistic. The shoegaze fuzz hits my face like bubble bath

Crucial Listening #4: Richard Youngs

Cold War paranoia, modular rock, Bieber vs The Stones. The ever-prolific, ever-eclectic English musician discusses his three important albums. Richard’s picks: 1) Pink Floyd – Meddle (again!) 2) Cabaret Voltaire – The Voice Of America 3) Justin Bieber – Purpose You can find Richard Youngs online and over at Bandcamp. The first

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 7 (25/07/2017)

Alex McLean of Algorave discusses the extended self, anticipating change and celebrating failure. Also: a playlist of music salvaged from a long-lost iPod. TRACKLIST: PART ONE: LOST IPOD Gultskra Artikler – Angel Andrew Chalk – Ngachi Hildur Guðnadóttir – Light Platypus (Louseman) – Electric Red Quetzolcoatl – Triumphant Rock Shards Rise From The Sea, Awaken

Interview: Sarmistha Talukdar (Tavishi)

There’s something satisfying about the seesaw between disparate pursuits: alternating between periods of analytical problem-solving and long, mentally unfurling stretches of creative practice. Each mode of thinking enriches the other. The music of Sarmistha Talukdar goes a step further by engaging in these practices simultaneously. Through her project Tavishi,

Review: Broken Thoughts – Realign

Something is waking up. Realign conjures the twitching of fingers coming into consciousness, or the blurred sights of recalibrating eyes, or those deep, galvanising breaths taken prior to the first physical movements of the day. Rhythms emerge as expectant flickers and lurching, part-built electronic loops, while drones roll in like

Review: Jelena Glazova + Marta SmiLga - Split

I take so much from Jelena Glazova’s notion that her music, generated primarily from manipulated vocal sounds, is a form of “expressing unpronounced speech”. These phonemes are more than just abstracted sonic shapes. They are momentary moulds of the mouth that made them, spat out in three dimensional negatives

Crucial Listening #3: Lasse Marhaug

Running up stairs, understated drumming, pushing beyond the boundaries of metal music. The Norwegian noise musician / fervent collaborator / record producer discusses three important albums. Lasse’s picks: 1) Pink Floyd – Meddle 2) Ground Zero – Revolutionary Pekinese Orchestra Ver.1.28 3) Tony Conrad With Faust – Outside The Dream Syndicate You

Interview: Northumbria

With every release, the music of Toronto duo Northumbria pushes further outward. The scale of their panorama increases, manipulating the tones of guitar and bass in a manner that not only considers breadth, but also mimics the undulation and fracture of natural landscape. Drones intersect to form glacier tips. Harmonies

Review: Far Rainbow – The Power Of Degenerated Matter

The recording space feels small. A bit dishevelled. The mains wiring is dangerously temperamental – the plug sockets buzz much more than they should – while the air conditioning has been broken for weeks, leaving the two musicians of Far Rainbow (Emily Mary Barnett and Bobby Barry) sweating into the carpet. Or

Interview: Okkyung Lee

Movement and vigour. As a performer, Okkyung Lee is seldom still. Her improvisations seem to manifest from the agitation of body and material: the convulsing body of the artist, the swaying body of the cello, the scraping bow against the string. It’s an urgent, two-handed throttling of the present

Review: Soiled – Phonic Grafts

Phonic Grafts does not dwell. Instead, it submits itself to the undertow of passing thought. The sense of movement here is irresistible; some sounds are wrenched and stretched into the future, others are stranded on the riverbank and left to fade away, and a few melt into Doppler glissandos as

Review: Cecilia Lopez + Wenchi Lazo – Abailable

Some improvisations seem less about dialogue – listening, responding, listening – and better resemble an agreement to let loose at a set time. Abailable starts with the sound of two musicians dragging crates of jumbled sound to the edge of a hillside: old Casio keyboards, toy synthesisers, MIDI trigger pads, spaghettis of

Review: A-Sun Amissa – The Gatherer

Two different images flit in and out of focus. The first: a congregation of musicians in a studio, arranged in a circle, facing one another. Guitar, strings, saxophone, clarinet, piano, hurdy gurdy (amongst others). Sounds are put forth like queries, which are then responded to in accidental unison or through

Crucial Listening #2: Lawrence English

Bodily listening, manipulated time and the voice of David Toop. The Australian sound artist / Room40 label-founder shares his three most important albums. Lawrence English’s picks: 1) Swans – Filth 2) David Toop – Black Chamber 3) The Necks – Aether You can check out Lawrence English online and over at Bandcamp. The

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 6 (27/06/2017)

A conversation/playlist with Adam Barringer of English record label Champion Version. Lathe cuts and endless repeats. Also: a playlist of pieces on sleeplessness and circadian dislocation. TRACKLIST: PART ONE: SLEEPLESSNESS Markus Mehr – Dyschronia Lärmschutz – Deep Sleep Ekin Fil – Silent-Alive Teruyuki Nobuchika – La Reve Demen – Illdrop Byron Westbrook – Infinite Sustain

Interview: Mart Avi

Even when Estonian composer/vocalist Mart Avi describes his writing process through abstract analogies of clutter and combustion, his method completely aligns with the way that I hear his latest album, Rogue Wave. These pieces aren’t melodies nurtured from the inside and then extracted, funnelling ethereal sentiment through the

Review: Jessica Moss – Pools Of Light

Pools Of Light can be vast. 20 violins arching downward like birds diving into the sea. 10 voices in endless rounds of overlapping harmony, cutting across eachother at discordant angles. A single bowed melody flickering like a kite, anchored by bass notes that frame the flight as either liberated acrobatics

Review: Markus Mehr – Dyschronia

I couldn’t have picked a better time to write about this record. I’m currently working nightshifts. 7pm until 7am. They don’t come up often, but given the amount of effort I’ve exerted in trying to whip my circadian clock into obedience over the past couple of

Crucial Listening #1: France Jobin

Strange chord progressions, the theory of the jar, falling in love in Japan. The Montreal sound artist / minimalist composer shares her three important albums. Crucial Listening is also available as a podcast via iTunes, Stitcher etc. France Jobin’s picks: 1) Miles Davis – Kind Of Blue 2) Joni Mitchell – Hejira

Live: Algorave @ Archspace in London, 03/06/2017

When I initially heard about live-coding, I was quick to presume that it was beyond my technical grasp. After all, surely this music was the reserve of those who have spent their lives immersed in programming, hidden behind a wall of education and natural computer aptitude, forbidden to the layman

Review: Philip Sulidae – Appropriated Field Recordings From Temporary Data Sources

This one takes me back. I can remember my early experiences of navigating “open world” computer games back when they first started to emerge. I remember taking those nervous forays into vast, vibrant landscapes via Super Mario 64 and The Legend Of Zelda, unhooked from the rigid tracks of two-dimensional

Interview: Chromesthetic

Everything about Cleveland’s Chromesthetic feels cyclical. The drum machine freewheels beneath the noise. Riffs curl back in on themselves, burrowing deep into their own fuzz-drenched beginnings, trapped within a momentous sense of endless return. In fact, just as I noted in my review of last year’s self-titled LP,

Review: Burnt Dot – Constant Ballet

As it turns out, synthesiser and brass don’t agree on everything. This cassette documents a long-form conversation between the two instruments, attempting to reconcile their differences through a process of fiery spat, mimicry, head-on collision, harmonic complement and alternating stretches of solo and silent scrutiny. The most beautiful aspect

Review: No One – 9

No information. Just a download code to a 43-minute track. The sounds within are tentative, pale, faint – muffled tones and clumps of hiss, blustering through my hearing like tumbleweeds and clouds of dust, generating a space that is neither completely empty nor mindfully alive. This is the soundscape that exists

Interview: Khyam Allami

I first watched Khyam Allami performing with his Oud at Supersonic Festival in 2009. The Iraqi composer seemed to possess the sort of instrumental intimacy that I’ve often dreamt of having myself, where the join between fingers and strings is as reflexive as that between the arms and the

Review: Derek Piotr – Forest People Pop

When the voice passes through auto-tune, it is corrected. Intention and execution are brought into seamless parallel. Deviations are either snapped back into line or solidified into decisive and angular turns, stripping away those ambiguous wobbles of vibrato that ultimately swerve neither this way nor that. Of course, this is

Review: Julien Bayle – Void Propagate

If we are to think of ambient music as a depiction of atmospheric equilibrium (which we probably shouldn’t, but I know that my own inclination is often to do so), then Void Propagate is perhaps the very antithesis: an examination of the repellent, reactive activities that occur everywhere, all

Review: Dominic Lash Quartet – Extremophile

Extremophile staggers rather than swings. Stumbles rather than grooves. I grimace as the drums stall and speed up, like fawn hooves flailing for purchase on an icy surface, as guitar and saxophone swerve overhead like counterbalancing limbs, and Lash’s own contrabass churns between wonk and skew. Like a clown

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 5 (29/05/2017)

Improvisatory pianist Delphine Dora discusses her own work and her label, Wild Silence. Also – a playlist of 53 songs in 40 minutes. TRACKLIST: PART ONE: BREVITY Dan O’Connor – one Mari Kimura – Six Caprices For Subharmonics V Gangpol & Mit – The Burial lovesliescrushing – teardrop Spartak – Tape Machine Dream Ghedalia Tazartes

Review: Gustavo Torres + J.-P. Caron – ~Ø

The needle and the tape. The crackle and the hiss. My ears are trained to perceive these sounds as a prelude: the fleeting bursts of noise that herald the arrival of signal and meaning. In an ideal world, they wouldn’t exist. The music would bloom immaculately from silence, devoid

Live: The Body + Uniform + Weeping @ The Exchange in Bristol, 17/05/2017

Tonight seems to have a thematic underpinning. All three bands write songs with the sole purpose of strangling and burying them. For every melody I’m able to salvage, three more are drowned beneath distorted feedback, or reckless echo, or bass frequencies cranked to indulgently convulsive levels. In the case

Review: smallhaus – unweather

I daydream about my past all the time, but some moments in life trigger a much deeper, more deliberate bout of retrospection. At the end of the year for example, or in the immediate wake of enormous news events. My world undergoes a tilt, and I pull together the artefacts

Review: David Greenberger + Glenn Jones + Chris Corsano – An Idea In Everything

I’m endlessly charmed by the stories gathered and retold by David Greenberger. Instantly, I picture two older people at home on an evening, sat in armchairs tilted toward eachother, nursing a single drink for several hours. They’ve moved past the idle niceties that prelude deeper discussion; now they’

Review: Reid Karris – Divinatio Exitium

“I would describe it as acoustic blow out junk noise, prepared guitar drone, drums and bowls falling down ten flights of stairs.” That’s what Reid Karris tells me. I’ve always loved this principle of pushing instruments down the stairs. That “push”, metaphorical or not, stands for so much.

Interview: Morenceli

The geothermal bass frequencies, the throbs of oncoming terror, the synths that skirt the surface like fog. The music of Moscow’s Natasha Morenceli generates the sensation of imminent, apocalyptic change. For a debut EP (released on Blackwater Label last year), Stigmatization carries a remarkable conviction in its own prophecy,

Review: Gareth JS Thomas – Cruising Hits

Everything fits. Roughly. The collages of Gareth JS Thomas are like a jigsaw built from all the wrong pieces, with brute force used to compensate for the violation of correct placement. Instead of crushed cardboard edges, we have techno pulses strung into an irregular heartbeat stammer; voices channelled down tubes

Review: Demen - Nektyr

Nektyr is a solo record. Not only in the sense that Demen created it single-handedly (presumably anyway – contextual information on the album is sparse), but also for how it seems naïve to the fact that someone else might be listening in. I spend the album’s 35 minutes nurturing a

Review: Tom Hall – Fervor

It’s wrong that my first impulse is to associate the word “environment” with the notions of stillness and permanence, parading the illusion that it’s down to me – the subject, the centre of everything – to generate movement and action as I navigate my surroundings. In several senses, Fervor puts

Interview: Will Mason (Happy Place)

Once I know that the debut Happy Place LP was written in a state of nocturnal sleeplessness, I begin to hear it differently. The rhythms (courtesy of two drumkits) start to sound increasingly slurred and intermittently synchronous. The guitars tumble out in streams, unimpeded by the discipline that reigns over

Review: Dino Spiluttini – To Be A Beast

It’s there in the cover art. Silhouetted trees reflected in a pool of water. Objects distorted by various manipulations of light: the smearing of branches as refracted by the rippling surface of the water, the backlighting that removes all colour from the leaves and turns the trees into shadows,

Review: Daniel Bennett – Roil

Discomfort is the baseline. Instead of adhering to the usual model of tension and release, Roil modulates between suffering and the expectation of it. If calamity isn’t here right now – drowning me in feedback, showering shards of electronic noise on my head – then it’s painfully imminent, gnashing from

Review: Sult + Lasse Marhaug – Harpoon

Wood attached to metal, attached to wood, pulled taut by horsehair, pulled taut by wood, splintered by metal, mangled by wood, crushed by metal. If I visualise Harpoon in my head, it’s the most atrocious mess: an orchestral storage cupboard undergoing a ransacking by some feral demons of anti-music,

Interview: Diessa

The music of Diessa exists in the margin between first-person agency and environmental flux; beat-driven electronica that weaves its way through the field recordings of Istanbul market places and stumbles over the cracks and crumples of imminent tape player failure, all while collecting the residue of low-fidelity streaming and niche

Review: ADPC – There Is No Conclusion

I’m reminded of a fly bouncing against a window pane, buzzing as it charges and dances into the glass, perplexed by the forces that withhold it from the world outside. The quartet (Łukasz Kacperczyk and Wojtek Kurek of Paper Cuts, plus Krzysztof “Arszyn” Topolski and Tomasz Duda) seem to

Interview: Akatombo

Pollution takes so many forms, and the music of Hiroshima’s Akatombo (aka Paul Thomsen Kirk) is like a filthy assemblage of all of them. I’m not just talking about cityscape smog (of which there is plenty here, albeit translated into white noise and the echoes of concrete spaces)

Review: Slomo – Transits

Transits one of those ludicrous, hyperreal night sky photographs. Every single star is out, luminescent like phantoms, spilling like fine salt over an opaque, cloudless black. Slomo utilise every hemispherical inch of the canvas; the patches of emptiness are as carefully shaped as the synth glimmers and rumbling low frequencies

Review: net - HS

If one were to remove the creaks and pops that haunt the edges of “Ptarmigan”, the piece would be an unequivocally pleasant ambient drift. Electronic beats offer only the most gentle of forward nudges to carry me over those rippling waves of synthesiser, and the piece swerves idly like a

Live: Sumac + Oxbow @ The Dome in London, 25/04/2017

Hat dipped. Coat zipped. Eugene Robinson wanders on stage to join the rest of Oxbow, reluctant or just internally burdened, dressed like a film noir detective keeping outsiders at a safe distance. Perhaps he’s wary that his efforts to communicate will be miscomprehended, and perhaps that’s why the

Review: Strom Noir – Malovane Kvety + Xeroxové Motýle

The first track is called “Widely Open Window”, and it fits the title perfectly. It’s a sonic analogy to letting fresh air and sunlight circulate the room in the morning: the shower of sunlight as the curtain is pulled back, followed by the cold air that spills in once

Interview: Slowpitch

In the opening moments of his latest record, Toronto composer/turntablist Slowpitch recreates that quintessential sci-fi experience of leaving the rocket to explore a planet for the first time: the clunk of shuttle doors pulling back, the wail of emergency sirens, the hiss of hydraulic mechanisms. There’s a cinematic,

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 4 (25/04/2017)

A conversation with Sietse Van Erve of Amsterdam’s Moving Furniture Records. Also: climbing hills, hot tub chat, Doctor Who and indistinct sound. TRACKLIST: PART 1: INDISTINCT Grey Guides – Van Hoogstraten’s Big Pay-Back: Gorton Poltergeist Revisited Black Thread – Autumn Flowers ii Anne Guthrie – Long, Pendulous Ben Gwilliam – breakdownspedup Danny

Review: Izanasz – Fāl-gūsh

Awake at 4am. Can’t sleep. Stranded between the day just passed and the day to come, unable to purge the obscure visions, thoughts and doubts that seize the times of stillness. Anxieties inflate to twice their normal size. Imagined sounds adopt the clarity of noises from the world outside.

Interview: Shiva Feshareki

When I listen to the work of turntablist/composer Shiva Feshareki, I’m reminded that there are always ways to expand my understanding of sound. Much of her work is built upon collaborations with other artists or manipulations of existing material, using external energies (orchestras, installation artists, organists, old records)

Review: Agnes Hvizdalek – Index

I picture Agnes Hvizdalek sat at the bottom of a 60-foot chimney. She’s in an ancient factory in São Paulo called Casa das Caldeiras, during an artistic residency in Brazil back in July 2016. There’s a microphone and nothing else. No instruments. For 48 minutes, Hvizdalek engages in

Live: Emptyset @ DRAF Studio in London, 07/04/2017

Reduction is impossible. This is my primary takeaway from the recent work of Emptyset. On their 2016 album Borders, the duo stripped their music back to a vital ventricular thrust. Bass frequency, throb, impact, vibration. Yet while the premise of the record was simple, the band inadvertently dug deeper into

Review: break_fold – 07_07_15 - 13_04_16

Each track title on this record marks the day the song began. It’s interesting to think about the voids of silence that would have existed on the day of commencement, like trying to imagine empty desert plains without that Dubai skyline sprouting out of them. So much has happened

Interview: Sarah Feldman

Perhaps you’ve been in this position too. You spot two lights pulsing at different tempi. On, off, on, off. Suddenly, the flashes synchronise for just a few seconds, oblivious to their kinship, entering into a chance alignment on their disparate illuminatory schedules. They slip away from eachother again. The

Review: Qype Dikir – KIKSGFR021

It’s such a simple premise. One small room. Two entities: a central furnace of soft drones and tidal overtones, and a synthesised firecracker spitting and quivering across the ceiling. Malcolm Delaney adjusts the situation, gently guiding the firecracker one way and stoking the furnace from beneath, but his role

Review: Metalized Man – Losing Your Virginity: Metalized Boy's First Adventures Into Manhood

What if I’d never been in a nightclub before? Furthermore, what if I had no innate comprehension of rhythm as a device for musical synchronicity and cohesion? The debut record of Metalized Man (aka Lasse Bjørck Volkmann) is like hearing music for the first time – hyperreal, oppressive, frightening – in

Review: Elephant House – Pony Ride

The first track on Pony Ride splays in all directions. Electronic drums patter on the left and the right. Acoustic guitars stretch across the frame like a spindly cradle, wefting and warping through eachother in curves of minor key. Cymbals, drones and incantatory improvisations rise out of the centre as

Review: Simon Thacker + Justyna Jablonska – Karmana

“I developed a scale,” guitarist Simon Thacker writes in the booklet for Karmana, before correcting himself: “or more accurately, a rather fluid collection of pitches that expands and contracts depending on the expressive need”. In fact, this statement could act as a broad-brush description of the whole record. Expansion and

Interview: Belisha Beacon

This conversation with Dorien Schampaert (aka Belisha Beacon) upturned all of my preconceptions about live coded music – crucially, my assumption that I wasn’t technically qualified enough to take part. Her first exposure to live coding was back in December 2015 through a workshop on the ixi lang platform, with

Review: Tony Peña – TomJohnsonForSix

The first track on TomJohnsonForSix, titled “Septapede”, was originally written for piano, centring on a short loop that gradually mutates through repetition, shedding notes and gathering others as it rolls around, subtly adjusting shape through the shortening and slurring of durations. It’s a delicate sculpture of plucking fingers and

Review: Pharmakon – Contact

The loops are walls. Recurrent pulses and buzzes repeat until they solidify, thickening into three inches of steel, then four as the loop returns again, asserting themselves on all sides of the stereo frame, sealing off all potential routes of exit. For a record that concerns itself with the act

Interview: Gideon Wolf

Year Zero is always swirling, contracting, expanding, thinning, like dehydrated plant matter kicked up on the wind, tossed back and forth over the cracked earth. Much like the latter work of Talk Talk, Gideon Wolf’s latest album was created by collaging individual recordings of strings, voices and electronics, each

Review: Myra Davies – Sirens

The motion is fierce. The electronic beats of Gudrun Gut and Beate Bartel power through time like tanks on cobbled roads, inexorable, hitting bumps of syncopation and slips of synth trigger-finger that kick me off axis but fail to slow the vehicle down. Myra Davies is dragged along with such

Review: Köhnen Pandi Duo – Darkness Comes In Two's

Köhnen (electronics) is the canyon. Pandi (drums) is the survivor stranded within. Köhnen is the environment: the winds that rattle across empty space, the rocks that tumble down on either side, the sheer vertical surfaces that eclipse the sky and thwart even the thought of escape. Pandi is the flail

Review: David Vélez – Apathy Spreads

Don’t disregard so quickly. Listen again. The sounds on Apathy Spreads are repeated and prolonged, which is Vélez holding my head down, keeping me submerged until I understand. On initial acquaintance, many of the textures are unremarkable: fuzzy and monochromatic, like hunks of broken breeze block or rocks wrapped

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 3 (28/03/2017)

A conversation with Kate Carr from Flaming Pines: a London-based record label for experimental music, originally founded in Sydney, Australia. Also: a playlist featuring various interactions with the guitar. TRACKLIST: PART 1: GUITAR Hans Tammen – Attack Study Jenks Miller – Spirit Signal Giacomo Fiore – Until It Blazes Six Organs Of Admittance

Interview: Egidija Medekšaitė

Egidija Medekšaitė creates her music by mapping textile patterns onto compositional parameters, using characteristics such as the weft, the warp and the yarn itself to determine the harmony and rhythm of her music. The translation is both strange and beautiful; while these textile patterns weren’t necessarily designed to be

Review: Oikos – The Great Upheaval

Oblivion is seldom sudden. Oikos describe The Great Upheaval as “an imaginary soundtrack for every moment in history ravaged by violence and superstition”. In truth, the record seems to document the prelude and the aftermath on either side. The “moment” itself is implied, so vividly written into the before and

Interview: Triac

I’ve listened to Triac’s new album in several different contexts. On a nocturnal walk over headphones. Via speakers during evening reading. Sat at the back of a busy cafe. The experience is drastically different each time. These clouds of sound – faint, ambiguous dispersals of laptop, piano and bass

Review: Orthodox – Supreme

It’s wailing and leaking. It just won’t die, yet it’s far beyond saving. Supreme is 36 minutes of imbalance and injury. It’s a prolonged, improvisatory swirl round the basin of death. Cymbals get wedged in cracked ribs of bass guitar. Saxophone gushes from the wound. Like

Review: Ian Hawgood – Love Retained

The pieces on Love Retained were originally intended to form the basis of collaborations. This would explain why the piano often appears to be crouching down in a small portion of the stereo frame, or why chords seem to pause and await reply (to which only silence acknowledges receipt). Hawgood

Interview: Nonconnah

My introduction to Lost Trail was via their excellent Wist Rec release The Afternoon Vision, which came in a jackdaw folder complete with soil survey maps, distorted photography of various landscapes, and poetic phrases stranded on the back of curious images. Meanwhile, their music feels shaped by the graceful erosion

Review: Ak'chamel – Transmissions from Boshqa

Ah! After several minutes sweeping the dial back and forth, I finally tune into the Ak’chamel frequency. An island sprouts from within a wasteland of dead air. The sounds I hear are a mix of isolation psychedelia and multicultural inquisition, seemingly built from the tiny trinkets of artefact that

Review: Chihei Hatakeyama – Above The Desert

“I recorded this album in the basement studio.” With this one nugget of context, Above The Desert becomes a record of aspiration and possibility. Hatakeyama is in the basement. The music is his skylight. Light is pouring in but nothing else, promising nothing in particular but sparking the flicker of

Interview: Taylor Deupree

There are moments of sudden and wonderful alignment on Somi. At 2:07 on the title track, a guitar string and a key are struck simultaneously. A harmony chimes out: a nervous, half-dissonant slant, like a vocal uplift at the end of a sentence. Unsure. Hurt, perhaps. These moments largely

Review: Aseethe – Hopes Of Failure

With some doom bands, you feel the initial impact and nothing more. With the first blow comes a numbness; a buffer of bruising against the second and third and fourth, as the riff reaches its peak of strength and promptly levels out. I’ve been to countless gigs where the

Review: WaSm – Een

Allegedly, these edited/mixed improvisations by Jos Smolders and Frans de Waard were recorded during a single day at Smolders’ own EARLabs studios. I promptly forget this. After a few minutes, I think of Een as the sonic diary of two veteran submarine maintenance engineers. They’ve been at the

Review: Muddersten – Karpatklokke

Here’s how I imagine this one playing out. Three improvisers take an off-road shortcut on their way to a recording session. There’s a bump in the road. The back door of the van flies open. All of the instruments – guitar, tuba, synthesiser, tape machine, assorted objects – tumble out

Review: Yiorgis Sakellariou – Silentium

Surely, the request for “silence” – as displayed on the doors of many religious buildings – is not intended to be heeded too literally. There are certain sounds that can’t easily be switched off: footsteps on the stone floor, the breeze skimming over the walls, the sigh a dozen nasal breaths.

Review: Marlo Eggplant – Callosity

The interference on Callosity is so prevalent that it becomes a presence in itself. It’s not a characteristic of the medium that disrupts the connection between me and the music, but a blanket thick enough to touch, wrapped and inextricably sewn into the fabric of her instruments. As it

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 2 (28/02/2017)

Host Jack Chuter talks to Phil Maguire of Verz Imprint (a new London-based label for quiet noise and drone music). Also: a playlist on the theme of “hitting things”. TRACKLIST: PART 1: HITTING THINGS Laurie Tompkins – Sweat Fujako – Iron Lion ovfdbk. BESS – Form / Form Michaela Antalová – Oblek Sly & The

Review: James Murray – Eyes To The Height

The mystery of Eyes To The Height resides in what James Murray chooses not to illuminate. The record is pocked with shadow. Synthesisers slink across the frame but circumvent certain patches of space, the emptiness announcing itself as drum samples echo right through it. And yet Murray’s melodic dialect

Interview: Himukalt

Himukalt is the artistic banner of Ester Kärkkäinen. I wonder if Himukalt is also the lens through which Ester’s image is refracted: the mechanistic grind and distortion that obfuscates her voice, the blurs and smears that drench her multi-xeroxed self-portraits. I’ve been captivated by Himukalt’s output since

Review: Forresta – Bass, Space & Time

Microbial growth and astral emptiness. Miniature plants and empty space. Somehow, Forresta has me depicting both simultaneously: the shudders of cell division as tiny noises expand, backdropped by echoes that splay infinitely in every direction. Tonality manifests in subtle presences, with harmonies implied by the slight rattle of bass guitar

Review: Lorenzo Balloni – 創生の最果て

I tend to think of these sorts of compositions as being painstakingly put together. After all, it’s not by accident that field recordings are threaded together so seamlessly, with bustling streets evaporating into open beaches which, in turn, melt in heavy downpours in forests, the colours emboldened – gently, unintrusively

Interview: Mirrored Lips

Mirrored Lips are always ready to burst. Even their stretches of relative structure – tractor-paced punk, galloping noise rock grooves – are constantly threatening to erupt in manic improvisations. Vocals babble out of the lines, syncopated drums accelerate impatiently, guitars foam at their dissonant, pitch-shifted mouths. Collapse is always imminent, and collapse

Review: Ben Vida – Damaged Particulates

I’ve never seen rain like this. Liquid gold dripping down the rim of the sky, blood-thick and shimmering. I’ve never heard chimes like this either: hexagonal prisms producing harmonics that run in slants, before arcing downwards and upwards simultaneously. Damaged Particulates is a collage of semi-physical, semi-tangible phenomena.

Review: Various Artists – Antologia de Música Atípica Portuguesa Vol 1: O Trabalho

Gathered together on this new compilation series are Portuguese artists that stretch back into the past with the same inquisition as they press into the future, allured both by the original significance of tradition and the opportunity to reframe it. The theme of the first volume is “o Trabalho” (which

Interview: Jenny Berger Myhre

In certain circles, it’s a faux pas for the recordist to be present in their own recording. It disrupts the illusion of first-hand experience by illuminating the mediator between the recorder and the recorded, while opening up the possibility that the artist may interfere with the naturalistic behaviour of

Live: Éliane Radigue – OCCAM @ St Paul's Church Southville, 06/02/2017

Sound emerges. Slowly, a single trumpet note presses out of the chrysalis of breath, protruding a little more each time. I’ve heard Nate Wooley improvise before. He can be furious, virtuosic. In fact, prior to the start of his performance, I hear him warming up at the back of

Review: Num.Lock – ##1 Versions

The cover of ##1 Versions is a paper-shredded version of the original EP artwork, which is all the context I need to understand the first remix here. George McVicar’s iteration of “gUZU” feeds the music into a fan blade. Loops of digital ventilation become pops of pressure release, chopped

Event: Clusters + Finglebone + No Context @ The Winchester in Bournemouth, 06/03/2017

FACEBOOK EVENT ATTN:Magazine and Wimbourne Contemporary Arts present an evening of ambient blurs and murmurs: Clusters Electric basses, e-bows, minimalist understatement. http://store.championversion.com/album/equal-spaces-pt-1-pt-2 finglebone Finger-plucked folk melting into electronica, melting into soundscape. https://finglebone.bandcamp.com/album/sunlit-plumes-of-dust No Context Manipulated space, electronics, repurposed objects.

Interview: Alan Courtis

Alan Courtis is exploratory in every sense. He’s forever leaving his home of Buenos Aires, Argentina to embark on international tours (he’s actually on tour at the time of publishing this), each time taking a different instrument configuration or creative premise in tow. He collaborates with all manner

Review: Sean McCann – Music For Public Ensemble

The narrative is meaningless or meaningful. This quote refers specifically to McCann’s book Pacifics, extracts of which are recited throughout Music For Public Ensemble. Frankly it applies to all aspects of Music For Public Ensemble. In the same way that landscape is an abstract splatter whose meaning arrives later

Radio: Resonance Extra – Episode 1 (24/01/2017)

In the first edition of the ATTN:Magazine radio show on Resonance Extra, host Jack Chuter talks to Keith Helt of Pan Y Rosas Discos (a Chicago net label releasing improvisation, noise and weirdo rock from around the world) and runs through a few of ATTN’s favourite cuts from

Review: Sarah Hennies + Cristián Alvear – Orienting Response

Play as accurately and consistently as possible but with the assumption that “mistakes” are inevitable. Allow “mistakes” to occur, do not attempt to correct them. All sounds should ring freely (as long as is possible) unless otherwise indicated. All timings and tempi are approximate and flexible. It’s important that

Interview: Michaela Antalová

Michaela Antalová is a drummer from Slovakia, currently based in Oslo. Her new EP Oblak Oblek Oblúk was recorded in the corridors and hallways of the Norwegian Academy Of Music, manifesting as the intersection between real and manipulated resonances. At one moment Michaela is using snare drums and cymbals to

Review: Moon Relay - Full Stop Etc.

Closure, but not. Full Stop Etc. is a great album title for a band who never succumb to the temptation of tidy conclusions, or the satisfaction of seamless musical cohesion. Instead, Moon Relay are full of zags and juts and jags: conflicting moods that clang into eachother at awkward angles,

Review: All Trees Are Clocks – S/T

The cello of Emily Burridge reaches, like an outstretched hand, into Nemeton’s field recording of New Forest National Park. She is an empathetic presence. Her bowed notes arrive slowly as though asking for permission before proceeding, mimicking the branches of the surrounding beechwoods that suspend themselves in the air,

Interview: Julia Reidy

The first track on Julia Reidy’s new album is a half-hour 12-string guitar piece titled “Surrounds Outlast”. It’s improvisation with the accelerator stuck down. Her fingers run fluidly and incessantly over the strings, swerving in and out of motifs, hitting microtones that jolt through the piece like speed

Review: Kristof Hahn – Solo Etudes I

We begin with the flickering, fire-like erraticism of the first track. Despite bearing the title of “Snow”, I’m drawn to imagine the very opposite: an intense heat that billows and dwindles across the stereo frame, suddenly erupting from left to right as if devouring an oil slick, promptly receding

Review: Phil Maguire – aural documents #1

The synaesthesic clarity of aural documents #1 is such that I could draw it. Three individual groups of circular black blots, each separated by jagged rectangles that extend across the page like hedges seen from a birds eye perspective. Sonically, the blots are little digital plosives veering in and out

Review: Consumer. + The Translucent Spiders – CON / TRA

At least once a year, I hear someone reciting that trivia bite about how a piece of paper folded 50 times would cover the distance from the earth to the sun. It’s no longer interesting to hear this recounted verbally, but it’s wonderful to hear Consumer enacting this

Interview: Morten Poulsen

Dark Web is the latest project from Danish sound artist Morten Poulsen: a generative, interactive audio/visual piece without beginning or end. While the output of Dark Web can be manipulated by the user, the project ultimately stands independently from observation and interaction; it exists whether the user is present

Review: Émilie Girard-Charest – Avec

I spend much of Avec contemplating the seams between objects, entities, people, sounds. This record illuminates the act of intersection: a bow dragged aggressively against a cello string, the impulses of two improvisers ricocheting off one another, the sounds of chimes colliding with shrill string harmonics. In particular, I think

Feature: Review of 2016

I realise this is coming out three weeks into the new year. That’s partly deliberate. While I’d intended to get this online within the first 10 days of 2017, I knew I couldn’t compile a proper retrospective without breaking free from 2016 first. Being impulsive and somewhat

Review: Dana Jessen - Carve

Bassoonist Dana Jessen is losing herself, finding herself, losing herself. The four longest pieces on Carve are the works of guest composers, all of which generate strange new realities for Jessen to inhabit. They are wastelands drenched in a precipitation of glitches, deathly sunsets over panoramic countryside, field recordings that

Review: aeon – Correspondances

One particularly interesting facet of αίών’s work is his attitude to the glitch. Instead of treating it as a malfunction in the transmission of sound, he wields it purposefully. As soon as we stop perceiving the glitch as a symbol of error, we unlock the ability to appreciate it.

Interview: Uniform

My first listen to Uniform’s Ghosthouse EP hit me hard. In fact, I was only two minutes into the first track – a juddering, jackhammer pulsation of drum machine, serrated riff and feral vocal snarl – when I sent over a request for an interview. The band’s new material demonstrates

Review: Radionics Radio – An Album Of Musical Radionic Thought Frequencies

“Delawarr’s Multi-Oscillator was not intended for purposes as frivolous as music. It was designed to ascertain combinations of frequencies that related to specific psychological conditions, ailments and their therapeutic equivalents. Whilst concentrating on a thought, a rubber radionic detector pad connected to the instrument would be rubbed whilst turning

Review: richardaingram - Valehouse

I experience Valehouse as if through a rainy window on a dismal day. Shapes refract through droplets of water. Colours recede into the grey of the sky and the empty streets. This album captures the sensation of omnipresent fatigue: when the weather presses down on the world below, causing everything

Interview: Jockel Liess

I was wrong. I’d assumed that the tones that make up Jockel Liess’ Bordun Chorus were artificial emulations of the human voice, laced with the hiss of electronic breath and the faux warmth of faux body. In the interview below, Jockel corrects me. Actually, the process is actually travelling

Event: en creux (live) + Eliane Radigue – Virtuoso Listening (film) @ The Winchester in Bournemouth, 10/01/2017

ATTN:Magazine presents an evening of sonic reduction. EN CREUX (LIVE) The solo project of Lucia H Chung. Precision, interaction, contrast. https://sm-ll.bandcamp.com/album/reloc-batch-0002 ELIANE RADIGUE: VIRTUOSO LISTENING (FILM) Anaïs Prosaïc’s wonderful documentary about French minimalist composer Eliane Radigue: a master of extended reasonances and microtonal

Review: Grey Guides – Beast Mask Supremacist

I picture this: a gigantic, industry-grade cassette player spewing chunks of tape at random intervals. It bunches up in the spokes and stops the mechanism from turning properly, creased and knotted and torn to shreds, spilling over the chassis like the explosive regurgitations of ten brown party poppers. The situation

Review: Mike Weis - Sound Practice

On Sound Practice, Weis allegedly adopts the Zen principle of the “unknowing mind”, interacting with his instruments with the naivety and absent prejudice of a first-time encounter. I feel this mindset most prominently when he taps each cymbal, gong and singing bowl in turn, marvelling at how even the slightest

Interview: Alexander L. Donat

On first glance, Blackjack Illuminist Records feels like an intimate and diverse artistic collective. There’s the child-like jubilation of Fir Cone Children; the blurry, inescapable krautrock mazes of Vlimmer; the translucent drones of Feverdreamt; the jagged indie rock of Leonard Las Vegas. Like all good labels, there’s a

Review: Miguel A. García + Seijiro Murayama - Zashomon

Stop. Sound. Stop. There are no continuous sounds on Zashomon. Instead, sounds appear, perpetuate themselves for a brief length of time and then drop out or transform. Their presence within the soundscape – at that particular moment, at that particular position – is always meaningful. Nothing is sustained for the sake of

Review: Off World - 1

Not quite. All of my thoughts and attempted articulations of this record fall just short of what I’m actually hearing. As such, it’s important to note that this album manifests in the margins and spaces between the words you read here, floating between colon dots and swooping into

Review: Benjamin Finger - Ghost Figures

The piano has long been neglected. Damp has started to soften the hammers and seep into the wood, tugging the strings gently away from perfect tuning. Each depressed key is a pronouncement of weather erosion and absent care, filtering each note through layers of the past as it pushes outward

Interview: KIP

At one point in this interview, I ask Israeli composer Igor Krutogolov – who founded KIP back in 2002 – whether he is drawn to the manipulation of tension and the postponement of release. The question arose as I switched from the first side of Hymns to the second, in which a

Review: Kentin Jivek - No Age

Everything floats freely in the darkness. Guitars allow themselves to be swept into improvisatory inclination, ambling through folk phrases as if struck by intermittent memory loss, forever finding the thread of melody and losing it again. Drones and electronics splay at the behest of gigantic echoes: some high and shimmering

Review: Chromesthetic - S/T

The amplifier doesn’t simply “make it louder”. It congeals, crushes, intensifies. Unassuming chord strums go in; great waves of fuzz pour out, distorting against the limits of volume and perhaps against the limits of something else; pressing into the membrane between everyday living and the psychedelic beyond, using the

Review: Rough Fields + YTAC + Youryourholiholinessness - EISHAUS4

We begin with seven minutes of skydiver techno. I’m tumbling through the air. Cymbals and static suck at my ears like currents of air felt at high speed, as a melody floats by in wisps. My heartbeat is in my head. YTAC’s remix of Rough Fields’ “ZERO7411310518296” is

Interview: Christine Ott

While it’s well established that a soundtrack can completely reshape the mood of a film, Christine Ott’s score for F. W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty’s 1931 silent film Tabu instigates a particularly profound atmospheric overhaul. Where the original was accompanied by a spritely and often bombastic orchestral

Review: Vapor Lanes - Hieratic Teen

Like dye introduced to bloodstream, the electricity convulsing through Hieratic Teen illuminates every nuance of A. Karuna’s synthesiser circuitry. Low groans navigate bends in long wiring, rattling loose screws and swimming through soldering, bursting through the speaker grill in pressurised jets of electronic sound. Pitches falter during melodies as

Review: Billy Gomberg - Slight At That Contact

This is music in a larval state. Through a process of unfurling and awakening, Slight At That Contact exercises all of the phonetic and gestural behaviours that will later be refined into language. Segmented body parts unsheathe to the crack of acoustic plosive, as keyboards gurgle and click like a

Interview: Line Gøttsche

72 seconds into “Opal”, the first track on Line Gøttsche’s debut solo album, the piano slows as it ascends. The momentum is just enough to carry it to the top of the next chord, as it slackens into the gravity that sends it tumbling down the other side. It’

Review: Finglebone - Sunlit Plumes Of Dust

Like a glass-smash in slow motion reverse, Sunlit Plumes Of Dust rebuilds itself. Fragments of guitar improvisation congeal into distinct melody, forming vivid shapes that cut into the background blur. They are only temporary. The album cherishes brittle lucidity in the knowledge that it will soon disappear again, unravelling into

Review: Jean-Sébastien Truchy - Transmission In An Expanse Of Firelight, Hear Me!

Space-time has been scrunched up like a napkin. It takes me a while to realise that and longer still to accept it. That’d explain why my sound world is completely askew: I can hear operatic voices amongst the whirr of server rooms, and drum samples bobbing upon pools of

Interview: Sian Hutchings

The vast majority of people I interact with through ATTN share my general perspective on sound and the importance of listening. Of course, there are countless other artists for whom sound plays an entirely different role: it’s a subordinate force that affirms or embellishes the experiences of sight, or

Review: Ashtray Navigations - To Make A Fool Ask, And You Are The First

We join Ashtray Navigations at the halfway point in the journey out of their own heads. The image of Leeds, England is melting away. Streetlamps droop and pour into the flow of tarmac; buildings bleed outward into an earnest overcast sky, as the image gradually transforms into the vibrant lights

Review: Krotz Struder - 15 Dickinson Songs

I felt a Cleavage in my Mind — As if my Brain had split — I tried to match it— Seam by Seam — But could not make them fit. The thought behind, I strove to join Unto the thought before — But Sequence ravelled out of reach Like Balls — upon a Floor. A

Review: Danny Clay - Stills

A listener who wishes to treasure sound must confront the fact that sound wants to disappear. The piano loops on Stills bear the blemishes of being forcefully carried through the present tense. The keys are muffled now, softened by the erosion that comes to claim repeat plays, falling into a

Live: Autechre + Russell Haswell @ Royal Festival Hall in London, 25/11/2016

The first sound I hear is the pop of a cork. The echo is wonderful. Russell Haswell holds a champagne bottle aloft to the crowd, perhaps in homage to the decadent setting of the Royal Festival Hall. After taking two gigantic glugs straight from the bottle, treating the drink with

Interview: The Delphic Wristwatch

The Delphic Wristwatch is the project of musician, artist and librarian, Trevor Thornton. It feels like an ode to getting “carried away”, drifting down passageways of thought and tentative thematic tangents, losing intention somewhere in the thread of discovery. A daydream enacted in music and spoken literary text. At a

Review: Teruyuki Nobuchika - Still Air

The ambient orchestrations of Still Air feel instantly familiar. I live here. I am stranded in distraction, dragged onward before I can properly engage with anything. I’m surrounded by too much: the incidental noises of corporeal life floating down channels of abstract electronics; the spin of bicycle wheels and

Review: Unruly Milk - Spilaggges

Initially, it doesn’t sound like much. Scraps of sound overlapping. Guitars recorded with cheap and broken equipment. Loops that isolate indistinct and inconsequential fragments of happening: slapdash synthesiser refrains, sterile splinters of electronic percussion, recordings of honking horns and clattering machinery. Layers are thrown on top of eachother to

Review: Tasos Stamou - Koura

To drone can be an act of subservience. Sound takes the reins. The composer is reduced to a listener who occasionally intervenes, largely naïve to the outcome of their own interruptive input. Changes to the sound are not corrections in course, but opportunities to observe the sound in a different

Review: Benjamin Nelson - First

I’m at the surface. First could be an unintentional sound. The hum of equipment left on by mistake, or the buzz of damaged cabling. It’s constant and tuneless. It’s a drone comprised of several equally vacant parts: a nauseating low whirr, a gush of white noise, a

Review: Blank Disc Trio + Ex You - Split

Which is stronger? The desire to make sound or the desire to keep quiet? Blank Disc aren’t sure. For their side of this spina!rec split, they go back and forth between proclamations of impulse and sudden retractions of regret. Do they rebel against the silence or relish the

Review: Solar Maximum: Soundtrack Event I: Uranian Fire

Psychedelia can take the form of an explosion or an implosion. In this case, it’s the latter. Instead of saturating every musical surface with vibrant, fluid plumes of happening, Solar Maximum press into the transcendence of simple, solitary movements. Uranian Fire is built from two bass guitars, embellished with

Interview: Yann Novak

The music of Yann Novak utilises all the different modes of listening. Through mindful focus, I’m able to hear the intricacies tucked at the back of the frame: the steady fracture of safety glass, the hidden rumbles of life within seemingly empty bands of noise. Yet the music is

Review: Ben McElroy - Bird-Stone

I’m inside a structure that both inhabits nature and shuts it out. A log cabin in the forest, perhaps. Just how this log cabin turns trees into a familiar artificial structure, Bird-Stone pulls from the serenity of the arboreal landscape while trying to divorce it from its brisk, untamed

Review: Camila De Laborde - Opuntia

“There is no end,” chants Camila Fuchs during the third track on Opuntia. It’s an apt statement for music that manifests as a continuous, restless transformation process. Over the course of 14 minutes, I hear these pieces strive to adapt and re-adapt to their environment, as tiny modulations in

Event: Tony Conrad – Completely In The Present @ The Winchester in Bournemouth, 09/11/2016

ATTN:Magazine presents an evening celebrating the work of Tony Conrad: artist, filmmaker, minimalist musician, violin-aided manipulator of time and tonality. TONY CONRAD – COMPLETELY IN THE PRESENT (SCREENING) Tyler Hubby’s documentary on Tony Conrad’s life and work. http://www.tonyconradmovie.com/untitled-gallery INSTAL 06 (LIVE) One-off improvisatory quartet

Interview: Sarah Davachi

In Davachi’s music, I hear a negotiation between human instigation and letting be. Sometimes I catch little traces of melodic patterns, as she sends synthesisers through little zig-zagging motifs that rise out of the drones and return to them. At other points, she simply allows the instrument to play

Review: René Aquarius - Blight

When listening to percussion, my focus tends to be drawn more to the player than the instrument. Rhythms are merely the translation of a body in movement; the output of a synchronous flexing and failing, amplifying a sequence of muscle twitches through membranes of metal, wood and plastic. Yet on

Interview: Robbie Judkins

Judkins’ music as Left Hand Cuts Off The Right is often a collage of simultaneous curiosities. The sounds of various animals. Instruments from around the world. Circuit bent electronics. Humid drones. It’s appropriate for an artist that seems to thrive on having numerous projects in parallel operation: playing guitar

Review: Usva - S/T

This record is a bleak day in winter. The spindly acoustic guitar of Lauri Hyvärinen sounds like a tree stripped back to its branches, all jagged and starved of colour. The bowed cymbals of Naoto Yamagishi cut through the room like a bitter wind, sending a penetrative chill shuddering through

Review: Wild Anima - Blue Twenty-Two

The reverb on Alex Alexopolous’ voice is exact. Thick enough to conjure the indistinction of semi-consciousness – the groggy half-hour upon first awakening, the auditory hallucinations that can often bedeck the boundary of sleep or deep meditation – yet not so dense to obscure the humanity that resonates within her melodies. I

Interview: MoE

It was only a matter of time before this interview came to fruition. In the past few years, I’ve found myself confronted with the music of Guro Skumsnes Moe over and over again. I first saw her performing with Årabrot at Desertfest 2014. Later in the same year, my

Review: Paul Nataraj - You Sound Like A Broken Record

It’s an appropriate time to be writing this review. Recently I’ve been thinking about how the listener impresses themselves upon the listening experience and vice versa. I’m planning to include a new section in the ATTN:Newsletter this month, where an artist writes a few sentences on

Review: Morten Poulsen - Aerodynamics

Whenever I’m travelling by plane, I only acknowledge the sheer volume of my soundscape when I try to listen to music over headphones. I find myself maxing out the volume on my phone to allow the music to protrude out of the din. At this point, I’ll often

Interview: Marta De Pascalis

Were it not for the durational limits of the cassette tape, I’m sure that the latest release by Marta De Pascalis – a musician originally from Rome, currently residing in Berlin – would go on forever. Using a couple of synthesisers and a tape loop system, Anzar generates the musical equivalent

Review: Laura Cannell - Simultaneous Flight Movement

There are numerous beautiful collisions on Simultaneous Flight Movement. The most apparent is Laura Cannell’s instruments (fiddle and recorder) splashing against the walls of Suffolk’s Southwold Lighthouse, creating a reverb that rinses the entirety of the cylindrical structure and carries a very tactile impression of the cold brick

Review: Siavash Amini + Matt Finney - Familial Rot

On opening track “Whole Summer”, I hear his voice for a moment as he stoops under Siavash Amini’s downpour of electronic rain. He’s engulfed by an oncoming blizzard of sad static and is nowhere to be seen once the noise finally clears. I meet him again briefly at

Interview: BESS

Mooncore is a percussive autopsy. After sampling the drum kit from every direction – using an array of different microphones, capturing the sounds that reside in every material within the kit – BESS processed the source audio into looped resonances, vacant white noise and downpours of plastic and wood. Each sound is

Review: Norwell - Grasslands

Each piece is an extract of an infinite loop. When I’m halfway through, I’m hearing the music’s future with the same clarity that illuminates its present and preserves its past. A pulsating synthesiser spans out behind me and before me. And while the road may curve with

Review: Porya Hatami - Phone To Logos

It was only this morning I was pondering the idea of “unreleased tracks”. These aren’t always the pieces that fail to break the creator’s quality threshold (otherwise, what would be the purpose of releasing them at all?), but outcasts that don’t belong within the context of full

Review: Modelbau - Judder

It’s difficult to tell whether Judder is the product of a consciously absent composer, or the product of a composer capable of emulating natural forces. Whatever the answer, Frans de Waard is only a peripheral body in the listening experience. The album uses compositional stillness to accentuate the onset

Review: Meridian Brothers - El Advenimiento Del Castillo Mujer

When I hear El Advenimiento Del Castillo Mujer, I think of an oddball Victorian depiction of future automobile technology, as loud and mechanically inefficient as it is crookedly beautiful. It’s covered in paraphernalia that rattles and jangles as it moves, puffing out clouds of smog as it lurches forward,

Interview: Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard

Now I think about it, I’ve been fascinated by the phenomena explored through Løkkegaard’s SOUND X SOUND project since I was a small child. I used to go see Tottenham Hotspur play several times a season, and forever marvelled at how the congregation of thousands of chanting fans

Live: Organ Reframed - Daylight Music at Union Chapel in London, 08/10/2016

The atmosphere at the Union Chapel catches me off guard. I’ve been here several times before, but only ever in the evenings – often when the lighting is lower and the music is drearier (Earth, Oxbow Orchestra). It’s noon when I walk in. I’m immediately greeted by a

Review: Stuart Chalmers - Imaginary Musicks Vol. 5

The past is collection of islands. Memories, tapes, books. All abandoned by the pertinence of the present tense, recalled out of the archives in an order governed by willpower rather than historical chronology, divorced from the context that initially brought them to be. Memories come to me out of sequence,

Review: Jessica Pavone - Silent Spills

Sometimes I forget to be grateful. When I’m feeling distracted or impatient, my ears start to blur sounds just as tired eyes soften shapes; I hear the overall shape but start to reject the nuances within them, casually allowing the nourishment of total experience to pass me by. Sometimes

Interview: Robert Curgenven

Having listened to Curgenven’s last few releases intensely over the past weeks, I’ve become particularly captivated by his documentation and conveyance of air pressure: the organ tones wafting into open space on SIRÈNE, the resonances rippling through heat on They Tore The Earth, the flutter of air around

Review: Lärmshutz - Sleepcycles

Lie down. Close your eyes. Open them again. Seven or eight hours have passed. You might awake with the traces of a dream draining from your mind – flashes of forgotten faces and strange melds of memory – yet sleep is ultimately a period of absent self; a blank interlude between undulating

Review: Dan O'Connor - IN/EX

Every time a breath passes through the trumpet, something different happens. Often the air will pass through effortlessly. At other points, it splutters and dies as the mouth seals shut, or drags a squeal of brass resonance along with it, or cuts out to form glottalstops of exhalation. Sometimes, it

Review: Franck Vigroux - Rapport sur le Désordre

Rapport sur le Désordre is the music that might reign over the nightmares of a bleeding edge AI scientist. Someone whose days are spent deep inside the guts of algorithmic code, and whose evenings are spent fraught with anxiety about the implications of increasingly technological power and ubiquity. Vigroux transforms

Review: Tse Tse Fly - Easy Listening Volume One

Tse Tse Fly is an experimental artistic collective based in Dubai, celebrating avant garde music created all across the Middle East. Easy Listening Volume One is the collective’s first compilation release, showcasing the sounds that occupy the gulf between silence and the glistening capitalist noise for which Dubai is

Review: Exhaustion/Wanders - II

In my head, it plays out like this. Mere moments before pressing record, an earthquake rips through the Exhaustion rehearsal space. The lights cut out. The walls fall down. Everyone is bruised and confused. II documents the aftermath, as four musicians freak out and try to take stock. Guitar, drums,

Review: Sly & The Family Drone - Appetite For Tax Deduction

Many Sly records are lessons in persistence. They begin as piles of broken material (static dribbling out of frayed cabling, dreary-black slicks of feedback) before assembling, miraculously, into lively percussive workouts. It’s like a dilapidated motor vehicle placed under repair, drilled and hammered until the wheels start to turn

Review: Bourgeois Speedball - Red Threads

I can’t keep up with this. Sounds are flying across my field of hearing: bursts of spoken monologue chopped and incessantly looped, disruptive clangs and rattles of protest, pop songs squished out of recognisable shape, plastic synthesisers coughing and bleating. It should be an unwholesome mess. Yet thanks to

Review: Hypnopazūzu - Create Christ, Sailor Boy

The image that persists throughout Create Christ, Sailor Boy is that of the inexorable marching army, rising over hillsides and gliding effortlessly across open fields. Like the war in which this army are engaged, the album is enveloping and unstoppable. It submits individual free will to the tide of terrible

Interview: Idle Chatter

Idle Chatter is a brand new venue for experimental music in Salford. More than that, it’s a space where live performance comes first; a dedicated (and gorgeous) warehouse space for the enactment and experience of live artistry, capable of adapting to accommodate the entire spectrum of Manchester’s experimental

Review: Hans Tammen - Deus Ex Machina

I’m sure you’ve seen those home videos where someone suddenly realises their clothes have caught fire. Initially calm and oblivious, the victim promptly jolts into wide-eyed alarm and enters survival mode, thrashing around to shed the particular layer as quickly as possible, occasionally running in circles in a

Review: Hifiklub - Mayol

For the first 20 minutes of Mayol, Hifiklub are ascending. The crowd noise of France’s Toulon stadium – as captured during a rugby match – goes from a deafening roar to a mere speck in the field of hearing, as drums and bass propel the music upward in steady shunted bursts.

Review: Sarah Rasines - Tommy Hilfiger

Your first listen to Tommy Hilfiger will pass you by. A rumble of thunder, a steady throb of electronics, an accordion jaunt. Gone. What just happened? It’s like a cryptic voicemail message, building up to a deep confession before bottling it and cutting the line dead. Rasines leaves me

Review: Razen - Endrhymes

Endrhymes is a never-ending fire drill. Sirens wail across rooms and hallways, crushing the air with excruciating shrill frequencies, urgently demanding an evacuation of the space. Yet there is no fire, and there is no way out. Listening to this record is like meandering through corridors under the persistent bleat

Live: Fort Process at Newhaven Fort, 03/09/2016

I hear a strange hum emanating from a small doorway. I follow the hum down a pitch-black corridor and come to a dead end, with the hum leading up a stairwell I can’t access. I traipse back out of the corridor and set off for somewhere else. My day

Review: Ekin Fil - Being Near

Ekin Fil grants these songs just enough impetus to exist, but no more. Almost every track brandishes a muffled tom drum heartbeat, providing constant confirmation that blood is still being pumped around the music’s withering frame. The reassurance is necessary. Ekin Fil’s voice is barely strong enough to

Interview: Bethan Kellough

Aven needs to be heard both quietly over headphones and loudly over speakers. Through headphones, the 27-minute piece unveils Bethan Kellough’s wondrous capabilities as a sound sculptor, slotting violins amidst field recordings of turbulent weather and placid currents of water, with sounds subsuming others like pebbles engulfed by clasping

Review: Le Cable De Feu - Firewire

I spend much of Firewire feeling trapped within an uncomfortable stale heat: locked inside a server room with no windows, surrounded by broken fans and the hot throb of electricity, sweating into the carpet. I blame those drones. The drones that clog up the air on opening track “Contre Sens”

Interview: Landscape : Islands

I’d never previously given any thought to the potential for collaboration between sound and ceramics, although artist / curator Joseph Young has spent much of the past few years exploring the innumerable ways they may intersect and interact. Many of these explorations have been alongside curator and ceramicist Kay Aplin,

Review: Emiliano Romanelli - Tabulatura (Volume 1)

Romanelli holds his sounds in place and asks me to look closer. Each of the guitar drones sways like the branches of a tree, shifting slowly through different volume levels and harmonic profiles, veering back and forth over a central point. The movement is enough to gift the album a

Review: William Ryan Fritch - Clean War

If the song is strong enough, it can transcend anything. It can cut through the fog of antiquity like a lighthouse beam. It can rise above the wounds of mistreatment, powered by a melodic strength that obliterates any symptoms of physical weakness. The songs are William Ryan Fritch are sincere

Live: CRAM Festival - Jason Alder + Tom Jackson + Alex Ward, Marcio Mattos, Sue Lynch + Adrian Northover

Last year I had the agony of being tantalised by the idea of CRAM Festival (thanks to an interview I conducted with its three curators) without being able to attend the event itself. This year, I’m able to make it up to Hundred Years Gallery for a mere taste:

Review: Tutti Harp - Tła

The movement of Tła is unique. Without drums to provide a sense of physical impact (note – this is the second review in a row to note the allure of drumless beats), each track surges forward in a series of limbless, aquatic thrusts. One beat ripples into the next; the body

Review: Sote - Hyper-urban

Like a drummer anxiously tapping against desks, bins and walls in the absence of an actual kit, Hyber-urban puts forth the notion that the irresistible force of rhythm will always find a way to manifest – even when starved of conventional resources. Sote finds the electronic equivalent of junkyard material (stray

Review: Elif Yalvaç - CloudScapes

Six pieces, six sonic evocations of rare cloud types. The mesmeric, almost contradictory essence of clouds resides in their combination of gaseousness and shapeliness; the puffy dispersal of vapour, curbed by edges that cut sharply into the sky. Spillages frozen in time and space. Elif Yalvaç manages to generate this

Review: Ordre Etern - Revolució Soterrada

It’s not necessarily strength that drives Revolució Soterrada, but strain: the act of pushing back against the walls that close in, and screaming as counter-active forces endeavour to strangle the throat shut. The music is never permitted to rise fully to its feet, yet it never ceases to try.

Review: The Overtone Ensemble - S/T

Tim Catlin’s Overtone Ensemble (completed here by Atticus Bastow, Philip Brophy and David Brown) centres on his self-made instrument called a “Vibrassa”: an array of vertical aluminium rods, all set to a different microtonal tuning, which emit pristine sustained tones when stroked by hand. They gleam fiercely like stars,

Review: Mammoth Ulthana - Particular Factors

Particular Factors is an ode to the awakening of instruments. When the minutiae of composition are stripped away, all that remains is the consequence of movement, impact and resonance: sound shuddering through objects and gifting voice to the inanimate; metallic materials clanging in sonorous, glistening tones that reflect their very

Interview: Bechdel

Bechdel is a new bi-monthly events series based in Brighton, focused on promoting female artists working in all manner of experimental sound. The lineup for the first two events has been ludicrous, featuring the likes of Lutine, Postcards From The Volcano, Lisa Jayne, The Zero Map and The Larsens (the

Review: Brian Case - Tense Nature

Case situates himself as an observer, not a creator. These pieces carry the sense of unfurling of their own accord. Electronic loops throb like tiny hearts. Guitar strings hum like the labour of laboratory monitoring equipment. None of the tracks have distinct beginnings or ends, cutting off abruptly like extracts

Review: Architeuthis Rex - Stilbon Is Dead

Architeuthis Rex are climbing into the sky. They stack electronics upon layers of distorted drone, whistling feedback, dusty keyboards, bowed cymbals, ethereal voices…anything that can be used to extend the tower of sound, which sways precariously as it clasps at the open air. Conceptually, the band deal with the

Live: Full Of Noises Archive Night #1 - Howlround + Ingrid Plum + Sybella Perry & Iain Woods + Helen Petts

Full Of Noises festival presents an evening of film and live music as part of the V22 SUMMER CLUB // SOUND series, curated by Helen Frosi (SoundFjord) and Andie Brown (These Feathers Have Plumes). Many of my favourite gigs been warm, pleasantly informal affairs. I recall those events at which I

Review: Juan Antonio Nieto + Metek - Umber

The most prominent force on Umber is empty space. I hear winds of different thicknesses and speeds, somersaulting through spaces of varying size and texture, enlivening loose surfaces and microphone membranes. I hear the rush of air through gigantic stone structures (old forts perhaps?), and objects splashing into the echoes

Interview: Mariska De Groot

September 3rd 2016 sees the return of Fort Process: a one-day festival of exploratory sound and multi-disciplinary art, placing performances and installations within the eclectic acoustic spaces of Newhaven Fort in Sussex. This year’s lineup includes Carla Bozulich, Pierre Bastien, Limpe Fuchs, David Toop, Toshimaru Nakamura, Sarah Angliss and

Review: MJ Guider - Precious Systems

When songwriting is smothered in echoes, it’s often affiliated with states of confusion or absent concentration. Precious Systems demonstrates how textural hazes can become agents of conviction. Echo isn’t used to conceal the song within smokes of uncertainty; instead, it pushes the core sentiment outward like a tidal

Review: Jeph Jerman - 34°111'3"N 111°95'4"W

I know I’m hearing the recordings of an abandoned windmill, as captured by a minidisc recorder and a handmade contact microphone. And that’s all I know. I can only guess what materials and mechanisms are present. Perhaps those high metallic wines are the sound of Jerman forcing the

Review: Bjarni Gunnarsson - Paths

“It’s about the journey, not the destination.” As I listen to the record, my mind drifts helplessly toward this cliché. I wince as I feel it happening. Yet perhaps thanks to the album title, my experience of Paths centres on this notion; the thrill of unforeseeable turns and ruptures

Review: Braeyden Jae - Fog Mirror

Today is a suitable day to write about Fog Mirror. It’s midday and my mind is thoroughly clouded. I didn’t sleep well. I drank too much last night. I feel dislocated from the world outside; the edges of my vision into a cinematic dream sequence, with public chatter

Review: H Takahashi - Body Trip

The sounds are the colour of bowling alley candy: E-number shades of blue, pink, red and green. Spheres of all different sizes – some as small as sugar granules, others as big as gobstoppers – glisten and bounce against the surfaces of the room, knocking against eachother and leaping away again. They

Review: Larkian - Iterations : alterations

In the opening moments of “Cobb”, the guitar of Cyril Monnard is scattered into tiny droplets of delay. Pinch harmonics patter like light rain, pre-empting the onset of worse weather. Low notes start to join them. Slowly, it intensifies: leads shower overhead, gradually becoming a heavier stream of interwoven harmony.

Review: Eluvium - False Readings On

When the press release refers to False Readings On as “an hour-long meditation on self-doubt, anxiety, and separation from one’s self”, my experience clicks into place. The synths warble like an aged VHS tape, glowing with over-saturated hues of major key, reminiscent of home movies in their surreal vibrancy

Review: Three Free Radicals - Diary Of A Left-Handed Sleepwalker

Increasingly, it becomes difficult to separate actual guitar from the unnatural twitches of electronic processing. Mart Soo’s playing is riddled with snap decisions and intentional failures; the insatiable scurries of human fingers, scampering away from particular portions of the fretboard only to become hopelessly tangled up elsewhere. He fidgets

Review: Makemake - From The Earth To The Moon

I press play. Suddenly I’m squatting amidst the junk objects and cymbals, with two well-worn guitar amplifiers pointing inward from either side. The room feels dank and unpleasantly cramped. In my mind, Makemake are hunched over their speakers like wretched beasts locked away in the dark, banished from the

Review: Arturas Bumšteinas - Organ Safari Lituanica

Even when Organ Safari Lituanica splays into a mess of tooting dissonance and billowing air, there remains a sense of conscious organisation. The album never reaches a state of total chaos; organs are forced to leave or hush down if the space becomes too unruly, and each organ seems to

Review: Alan Courtis - Crystal Faisa

Two sides, two acoustic scenarios, two onslaughts of sound. Each of these seven-minute pieces is a meditation on a separate circumstance. Side one is a piano recorded in a Japanese train station. Side two is a recording of several electric guitars in an Argentinian studio. In each instance, Courtis seems

Interview: A.R.Kane

I hadn’t seen London’s A.R.Kane live before I watched them at Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona last month. Without a doubt, they played one of my favourite sets of the weekend. Aside from the sheer weight of sound emanating from just three people – guitars and feedback

Interview: String Noise

String Noise are New York violinists Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim. They term themselves a “classical, avant-punk violin duo”, which goes some way to conveying their collision of technical finesse and brazen, often visceral approach to experimentation. As well as performing the material of modern classical mainstays – Scelsi, Stockhausen etc

Review: KP Transmission - Temnoe Poznaetsya Chernim

The artwork for Temnoe Poznaetsya Chernim is a blurred monochromatic photograph. A distant streetlight (or moonlight?) swirls in the background, while a dog-shaped silhouette peers out over the murk. Details are difficult to identify, and the way in which the shapes melt into eachother suggests that it was taken on

Review: Lars Lundehave Hansen - Terminal Velocity

21 tracks, 43 minutes. This breed of sound design usually thrives within much longer durations. When drones are permitted to flower over the course of a quarter-hour, evolving at a pace too gradual to perceive moment-by-moment, they often emulate some of the more elegant and cyclical progressions of nature: incremental

Review: Wilder Gonzales Agreda - Scala Mega Hertz

The pieces almost fit. Like a word that poises itself on the tip of the tongue, teetering on the edge of conscious recollection, Scala Mega Hertz is one vital piece away from becoming totally comprehensible. Throbs of electronics and vocal loops dance around the perimeter of the beats but refuse

Review: Klara Lewis - Too

And so Too materialises all by itself, thickening from the sound of amplifiers left humming, of vocal loops beating against the walls like trapped moths, of the buoyant rhythms of plastic cups being rubbed together. The opening four minutes, titled “View”, embark on a transition from idle noise to visceral,

Review: Adamante - Exercícios Sobre Mundanidade

Exercícios Sobre Mundanidade starts with an eerie descent down a mansion staircase. The piano creeps between two chords and guitars bluster in through the windows, adorning the soundscape with a ghoulish breed of foreboding. The more the melody falters, the more those peripheral guitars seem to flare up in

Review: Cecilia Quinteros + Wenchi Lazo - YAS

Two instruments, two very different improvisatory circumstances. I hear Cecilia Quinteros’ cello through a very organic lens: the fierce strike of the bow, the fingers skipping up and down the neck, the sound rushing into the resonant wooden body of the instrument. Changes in timbre are conducted through changes in

Review: Linden Pomeroy - Ikiryo

Linden Pomeroy doesn’t use delay and reverb to generate a sense of space, but to smother it. By sending each guitar note through funnels of infinite repeat, opening track “Festival Of Red Leaves” grows tendrils of harmony and compounded feedback, which press together until the initial melodious sentiment is

Interview: Mohammad

Between May 2014 and May 2015, Greek band Mohammad released a trilogy of albums exploring the sounds of a particular geographical area (34°Ν – 42°Ν & 19°Ε – 29°Ε). By doing so, the group called upon parallels between their sound and the physical landscape: the bass frequencies that

Review: HAU - ii. ep

My head is in a state of sleepless disarray. At the time of writing, I’ve just roused myself from six hours of restless daytime sleep, about to start my second nightshift in a consecutive set of three. If there’s a plus to this scenario, it’s that I’

Review: Chambers - Sigma Flare II

There is a quiet turbulence here. When those dub beats start to pulse from beneath, the record asserts a relationship with urban destitution. Harmonies ricochet against concrete surfaces, navigating a noise that hangs in the air like factory dust, while drones curdle into a smog of dissonance. But when the

Review: Oscillotron - Cataclysm

Within Cataclysm, I hear that dystopian future thrown forth by the sci-fi of the 1970s: innumerable computers encased in dull grey chassis, outlandish cars hurtling into green horizon lines, hulking robots that resembled upturned fax machines with wheels affixed. Technology is omnipresent, but rather than shrinking into palm-sized devices and

Review: The Pololáníks - The Suspicious Slumber Party

This record is actually a collection of abandoned Pololáníks material, curated into a new release by Prague-based musician Tomáš Procházka (aka Federsel). These are the sounds that were put forward by improvisatory impulse, yet overruled by the more rigorous curation of retrospect. Clearly, the potency held by these pieces at

Review: K.lust - Liven

Essentially, Liven brings together six beautiful pieces of regenerative, self-powering machinery. The rhythms spin freely like bicycle wheels, powering all manner of beautiful ambient lights and clacking wooden winches, which in turn – through a mysterious, levitational defiance of earthly physics – feed their energy back into the beats that cycle freely

Review: Andrew Reddy - Spitting Broken Teeth And Mistranslations

If Andrew Reddy’s musical craft were to be transposed into the physical realm, he’d doubtless be working with gravel, grit and rock. Sounds crumble and collide, mimicking avalanche tremors and tectonic restlessness. Steam bursts through the cracks like hot springs. There’s the implication of military transport – chopping

Review: Chemiefaserwerk - Collagen

“We live in a world of musical undo and versioning.” – R. Henke This quote sits atop the Bandcamp release description for Collagen. Of course, undo and versioning are the primary symptoms of digital music in the modern age: the transience and potential rearrangement of cloud-stored files, the infinite production scrutiny

Live: THIS IS A VOICE @ Wellcome Collection in London, 29/05/2016

In many respects, Marcus Coates’ installation here acts as a miniature emblem of THIS IS A VOICE in its entirety. “Dawn Chorus” is a multi-screen ensemble of individuals in isolated settings: in the bath, at the breakfast table, in a doctor’s waiting room, in a stationary car. By having

Interview: Graham Dunning

If you’re currently unfamiliar with Graham Dunning’s “mechanical techno”, treat yourself to this demonstration video. Piece by piece, he crafts machines made out of records, modified tone arms, dangled contact mics, slinky-springs, pedal FX and other objects, using the rotary motion of the turntable (along with additional motors)

Review: Mas - Géométrie du Coeur

The landscape of Géométrie du Coeur is, quite vividly, a city at night. Shadowy characters press into the walls of high rise buildings, hunching away from the observant glow of streetlamps. My peripheral vision stirs with stray animals and flickering electricity, as the landscape sits in an eerie air of

Review: Bouchons d'Oreilles - Faces

When the noise dies down on opening track “Storyteller”, I hear a quivering layer of static. This is as close as the record comes to stillness. When everything else vacates – the strange electronic signals that sway erratically like fire hoses, the contorted tubes of classical music – all that’s left

Interview: Aaron Turner (SUMAC)

Isis were an incredibly important band for me. I was 14 when I initially heard their 2004 record “Panopticon”, and found myself appreciating – for the first time – how rock music could harness the qualities of patience and open space. I was particularly transfixed by how the guitars of “Backlit” traded

Live: 290516|MS[k]|TRw (Matthew Sergeant/Emma Lloyd + Tom Rose), The Yard Theatre & Club, London, 29/05/2016

I imagine a gigantic pane of glass. I’m on one side, Wisty is on the other. Tom Rose’s new installation is playing over a hardy-looking set of nightclub speakers (the sort designed to stay intact during gigantic throbs of techno), spilling into a space occupied by a bar

Review: Ida Toninato - Strangeness Is Gratitude

Through the process of these solo improvisations for saxophone, Ida Toninato comes to know herself and the space she inhabits. Her instrument emits bullets of echolocation in the form of sharp, low bleats, feeling the spread and texture of the walls as her pulses collide with them. Low drones run

Review: Jockel Liess - Fluid Variations

Within Fluid Variations, the tones form numerous intersecting currents. They surge into the frame and force eachother back. They climb over eachother, riding the sloping drones as they creep through upward fades and gradually dissipate. Each interaction triggers a change in direction which, however small, invariably triggers another. Before long,

Review: Roarke Menzies - Corporeal

Some of the pulses on Corporeal are undoubtedly machine-based. Hydraulic arms pound against surfaces, each thrust announced by a fierce expulsion of air. The clack and whine of an unoiled rotary mechanism. The pump of an electronic bass drum. Elsewhere, the pulses are that of flesh and blood and ungainly

Interview: ddmmyy (Tom Rose + Matthew Sergeant + Emma Lloyd)

This coming Sunday (May 29th), composer Matthew Sergeant will be presenting his installation/performance “[kiss]” at the Yard Theatre & Club in London. The piece consists of a 4-5 hour violin performance that skirts the perimeters of pitch and audibility; a thin, extended strand of glitch and friction between twine

Review: Masayuki Imanishi - Tone

Imanishi divulges his sound sources. Radio, paper, field recordings. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that I’m listening to the microscopic sounds of plant life and microbial growth: the bubbling of cell division, the tinny hums of photosynthesis, the slosh of water molecules, the chattering sines of inter-cell

Review: Left Hand Cuts Off The Right - Beautiful Pigs, Disgusting Humans

“Clammy” is the first word that comes to mind. Robbie Judkins seems to specialise in sounds that stick to my face and get caught in my hair. I feel smothered and unclean within the tangle of viscous electronics and mouldy tape samples, picking bits of static and drone out of

Review: Angelina Yershova - Piano's Abyss

If I wasn’t informed in advance that I’m hearing a piano (albeit with the output stretched and twisted out of its original shape), would I have been able to deduce this independently? Does Piano’s Abyss carry me deeper into the identity of the instrument, or does it

Review: Lasse-Marc Riek - Schwarm

The recordings of Schwarm were captured within a flight corridor near Frankfurt airport, which cuts through the small town of Hanau Steinheim. An image search for the town depicts a place of quaint and serene charm, with beautiful historical architecture and abundant greenery; castle turrets sprouting from behind trees, spacious

Review: Ned Milligan - Continental Burns

On the artwork for Continental Burns, children are playing in the sea. The sky above is a cracked turquoise dusk – a mixture of faded photographic ink and the true colour of the evening. It’s not just the image that’s blemished with age and imperfect exposure. For the first

Review: Kyoka - SH

The six electronic pieces of SH were recorded/edited during sound checks and live performances. Compared to the studio – where hours and hours can be lost to the acts of revision and refinement – the performance environment is strictly adherent to the clock. The artist works within pre-defined times, often shaping

Interview: Jon Mueller

Mueller is one of a handful of artists that has really, really excited me over the past couple of years. Many of his recent releases have centred on duets between drums and the wordless voice, digging deep within solitary ideas over vast stretches of time, dragging me beneath the surface

Review: M. Ostermeier - Tiny Birds

Ostermeier’s piano melodies refrain from excess. Their allure doesn’t reside in ornamental detail or the presence of intricate little trills, but for the elegant slopes that carry one chord into another. The self-conscious hesitations and sentimental indulgence that dictate when a note is depressed, and for how long.

Review: Aires - Fantasmas

What if the sky suddenly shifted in colour? From midday blue to an alien green, with clouds circulating like ink swirling in an unplugged sink? This is what Fantasmas feels like: noise dispersing overhead in strange, unnaturally shaded vapours, blotting out earthly equilibrium and instating foreboding in its place. The

Review: Clara Engel - Visitors Are Allowed One Kiss

The songs of Clara Engel gradually accumulate in empathetic weight. The guitar repeats a single sentiment until I understand it, patiently waiting as I acquaint myself with the rhythm of the fingers and the grave pendulums of melody. At the core of each of these five pieces are kernels of

Review: Cello & Laptop - Transient Accidents

What is the laptop to the cello? It’s a landscape generator: a vibrant backdrop of birdsong, insects and the occasional whoosh of passing traffic, like a lush field spilling out the back of a village in the summer. The cello navigates the field recordings like a snake carving a

Interview: Norman Westberg

Like most people, I discovered Norman Westberg through his role as guitarist in Swans. In the context of the band, Westberg’s input seems less concerned with establishing melody and more with furnishing the Swans landscape with objects and acts of nature: spurts of overdrive foam, wood-carved slopes of dissonance.

Review: Kib Elektra - Blemishes

I love the moments on Blemishes when Kib Elektra’s voice hangs like lanterns, lingering obliviously in pleasant harmony as the music jolts and pounds from beneath. And the moments when delay catches her sibilance, carrying her words over synthesisers with the delicate jerks of a pond skater. She dangles

Review: Giant Gutter From Outer Space - Stumm

The only reason Giant Gutter indulge in the “pretty” (i.e. the opening moments of “Sturm” which glisten like wind chimes catching the light) is to prove how quickly things can go terribly wrong. Within a matter of seconds, the track ruptures like an earthquake: the bass shifts from delicate

Review: VOX SOL - A Place Colder And Brighter Than The Days Of His Youth

The 22 minutes of A Place… enact a state of memory jam, where the sheer mass of recollection starts to overwhelm the limited capacity of the mind. Slugs of voice and noise manage to seep to the surface, damaged by the combination of extreme heat and compression, carrying the sloppy

Review: Treyverb - A Year Without Words

The first time I listened through A Year Without Words, I spent the entire listen staring into space; specifically, the window of my third-floor flat, through which I can see the sky, the high branches of idle trees and the antenna reaching out of the top of high-rise buildings. It

Review: Suplington - Music For Life Cycles (I-VII)

Suplington’s new 21-minute composition is a perpetual act of motion and incompletion. The chord progressions never resolve, instead tilting between different states of suspense, actively welcoming the arpeggiations that send them into furious spirals of sound. Percussively, the track is driven by what appears to be a wood block

Review: France Jobin - Singulum

Singulum arrives like a retriggered memory: not a sudden and fully-formed epiphany, but an image that emerges through a process of molecular restoration, enacted with the same painstaking patience with which memories fade to begin with. Each piece flowers from buds of grainy piano loop or photic drone, revealing slithers

Review: Le Revelateur - Hyper

I feel like I’m standing at an immaterial T-junction of the internet: data hurtling back and forth in binary pulses, prism refractions of orchestra drone shining through the centre, convulsions of electricity on all sides. I’m not sure where to look. Where music of the digital realm can

Interview: Laura Cannell

I heard Laura Cannell for the first time only a couple of weeks back, while I was eagerly awaiting acoustic sets by Thurston Moore and Michael Gira at the London Barbican. Cannell’s supporting set – consisting largely of solo pieces for fiddle or double recorder – knocked me sideways; a mercurial

Review: Various Artists - This Is Kologo Power!

A kologo is a two-stringed lute from West Africa, with a long cylindrical neck and a resonating chamber made out of a dried calabash gourd (the large, round fruit of the calabash vine). The tone of the instrument is a firm, bright clack – vigorous in its plucked attack and beautiful

Interview: Andrew Tuttle

15 seconds into Fantasy League – the latest album by Australian composer Andrew Tuttle – a banjo springs into the frame, dancing jubilantly atop a slow-swelling drone, swaying over the synthesiser haze like plant life indulging a summer breeze. The record is full of rich visions like this; intersections of moist electronics

Review: Genus Inkasso - Odd Little Gestures

It’s a nice name for a record, because I get the impression that Genus Inkasso doesn’t entirely comprehend the rationale behind his own musical twitches and twists. Odd Little Gestures is a 26-minute exercise in acting without the obstruction of forethought or self-analysis; letting the hands enact the

Review: Mars-96 - Live At Dada

There’s too much energy rumbling through Mars-96 to guarantee anything longer than 30 seconds of rhythmic coherence (melodic coherence never gets a look in). For fleeting stretches, everything locks down – drums solidify into jackhammer rhythms while the guitars twitch uncomfortably within the state of unison, lingering upon the idea

Review: Himukalt - Conditions Of Acrimony

Ester Kärkkäinen works with the outer crust of music. The part that artists normally throw away; the in-between breaths, the whirrs of unwanted interference, the buzz of bad wiring, the amplified groan of labouring tape machines. Conditions Of Acrimony is orchestrated from failure, collecting those moments when voices fail to

Review: Amute - Bending Time In Waves

The first track is called “You’re Free Now!”. As promised, I am liberated. Tom drums bound freely like galloping legs, tumbling in time to a piano that gleefully distorts as it spills beyond stereo restraint. It’s a viscerally happy sound, expressing jubilance as much with enthusiastic aerobic gestures

Review: Maja S. K. Ratkje - Crepuscular Hour

By positioning the musicians at the perimeter and the audience at the centre, Crepuscular Hour becomes an act of materialisation. Instead of bursting outward and dispelling into the open air, sound funnels inward and solidifies – guitars react effervescently with waves of choir, while organs meld with flumes of brass and

Interview: Dälek

Hip hop outfit Dälek have technically been on hiatus since 2011, although their existing records have continued to reveal themselves to me over the course of the band’s dormancy. Even an album like Absence – which was the first Dälek record I bought, a whole 10 years ago now – is

Live: Michael Gira + Thurston Moore + Laura Cannell @ London Barbican, 30/03/2016

Laura Cannell’s music flutters and swoops across the grand open space of the Barbican concert hall. Harmonies graciously interweave; splay dramatically into separate strands; re-align like birds reclaiming flight formation; dive and rise like leaves hurdling a light wind. When playing the overbowed fiddle (which replaces the standard bow

Review: Flaming Pines + Arash Akbari - Absence

It’s important to listen. As someone whose main interaction with Iran is through the mainstream British media, I have a very diluted (and undoubtedly warped) understanding of the country and the plethora of artists within it. Not only would it be stupid to slot Absence – a compilation of Iranian

Interview: SM-LL

I first met Martin J Thompson back in Summer 2012. As we browsed the shelves of SoundFjord’s pop-up record store at the V22 gallery in London, he told me of his plans to start his own record label. I’ve since forgotten most of our conversation, although I remember

Review: Garaliya - Ventricle Replicant

This is techno for alien insects. Amidst the steady rhythmic pulses and guttural synths, I hear the skitter of little legs and the scrape of body segments; syncopations crawling over themselves; digital sounds scampering in from the sides and writhe up through the centre. I imagine tiny mouths chewing at

Review: Godhole vs Crozier - Anthrophobia

Godhole can’t excavate their fury quick enough. It’s all too fast, too frenetic. Crozier’s noise starts to spit through the seams as the pressure tips into excess: funnelled between the guitars in thin jets, erupting in mini-volcanoes upon the surfaces of snare drums, smothering voices in sandpaper

Review: Bachorze - Okoły gnębione wiatrem

The saxophone sounds stranded; like a beautiful rose growing up through a crack in the concrete, emitting the sort of syrupy tones that usually nestle amidst the soft keyboards and vocal tones of a soul ballad. Here, it’s sandwiched between mistreated guitar and vacant electronics. Bachorze don’t care.

Review: Akpatok - Two Winters, Two Springs

You’re definitely missing something, so just keep listening. Each of these six pieces – created entirely using just hurdy-gurdy, shepherd bells and gongs, and only ever one at a time – is a tribute to perseverance and the sensory ignorance of the first impression. The frantic rattle of “Tree And Wind”

Review: Tomas Phillips - Limit_Fold

Limit_Fold is loaded with promise. Each sound is a probe pointing outward, patiently beckoning the arrival of the new. I’m made to listen intently for the signs of materialisation; the nascent indications of an emergent sound as it climbs out of the crumple of walkie-talkie dead air or

Interview: Richard J. Birkin

So much of Richard J. Birkin’s craft centres on human connection. His new record Vigils exhibits the warmth and understanding of an intimate conversation, with classical instrumentation (piano, strings) navigating space with a patient, empathetic grace. Yet instead of confining his music to the concert hall, Birkin often turns

Review: Sewer Election + Leda - MAAR

I’d recommend taking a look at this photograph before you read on, which acted as the source inspiration for MAAR. It was taken by Giorgio Sommer circa 1888, and shows a dog that was killed during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79BC. Like so many Pompeii inhabitants that

Review: Giulio Aldinucci - Yellow Horse

Yellow Horse is chaotically, vibrantly alive. Field recordings climb over strange bass frequencies, leap over puddles of synth, heed the commands of reversed voices. Unidentified noises recede into forests of yet more identified noises, as the stereo image heaves and contracts like a heart with many ventricles. Warped memories writhe

Review: Old Man Gloom - Mickey Rookey Live At London

It’s always interesting to hear the document of a gig you actually attended. Up until now, I remember April 3rd 2014 as a mixture of elation (finally, I was seeing an Old Man Gloom live set) and bludgeoning volume; riffs surging out of feedback and then scampering off into

Review: Prequel Tapes - Inner Systems

Ticking, pattering, flickering. The signals of mechanised preparation. A bass drum clacks along the underside of “When We Fall Into The Light” like a rollercoaster in slow ascent; synths cut out like broken strobes on “The Comfort Of Feeling Numb”, flashing in a state of violent and ominous forewarning; the

Review: Mike Majkowski - Bright Astonishment Of The Night

I hear the room emerge. I hear the double bass emerge. Over the course of an hour (divided into two long-form pieces), Mike Majkowski traces an image with sound alone. As each tone swells into wooden chamber of his instrument, or splashes gracefully against the walls of the studio, I

Interview: Sky Deep (female:pressure)

female:pressure is an international network and database of female musicians working in electronic music and digital arts. They also put on countless events, generate reports that exhibit the bleak truth about the under-representation of females at festivals and on record label rosters, as well as running a number of

Review: Cássio Figueiredo - Presença

Presença is like an old movie reel. Unlabelled; thirty years old at a guess, bearing the rust and erosion of age. I set it rolling. I’m presented with a series of murky landscape shots, covered in blotches of noise and muffled by analogue decay, jumping ungracefully from one scene

Interview: Robert Stillman

For the past five years, I’ve kept the music of Robert Stillman close by. His album Machine’s Song was one of the first records I reviewed for Rock-A-Rolla magazine. I remember listening to it on the train and feeling as though I’d time-traveled to a century prior:

Review: Verãopop - Nouveau Shamanic

Nouveau Shamanic is a slow awakening. Organs emulate the hum of an engine labouring into life. Cymbals rustle like a sleeping figure tossing and turning, gradually permeating the boundary of consciousness. The music hangs in a state of expectation, whirring and clattering in a state of agitated stillness, awaiting a

Review: Gate - Saturday Night Fever

Just like when Spinal Tap lose themselves in the labyrinth of the backstage area on their way to perform, I find myself unable to escape the airlock of the disco entrance corridor. I take endless turns down numerous dim hallways – tantalisingly close to the party in a nearby room – yet

Review: Adam Golebiewski - Pool North

What is Golebiewski hoping to find? A lot of these percussive improvisations evoke images of rummaging, prising open, scrambling – wading into piles of cymbals and frantically upturning bass drums, in a desperate search for an object that Golebiewski needs right now. There’s a violence and urgency to his process.

Review: Ersatz - Hints Of...

A hint may be emerging or receding, or eternally destined to only exist as a thin, estranged wisp of the entity itself. A hint often inhabits other sensations, manifesting as a streak of colour upon a larger shape. A hint arrives gradually, obscured and perhaps difficult to identify, easy to

Review: Reloc - Batch 0002

I’ve travelled on Berlin’s U8 metro line before. I’ve sat in the darkness, sensing movement as metronomic bumps over the joins in portions of metal rail, translating acceleration and deceleration into slight adjustments in my sense of balance, thoroughly ignoring the passing of time. I’ve felt

Review: Ed Sanders - Yiddish Speaking Socialists Of The Lower East Side

I picture Sanders sat alone in a small room, illuminated by dim candlelight. Draped over his hands is an instrument he invented called a “Pulse Lyre”: half-gloves worn over the thumbs and two most immediate fingers, activated by pressing finger and thumb together. Sanders, a microphone and his story. Over

Interview: Phil Minton

The first time I saw Phil Minton – a vocal improviser from Torquay – was in August 2014 at Supernormal Festival in Oxfordshire. I was aware that he’d been running a workshop over the weekend, although I had no idea what to expect when I turned up for the finale performance

Review: Rotorvator - Reliquies

The rhythms on Reliquies – throbbing electro-beats, metal colliding with metal – are constructed with the deliberate omission of forward movement. Instead, Rotorvator seem to slam themselves against the side of a small prison cell, teeming with an energy that has nowhere to go, flailing fists into concrete walls and titanium doors.

Review: Brave Timbers - Hope

Hope was recorded in Peel Hall, which is a concert venue that resides on the Salford University campus: generously high ceiling, candle chandeliers, 500 tiered cushion seats, sun blazing through three large windows at the back. I’ve seen pictures of it, but I could quite easily trace the dimensions

Review: JD Mason - Opalescent

As the instruments whirl around him, Mason stays strong. He points inward, eyes and hands transfixed upon the neck and fretboard of his guitar, asserting personal stability amidst a soundscape that rocks like the hull of a ship in turbulent, stormy movement. Harmoniums, keyboards and extra guitars tumble dissonantly around

Review: Marcus Hamblett - Concrete

Hamblett’s guitar playing is like a spontaneous vocal monologue. Some of the pacier fretwork mimics exclamatory rushes of speech, while the moments of hesitance see Hamblett scrambling for the appropriate phrasing for a strange and striking thought. The sudden dissonances of “Augmented” add jaunts of contradiction and abrupt verbal

Review: Temple Maps - DEC15MBER 1: Cryogenic

Wires are everywhere. Splintered rubber casing, multi-coloured junctions of cable. Temple Maps makes no attempt to conceal the mess of process, lifting off the outer casing to reveal a spaghetti of wires and manual soldering, allowing me to trace each sound back to its source within one of a number

Review: Aluk Todolo - Voix

Like a shark, the survival of Aluk Todolo hinges on incessant movement. Unlike a shark, Aluk Todolo are consciously haunted by their own mortal fragility. Percussion moves in frantic twitches and convulsive thrusts; cymbals scuttle like spiders, drums palpitate like a torso in the throes of violent nightmare. All the

Review: Tag Cloud - A Footnote Of Sorts

Recurrent throughout A Footnote Of Sorts is the harsh buzz of noise and lights. The electrical hum of an abandoned classroom. The purr of halogen signs. Voltage leaking out of fractured wiring. I start to picture Tag Cloud as a connoisseur of imperfect circuitry, with a basement stacked with broken

Review: Stinky Picnic - Minecraft

Ponky Pie Pea (which is a pseudonym, I can only assume) was three years old when she became leader/singer/primary creative orchestrator of Stinky Picnic. Her own father completes the lineup, and together they build towers of bedroom psychedelia that wobble under the weight of mantric vocal looping, manipulated

Review: Māra - Surfacing

Every time I listen to Surfacing, I fall for Faith Coloccia’s voice that little bit more. Those melodies aren’t as simple as they first seem. She wields gravity and balance to carry one note into the next, riding vocal swoops into updrafts of momentum and holding tones for

Review: Eating Flowers - God Was A White-Tailed Deer

It’s a ladder out of my own head. A ladder that reaches upward, straight into soft ambience and droplets of airborne light, where synthesisers and strings congeal like clouds and tonally mutate as winds tug at their edges. But the ladder also points down, crunching into the anchorage of

Interview: Ingrid Plum

Ingrid Plum is a conceptual artist working with sound, voice, space, video, currently based in both Denmark and England. Plangent is her debut record. Much of Plum’s previous work has centred on site-specific installation, which no doubt informs Plangent’s acoustic and environmental awareness; throughout these pieces, I hear

Review: A Wake A Week - Twelve Days

I’ve spent my last few listens to Twelve Days straining to hear the poem tucked away in the background of the opening track. A woman is reading aloud, her voice raised as if battling the rumble of the wind. I imagine her leaning over the edge of a cliff,

Feature: Animal Music

Tobias Fischer and Lara Cory run the fantastic Fifteen Questions website, which (as the title suggests) compiles 15-question interviews with all manner of sound artists and musicians. The questions are always attentive yet open, catching that balance between a comprehension of the artist’s work and a humble desire to

Review: Ryoko Akama + Bruno Duplant - immobilité

Marbles of feedback roll around tiny pillars of electronic interference, doing their utmost to try and establish a sense of stasis. The surface is never entirely flat. Never entirely balanced. The music tilts gently to the left. There’s a heavy-handed correction attempt. The music swings over to the right.

Feature: ATTN in 2015

In 2015, I wrote my first book. Storm Static Sleep is the first to be dedicated to the story of post-rock music, and stands as both my biggest undertaking and my greatest achievement. I spoke to several of my favourite musicians and discovered some of the strangest, most exhilarating adaptions

Review: Cheel Ghar - S/T

Cheel Ghar translates from Hindi as “tower of silence”, referring to gigantic circular structures used to dispose of the dead back in the 9th Century by subscribers to the Zoroastrian religion. Bodies would be left in the tower to decay and be scavenged by birds. Gigantic, resilient towers welling with

Review: Stephan Mathieu - Before Nostromo

“Minutes before the Nostromo crew awakes from hypersleep, each member has a dream.” Before Nostromo takes place inside the diegesis of Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien. Specifically, it takes place at the beginning of the film, minutes prior to the awakening of the crew. Moments before the introduction of

Review: Ancestral Voices - Night Of Visions

Night Of Visions waits patiently. It’s a ritual conducted in the dark; a quiet stir of shakers, sonorous metal plates, electronic claps and smoke-like wisps of woodwind and voice, sent drifting into the sky like a soft spiritual probe. In the absence of volume (the record feels respectful toward

Review: Dragged Into Sunlight + Gnaw Their Tongues - N.V.

N.V. sits upon a great paradox. On one hand, every nook of this record is clogged with erratic, violent instinct. There’s no space for moderated thought. Drums palpitate between blastbeaten panic attacks and rage-drunk lethargy. Guitars combust into growls of flame. Screams, blood and ash occupy any remaining

Review: Ingrid Plum - Plangent

I pick up the thread and follow it back. Plangent reads like cascade of memories arranged by sound and association; heavy rainfall triggering the reminiscence of autumnal evenings at a wood-fired home, the persistent seethe of waves inciting thoughts of train brakes during routine commutes which, in turn, picks at

Review: Flaming Pines - Tiny Portraits

The act of inhabiting place is fixed. Irrefutable. On the homepage of the Tiny Portraits website (programmed by Iranian artist Arash Akbari), each contribution is represented by a little red dot upon an interactive 3D globe. One shows the exact co-ordinates of Shikinejima Island in southern Japan. Another pinpoints Nguyễn

Review: Adoran - Children Of Mars

Like a volcano about to blow, the opening of Children Of Mars stirs with low frequency tremor and cymbal moan. A slow groove emerges like a hairline fracture running jaggedly through humming stone, the split widening as Aidan Baker strikes his drums ever harder. Gradually Adoran fulfil their own prophecy

Review: Be My Friend In Exile - Bound By An Endless Desire To Wander Down Avenues Of Apathy

This record is like a scarf wrapped round my head. The fabric muffles the clarity of the world outside. My mind clogs with claustrophobic heat, while my surroundings become a smog of objects and voices: the dulled winds of pedestrian underpasses at night, incoherent announcements over train station tannoy, guitars

Review: Jon Mueller - A Magnetic Center

Mueller smacks a single drum. The skin is slightly loose, wobbling upon impact and emitting a deep, gong-like resonance that carries all the way through until he hits it again, creating a drone that runs through the gaps in percussive attack. In both of these pieces, the drum is the

Review: Christopher Bissonnette - Pitch, Paper & Foil

I can’t call Pitch, Paper & Foil an ambient record. Within the word “ambient” are implications of dependency and stasis. With “ambient”, I anticipate sound to behave like a mattress or a warm bath; catching me as I descend, embracing and retracting around the contours of my body. I

Review: Lawrence Lek + Oliver Coates - Unreal Estate OST

“Congratulations! Your bid for Burlington House and 6 Burlington Gardens was successful. The former home of the Royal Academy of Arts is now yours.” The premise is this: the Royal Academy of Arts has been sold off to an anonymous Chinese billionaire and converted into a luxury playboy mansion. Through

Review: PERILS - S/T

Where most collaborators try to find points of parallel alignment, I get the impression that Kyle Bobby Dunn and Benoît Pioulard delight as two visions bleed into eachother with a sleepwalkers apathy. Two cloud shapes merge into a clump of neither one nor other, with wisps of dissonance curling out

Review: Dead Fader - Glass Underworld

On opening track “Boom Town”, it’s as though Dead Fader (aka John Cohen) works not in sound, but in gigantic bolts of electricity that just happen to be ferociously loud. I feel my head illuminate as buzzing drones ignite inside it, as Cohen orchestrates the noise into rhythms that

Review: Jacob Kirkegaard - Arc

Like the moon sped up, I watch Arc fade between radiance and hideous darkness. The surface is forever in motion. An illuminated underside slips beneath cloaks of shadow and then re-emerges into light, always fading in the direction of either joy or decay. Within the wheel of eternal movement, any

Review: God Pussy - Animal

I’m already numb by the end of the first hour. In fact, it’s no longer the noise that jolts me back to consciousness – it’s the silences and fade-outs that signal the transitions between tracks, lifting the foil blanket of feedback and distortion to let me take just

Review: Ian William Craig - Cradle For The Wanting

When the only instrument present is the voice, there is no stable point of reference. When it falters and dips – due to inconsistencies in exhalation puff, or the quivering strain of a held “ooh” – it collapses upon the cushion of the lungs or sinks down into the diaphragm. The layers

Live: Ragnar Kjartansson - The Visitors @ Brewer Street Car Park in London, 13/11/2015

Each of the nine screens switches on, one by one. On each, I see a musician in a different room of the house (namely, a “two-hundred year old Rokeby villa on the banks of the Hudson River in New York State”). A guitarist perched on the edge of a bed,

Review: Seabuckthorn - They Haunted Most Thickly

Immediately, it’s obvious that Andy Cartwright’s 12-string acoustic is a beloved thing. The strings are dulled from constant exposure to the outdoors. The body resonates with the warmth of a fire-heated home. His fingers run through it with unconscious intimacy, as fluid and expressive as human speech, alternating

Review: Mats Gustafsson - Piano Mating

There is no such thing as listening to Piano Mating quietly. Gustafsson activates those tones that are always loud, tapping into the resonant frequency of my eardrums. And then there’s the strange way in which volume levels increase via sheer duration, like a gushing tap filling a sink over

Review: Robin Fox - A Small Prometheus

Each track whirrs into life. Metronomic status lights and boisterous accelerating motors. Steam billowing upward and slow, humming circulations of rotary blades. A flatulent, intermittent rumble, muffled by rubber casing. I turn nervous as the noise escalates, or when things turn too quiet. Have any of these machines been tested

Review: Nac/Hut Report - Schism No Symmetry

Schism No Symmetry is an album in ruins. Melodies have been reduced to fragments of noise that splutter and cut out, leaving gigantic spaces of emptiness where walls of rhythm used to be. A vocal drawl sidles between the chunks of sound, like a draft washing through an abandoned building.

Interview: Avec le Soleil Sortant de sa Bouche

I’ve had the best time acquainting myself with Zubberdust!, which is the debut album of Montreal’s Avec le Soleil Sortant de sa Bouche. What keeps me coming back is the impeccable combination of “push” and “pull”. Like a carnival ride going slightly too fast, I fall dizzy under

Review: Set Self On Fire - To Bathe In Embers

What better way to protest against worldly malice than to channel it? In a society that uses stiff, structural obedience to fend off the constant waves of bullshit, the ultimate act of defiance is to let the body fall slack; to be the loose brick in the barricade of ignorant

Review: Dead Neanderthals - Worship The Sun

Worship The Sun is an agonising exercise in cathartic chastity. The duo never reach the eruption they so evidently crave. Saxophone and drums writhe upon the brink of bursting, thrashing and shuddering like bodies in nightmarish sleep fits, daring eachother to press harder against the ceiling without breaking it. Otto

Review: Badrutt Belorukov Kocher - Rotonda

It’s not often that I’m rendered aware of the throb of my own pulse in my head. Yet as I listen intently to Rotonda – waiting for something to emerge from the silence, be it a shuffle of movement, or a chime dropped from above, or a drone of

Review: Gideon Wolf - Near Dark

Immediately, I imagine abandoned buildings bedizened with the arboreal jewellery of neglect. Ivy spiralling around eroding stone pillars. Jagged branches forcing their way through window frames. Voices and strings weave themselves into beautiful beds of overgrowth, chaotic in how they swoop over and under eachother. Strange distorted samples gleam like

Review: Gurguburek - Old Postcards

Gradually, the most unassuming sonic fragments become the subjects of prolonged and profound debate. The passing sentiments of a wandering guitar meet the enthusiastic concurrence of a squawking saxophone which, in turn, tumbles into an angry spat with electronics on the basis of a few misheard remarks. Tiny morsels of

Interview: She Spread Sorrow

My first listen to Rumspringa, the debut full length by She Spread Sorrow, made for one of the most anxious and tense afternoons in my recent memory. The evenings are drawing in quickly now. As thick clouds started to smother the windows of my flat, Alice Kundalini’s whispers and

Review: Stephan Barrett - Sea . Forest . Wind

In the opening moments of “Illumination”, the piano curls upward to stare at the sky and the birdsong within it, like a head rising out of sleep. The clarinet crumples gently like the bed sheets discarded by the morning body. Suddenly the piano is no longer a waking form, but

Review: St. James Infirmary - An Antic Pause

So much is residue. Shadow. By-product. The sound I hear has been refracted until it sheds all resemblance to its source, rendered instead as echoes folded over echoes; light trapped inside itself. The first of these pieces is pure murk. A swamp of low and mid frequency disturbances, with feedback

Review: Byron Westbrook - Precipice

Precipice isn’t immaculate. I listen closely and I can hear where the stitching has come loose; electronic textures fraying into lower fidelities or oozing interference where holes in the fabric have started to emerge. Westbrook tilts the tones of “Infinite Sustain” back and forth so that different sides catch

Review: Jason Kahn - Songline

I imagine Kahn curled up at the bottom of a well. Leg broken from a long fall, bone jutting out the skin. He emits a series of strained whines; suppressed agony seeping out of his mouth like air from a punctured tyre. Each long groan is more insular and helpless

Live: Matana Roberts + Eric Chenaux + Marcus Hamblett @ The Prince Albert in Brighton, 07/10/2015

As I watch drummer Thomas Heather, I’m instantly reminded of a goat tumbling down a mountainside. Limbs in apparent disarray, with the rhythm – a flurry of improvisation and toppling snare delays – miraculously staying upright. Guitarist Marcus Hamblett decks the surface of the beats with a series of sunbeams, warm

Review: Dura - Living Color

It’s a rainfall of fingers and strings. Notes drop like petals detaching and plummeting, dislodged with the gracious swipe of fingers along frets, bouncing against varnished wood surfaces and tears of echo, splashing in the most gratifying shades of major key. I feel both the patter of individual impacts

Review: Wil Bolton - Inscriptions

Inscriptions is a piece of driftwood. Content to simply exist, falling slack into the tide of sensation. Complying with the movement of nature, enacting a dialogue between consciously directed sound (or “music”, if you will), and the organic flux of field recording. Bolton performs through the act of listening. His

Review: Rosalind Hall + Ada Rave - A Trail, A Texture

It’s as though Rosalind Hall is wielding a hand-held fan, pressing it against surfaces so that it buzzes in frictional complaint, without applying the necessary pressure to stop the blades entirely. It’s a delicate navigation of brinks and almosts – her saxophone lingers upon single notes and tilts them,

Review: Kostis Kilymis - Bethnal Greener

Spinning tops. Electronic pulsations rotate and stutter off balance. There are many moments on Bethnal Greener where stasis exists against the will of surrounding forces; some drones crackle like lights cutting out, while others slump out of tune as though powered by a dying petrol motor. And then there are

Interview: Ashley Paul

For some reason I have a very vivid false memory of seeing Ashley Paul live at Cafe Oto, even though I’ve never managed to make it out to see her play. Does the intense detail and intimacy of her music trick me into thinking that we’ve shared company?

Review: Dead Rat Orchestra - Tyburnia

Dangling over each of these pieces is the spectre of death; the solemn summary of a life; the moral boundaries over which people step, and the mortal boundaries over which people are pushed. The words of traditional songs declared in profound vow, rich in the doubtless conviction that must exist

Review: Xu(e) - Brown Jenkin

Just how particular beams of light can illuminate the dust that otherwise drifts unseen, Xu(e) seem to observe drones rather than generate them. These are the particles of sound that hang within our breathing air, tucked into silence until the appropriate creative apparatus comes to unlock it. The drones

Live: Sun Araw + Helm @ The Cube in Bristol, 25/09/2015

It’s dark. The most notable sight – aside from the torch-lit figure of Luke Younger (aka Helm) stooped over his table of equipment – is the loops of wiring cast in gigantic shadow on the side wall, curled into inhuman fingers. I hear synths spurting out between the crunch of bone

Review: Richard Garet - Meta

I hear the sounds I usually ignore. The sounds that lay outside of my subjective sensory pathway; the 30,000 sounds that don’t shape the way I perceive the world at any given moment (in contrast to the handful of sounds that do), all compacted into a foregrounded object.

Review: DunningWebsterUnderwood - Bleed

I’ve just entered a sauna the size of an elevator. Needless to say it’s stifling; tuba and sax drones press into eachother like sweaty stomachs, turntables shuffle in a futile bid to make room. Instantly, the significance of the record title becomes clear. Through a mixture of groggy

Review: Martijn Tellinga - Positions

The trombones at the top of Positions droop like aged oak trees, hunched under the insistent weight of centuries alive. The drones curve solemnly; sepia memories of passing spitfires, fanfares pointed downward to rattle through the ground and the buried dead, swarming into a microtonal smog of weariness and withering

Review: Rin Larping - STRATUM

Firstly, I feel the coarse edges of STRATUM. Those deep, droning clarinet tones fizz delicately within the mist of low fidelity, deprived of smooth edges but not of guttural depth. They press into my stomach with both meditative warmth and distorted urgency. I quickly realise that Rin Larping’s approach

Review: Visionist - Safe

The beat of “Victim” stumbles and sucks; electronic booms, reverse cymbals. It’s a body jerking in rash respiratory indecision. The chest bursts outward and retreats at speed. Fragments of melody congregate around the rhythm like twenty thoughts demanding full attention simultaneously. Safe is the sound of peaceful coherence and

Review: Periskop - Immerse

How far down am I? 20,000ft? When I listen to Immerse with headphones, my ears fill with water. The synthesisers are great rumbles of ocean pressure, pushing against my head and smothering my understanding of orientation and space. The beats hit me like shockwaves sent pulsing through the water

Review: Ben Gwilliam - breakdownspedup

It’s hard to tell what I’m actually hearing. This 18-minute piece comprises several Dictaphone recordings made inside freezers, each concluding in the malfunction and death of the Dictaphone itself. The groan of the freezer motor swells and collects like a pool of liquid in my head – treacle-thick, cognitively

Live: Soundscapes @ The National Gallery, London, 02/09/2015

Truth be told, I was worried about Soundscapes. My mind kept flitting back to one memory in particular: explaining my interest in sound art to my gran back in 2011. I remember her sitting silently in thought for a second, before replying: “so is that where you push a button

Review: F ingers - Hide Before Dinner

Like a beautiful jewel at the bottom of a swamp, I see the songs of Hide Before Dinner gleaming and rippling, dimmed by the obfuscating soup of mud and liquid. Guitars jangle despondently (with sudden, impermanent updrafts of optimism) beneath the gelatinous translucency of chorus and dolloped reverb. Voices climb

Review: Lisa Ulfves - Take Me By The Hand

The first electronic drum loop starts and I am instantly endeared. It’s the popping, ticking equivalent of tapping a Tupperware lunchbox quietly in private – a little morsel of head music leaking out into the real world. All of the radiant synths and bubbling guitars feel intimate and part-immaterial, conceived

Interview: Jennifer Walshe

The first time I saw Jennifer Walshe was when she performed “ALL THE MANY PEOPLS” in London last year. As you can probably tell from my review, I was left brimming with more thoughts and sensations than I could set down coherently. The below is a transcription of our conversation,

Review: Bird People + Waterflower - Split

In amongst the chimes of cymbals and the soft clang of singing bowls, I can hear Bird People rustling uncomfortably: knees shifting in readjustment, floorboards depressing and popping. Synth tones bore further into my head than feels comfortable, while accordions take the kind of curt breaths that prelude a panic

Interview: CRAM Festival

CRAM Festival takes place this bank holiday weekend (August 29th – 31st) at the Hundred Years Gallery in London. I was delighted to see so many familiar names on the lineup, although as is the charm for any festival celebrating improvised music, they all come with the guarantee of the spontaneous

Review: Möström - We Speak Whale

We Speak Whale is the place where the side-alley jazz club is scorched by the erratic zaps of a tesla coil, before the whole mess is immortalised as a thick gelatine of bass frequencies and phasers, and then tossed into a dumpster of old radios, hospital equipment and discarded orchestral

Review: Duane Pitre - Bayou Electric

At the base of Bayou Electric is a field recording that Pitre made in Louisiana back in August 2010. It’s unmistakably the sound of the night; the soundscape of wildlife filling the empty spaces where light and landscape used to be, with insects purring and chirping like water flow

Review: Kenneth Kirschner - Compressions & Rarefactions

The first piece on Compressions And Rarefactions dangles above my head, suspended from the ceiling by a solitary hair. Crystal baby mobiles swerve and bump into eachother in a cascade of glacial clinks. Pseudo-violins produce fine strands of drone, like light winking upon glossy surfaces. Surely the hair must snap

Review: Michael Hix - Aeon

Synths pour in like sunlight through curtains, illuminating my room with warmth and stillness. Piano notes roll like legs curling and twisting beneath a duvet, still half-asleep, stretching outward into the morning. It’s almost too perfect. Dare I step out into the day and risk colliding with accident and

Interview: Simon Coates (Tse Tse Fly)

So what exactly is Tse Tse Fly? Tse Tse Fly is a club night where we play sound art and experimental music rather than the usual club music fodder. The nights also act as a platform for live performance as well as recorded media. It’s based in Dubai where

Review: Lu Katavist - Inburst

Lu Katavist does not sound in control. Like a child whose curiosity overpowers their tendency toward good behaviour, he lifts up flaps and pushes strange buttons, clueless to the consequences. Some sounds dribble out of holes like pus or goo. Others change tonal colour like an animal reacting to threat

Review: Chelsea Wolfe - Abyss

Wolfe remarks that Abyss is designed to generate the sensation of waking from a dream, ever so briefly, before falling back to sleep and returning to it. The dream world attains the same object permanence as the corporeal one. When the dream can continue to exist in my absence, what

Review: Zeno Van Den Broek - Divergence

This is the sound of the space-time blanket bloating and twisting. The “happened” and the “happening” rub against eachother like tectonic plates, as humming bass frequencies confront their fragmented, tape-processed former selves in the mirror of music production. A nervous, nauseous whirr presents itself in varying degrees of obfuscation: sometimes

Review: Erik Bünger + Jan-Filip Ťupa - The Empire Never Ended

All we know about the strange 78rpm vinyl discovered by Thomas Knoefel is that it was probably recorded in 1948, and that the content was deemed to be somehow unsafe (as indicated by the notation of “Dangerous! Do Not Play!” on the original record sleeve). The audio is a man

Review: Fir Cone Children - Everything Is Easy

The title of this record is a perfect encapsulation of the Fir Cone Children modus operandi. Like a child hurtling downhill on a broken trike, the thrill of high speed momentarily suspends any threat of ill consequence. A delusional invincibility sets in. For 23 minutes, Fir Cone Children can pretend

Review: Patkus - Nigel's Brie

Nigel’s Brie is full of pockets. Within each pocket resides a worn trinket of sound: weathered guitar drones woven together into beautiful loops, resonant hums curled into gleaming ambient rings, rosy melodies that re-iterate themselves until they fuse with my breathing air. The record crossfades between these little pockets

Review: Gurun Gurun - Kon B

There are numerous moments during Kon B that sound like a ship’s cargo hold tilting severely back and forth. Instruments slide from one end of the space to the other, groaning and scraping against the floor, contents rattling against the inside of gigantic wooden crates, slamming against the side

Interview: MacGillivray

I first encountered MacGillivray when she supported Current 93 at the Union Chapel last year. Her set meddled with the tenses of time; the songs were both anxious explorations into the unknown and the fruits of beautifully honed creative craft, often placing voice and single instrument (piano, autoharp) in stark

Review: Michael Vincent Waller - The South Shore

When dropped, feathers never plummet. They sway and lift again, dusting the descent with little moments of fleeting hope, bringing a certain grace and beauty to the act of submission. I think of this dropped feather as I listen to the solo violin piece, “Il Tenuto Mento Alto”. The music

Review: Phil Minton - A Doughnut's End

A Doughnut’s End begins with a melody sung through a series of wretches. “Ah-eh-ah-oh! Eh-oh!” Every component of Minton’s voice introduces itself: the lungs ejecting air in curt bursts, the throat contracting around each phoneme and squashing it into a slither, the mouth dousing vowels in a patter

Review: B O L T - ( 0 3 )

There’s a malevolent intent to the forward motion of B O L T. Each chord comes creeping out of the wake of the last, bass guitars plucking grimly like the next part of the scab unsticking as it’s peeled away. ( 0 3 ) may be divided into smaller parts,

Review: AU79 - Opiłki i Makrostruktury

I’m in a gigantic metal dumpster in the pitch black, surrounded by all of those sounds deemed too garish or abrasive to fulfil the ruthless checklist of popular dance music. They roll over me and eachother, drumming reverberantly against the walls: hobbling electronic glissandos (the digital equivalent of nails

Review: Western Skies Motel - Prism

At certain points, I stop listening to René Gonzàlez Schelbeck’s classical guitar melodies and focus on the flurrying attack of his picking hand instead. The motion is cyclical and delicate, like a feather pushed against the spokes of a spinning bicycle wheel. The consistent means that Schelbeck can slow

Review: Alex Ward Quintet - Glass Shelves And Floor

This isn’t just about conversation. So often, descriptions of improvisation focus on the “back and forth”. Listening, responding, listening again. Glass Shelves And Floor is a rich, visceral reminder that these collaborations are as much about third person perspective as they are about first and second. Not only do

Review: Aires & Rui P. Andrade - Pânico-Ambiente

With noise, I often have to meet the imagery halfway. I wrestle a scrap of static to the ground as it tries to writhe out of my hands. I take a good look at it. Like a constellation in the stars, I decipher a vague sonic likeness. A thousand kettles

Review: Samogonka - The Importance Of Being Wasted

The screams of Derek Crozier protrude out of the noise. A head jutting out of the window, cradled by the closing jaws of a car compactor, forced to the surface by the buckled metal pressing into flesh, crumpling ribs. The noise smothers itself. Feedback jolts with low drum machine plosives,

Review: Francisco López - 1980-82

When Francisco López started working predominantly with cheap cassette players as a recording device in the early 80s, there wasn’t the option to freely experiment with other instruments and methods of audio capture. These other devices were expensive and seldom portable. As such, 1980-82 is a story of perseverance

Review: MacGillivray - Once Upon A Dirty Ear

I remember one particular school assembly back when I was seven. “If you have a secret and you want to tell someone,” the teacher said, “tell it to a glass of water.” I was baffled at the time, but now I understand. It’s a means of offloading the emotional

Review: Visionary Hours - Footfalls Echo

The track titles allude to the mode of movement of Footfalls Echo. “Neither From Nor Towards”. “The End Precedes The Beginning”. Ideas hover within nests of stillness, unbound by a duty to dim or disperse. Visionary Hours unravels them patiently until the melody separates into four or five strands. The

Interview: Benoît Pioulard

For the duration I’ve been listening to Thomas Meluch’s music (a mere four years or so), I’ve heard his hazes of sound thicken into songs and then evaporate again. Our conversation below touches on dreams as a pool of inspiration. Like dreams, Meluch’s music is a

Review: Huey Walker - Blearies

When Huey Walker’s melodious tones rise out of silence and return to it, I see the delicate little coils and thrusts of seahorses. The head poking forward as synthesisers and hazy guitar notes whine in the upper frequencies. The body catching up as bass rushes underneath to catch the

Review: How To Cure Our Soul - Saigon

The chord is never correct. It squirms and mutates forever. Frequencies burrow into silence like earthworms; others wriggle into audibility in their place. Can we call the 25 minutes of “Aurea” a continuous drone when it so actively decays and rejuvenates itself, like evolution sped up a trillion times over?

Interview: Black Spirituals

I first heard improvisatory duo Black Spirituals (based in the Bay Area and Atwater, CA) after picking up their incredible “Of Deconstruction” record last year. As the below interview will illustrate, both have a fascinating means of understanding and articulating sound, as well as the way in which sound connects

Review: Die Neuen IBM - Herzkreisnegativ

The sound of the cassette can be a grubby amulet found in an old attic box. A token of a time-space-elsewhere, raising more questions than it cares to answer, pointing toward a potential origin and letting the mind of the finder imagine the rest. With Herzkreisnegativ, I hear machines that

Review: VA AA LR - Polis

Polis documents an installation that took place on the streets of Porto, in which polyrhythmic compositions were played out through car speaker systems at various locations over the town. This disc is the result of merging recordings on location with the source pieces, meaning that the busy and oblivious chatter

Review: HS - How To

It’s like those Gaspar Noe films where the camera swirls endlessly, hurtling through the air like a plastic bag dancing into an updraft, gliding through windows and above the blur of traffic, penetrating clumps of cloud and spinning amidst the winds of 20,000ft. This isn’t what I

Live: Ryoji Ikeda - Supersymmetry @ Brewer Street Car Park in London, 25/04/2015

The sheer size of Ikeda’s work hits me hard. Size loiters beneath me as an incredibly low frequency. Size scorches my retinas as the lights flicker at an exact speed. Size dwindles me in a corridor of data analysis, running the length of two gigantic horizontal screens to my

Review: Clade - Klavierstücke

If we’re to think of ambient music as that which evaporates into the breathing air, circumventing space with the liberal flow of smoke, then Klavierstücke is the precise opposite: a thickening agent that turns air into translucent, anti-gravity gelatine, into which piano notes are embedded like shards of splintered

Review: Debating Math + Cerlan - Split

When I listen to Debating Math, a particular time comes to mind. 3am. It’s pitch black outside, and reality starts to haze behind the thickening curtain of fatigue. Guitars strum muffled and intermittently, like streetlamps perceived wearily out of focus; the glows hang in the air, suspended all by

Interview: Zu (Massimo Pupillo)

After the release of their 2009 album Carboniferous, drums/bass/sax trio Zu took a break. The band gained a new drummer in Gabe Serbian (The Locust), while bassist Massimo Pupillo left Rome to spend time in the Himalayas before moving to Peru. The background of our Skype conversation is

Review: Wet Nurse - Lacrimosa

Wet Nurse is sweating. Heat and emotional waste wade up through the dermis and squirm out through the pores, even as Paul Kinasevych does his mortal utmost to keep it all down. Black slugs of melody and stagnant feedback press up against the surface of his body. His mouth slackens

Review: IX Tab - R.O.C.

Time peels away into separate strands, which wriggle in separate directions at separate speeds. R.O.C. is often like being intoxicated, but only in particular spots of my brain. Some sounds come to me in immaculate, present tense clarity, while others – like the angelic robots and Lego block sunshine

Live: Emma Smith + Christine Sun Kim @ Bristol Arnolfini, 01/04/2015

I hear Cocteau Twins’ album Lullabies playing as I enter the room, wafting out from a record player upon a varnished wooden cabinet. Liz Fraser’s voice swoops through the air like a kite. A small sign invites me to change the record if I please. I take a look

Review: Ekca Liena - Graduals

Even amidst the apparent stillness of my lounge, the earth I inhabit is hurtling through space at immense speed. Graduals inverts this principle. Through soundscapes of macro-level chaos – looped memories stuck in synaptic glitch, guitar drones coated in a distortion that mimics feral animals rattling against cages, synthesiser melodies that

Live: Bloc Weekend @ Butlins Minehead, 13-15/03/2015

Each time I enter a new room at Bloc, I forget where I was previously. My skin ripples to a new tempo. Perhaps my pulse rate follows suit. I’m inhabited by each new electronic soundscape, filling up with the present tense as a vessel of flesh and listening, violently

Review: Yasunao Tone + Talibam! + Sam Kulik - Double Automatism

The noise subdivides my head. And again. And again. All at once, I hear the ambling panic of a lost trombone (Sam Kulik), the violent coughs of scalpel-cut circuit boards (Yasunao Tone) and synthesisers played with a persistently tasered hand (Talibam!). It’s an absolute fucking scramble, and I’m

Review: Pauline Oliveros + Timothy Hill + David Rothenberg - Cicada Dream Band

You have to wander far, far into the reeds to find the Cicada Dream Band. This is either the music of a trio that have spent generous amounts of time in eachother’s company – bouncing ideas between them until the original concept is mashed into a bizarre new shape – or

Review: Teresa Winter - Oh Tina, No Tina

For the opening three minutes of Oh Tina, No Tina, I’m carried upward in teleport of angelic voices and an expectant, high-speed piano refrain. I expect to be dropped up my arse at any moment, cracking my rump on the concrete of a pulsating house beat. It doesn’t

Review: Dean McPhee - Fatima's Hand

The transition from McPhee’s 2011 Son Of The Black Peace album to Fatima’s Hand is almost seamless. He could even be sat on the same small chair, in the same delicately reverberant room, electric guitar cradled gently on his knee, solemnly silent and unmoved since the end of

Review: Akatombo - Sometime, Never

I sink into the sewer networks that exist beneath my feet, far below the concrete. The eternal lack of light lays waste to all perception of time passing, leaving the rhythms of techno and industry to repeat indefinitely, obliviously. The air vibrates with the low hum of nearby electrical cables,

Review: Lotto - Ask The Dust

The delights of a solitary chord can be endless. When opening track “Gremlin-Prone” strikes upon a phrase it loves, it stays there. The trio clang over and over again like the toll of a morning bell, listening closely to the mingling resonances of strings and guitar; sound rummaging in hollow

Interview: Joe Snape

According to the press release of his upcoming album Brittle Love, Joe Snape is “particularly committed to the kind of sounds that, if they were people, would be the last picked for sides in a game of schoolyard football.” He was born in Birmingham and currently resides in Berlin. In

Interview: Francisco López

For his upcoming Cafe Oto appearance on 14th March 2015, sound artist Francisco López will perform two quadrophonic pieces to a blindfolded audience. The pieces will also be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3’s Hear And Now programme. Go here for a link to listen live or to listen

Review: Delphine Dora - Près du coeur sauvage

Who takes the lead here? The piano or the voice? I hear Dora’s falsetto like a small origami boat on a lake that stirs gently, tilting between notes as the water beneath nudges it onto a slant. Yet sometimes the energy flow feels reversed, and the boat quivers as

Review: Roger Turner + Otomo Yoshihide - The Last Train

Guitar, amplifier, drum kit, percussion. Recorded live, real time. Nowhere to hide, minimal scope for deviation. The Last Train is the sound of two experts treading around the trap that they’ve laid for themselves. The situation tries to tease the duo into an improvisatory rock of wonky fretwork and

Review: Cyril Bondi + Toma Gouband - Hi No Tori

Distant earthquake tremors. Inadequately stacked ceramic plates quiver against eachother. Steel pans shiver in a cupboard to my right. There is silence – thick and deceptive, a sinister temporal calm – before the rumbling begins again. Bigger this time, more urgent. Hi No Tori is a nervous stirring. Drummer limbs are puppeteered

Review: Kate Carr - Fabulations

A synthesiser seeps in like smoke curling its way through the train window. It’s such a curious thing. I don’t know why it came to writhe in the air in front of me, drifting between notes until a melody half-forms through the dispersal. Its visit is beautiful and

Review: Iris Garrelfs - Breathing Through Wires

“It’s a bit weird up here,” Garrelfs declares to her audience during the opening of the album’s first track, which was recorded at the Montague Arms in London, 2014. “Usually I play on stage. I can’t see you; it’s even weirder.” And then, through the commotion

Review: Sarah Davachi - Barons Court

So often I settle for hearing so little. Perhaps I have grown accustomed to letting sound hit me like an animal stampede; colour blurred by movement, all detail lost to the splay of focal points. I catch everything at a glance, and each sonic object – each tiny morsel of timbre

Review: Elegant Humanoid - Ideoplastia

Ideoplastia is like an immensely chaotic laboratory experiment. Too many variables to keep track of, hazardous samples spilling out of protective glass tanks, a scientist singing deliriously as his brain fogs up with vibrantly coloured alien gases. Sound spews out of test tubes in sudden, violent reactions, and drones throb

Review: Northaunt - Istid I-II

In the absence of humans and animals, what stirs? And why does it stir? Istid stretches back to a time before we existed; when the landscape respired purely through wind and water flow, modulating slowly through plant growth, tectonic event and dramatic shifts in weather. Everything happens for its own

Review: Poppy Nogood - Collected Works

“Each seemingly disparate piece,” writes Poppy Nogood, “is connected by the central role of the computer as a branching off point in infinite directions.” The computer, of course, can be something of a cluster bomb as a point of mutual intersection. It can add fiercely transformative processes to sounds and

Review: Father Murphy - Calvary

Ten minutes. That’s all Father Murphy grant to their sonic illustration of the execution place of Jesus Christ, Dismas and Gestas. It is a preparation and a ghostly residue; the assembly of deathly circumstance ahead of time and the echo of a monumental event now passed. The events are

Interview: Derek Piotr

Derek Piotr is a Poland-born composer currently based in New England. His work centres on the use of the human voice (decorated with undulating beats and faint melodic traces), and his upcoming record Bahar adopts a more forthright, pop-derived approach to the presentation of his vocal than ever before. The

Review: Coppice - Cores/Eruct

Coppice sound restless. “Son Form” could be a pipe organ snoring at night, tossing uncomfortably in dirty bed clothes as it emits a dry nasal wheezing every couple of seconds. “Bluing” sits on a slant across the stereo frame; I feel like one of my ears is drooping under the

Review: Morton Feldman - For Bunita Marcus

Is Lenio Liatsou playing the piano, or tilting it back and forth until notes tumble out? The piano pitches come one at a time in a methodical drip, overlapping eachother through dimming trails of sustain. Each note bounces off the last at a precise and beautiful angle, timed so that

Review: Jason Kahn - Thirty Seconds Over

The process of wringing sound out of Jason Kahn’s equipment seems arduous. Static spews out like water from a disused water tap, black with the residue of wayward radio signal and synthesiser noise, coming in intermittent spurts or not at all. It isn’t long before I start taking

Review: Triac - In A Room

A room limits space and direction. It’s so obvious that I don’t often consider it, until a record like In A Room demonstrates how to navigate a space with such conscious awareness for the surrounding walls and a sensitivity for the other peoples present. I feel the edges

Review: Chad Mossholder - Non-Site Specific

On Non-Site Specific, Mossholder operates exclusively within the realms of electronic synthesis. He can control everything. There are no unexpected intrusions or colliding variables; he can isolate processes and enact them with the purity of mathematics, in a vacuum of unconditional predictability. Yet the record isn’t comprised of spotless

Review: Eric Chenaux - Skullsplitter

I’m sharing a romantic meal with Chenaux. Alone, obviously. Perhaps at his place. The room is in crooked temperament; the lights are flickering and the dinner table is on an unsettling wonk. My food moves restlessly on my plate. Yet I’m lost in Chenaux’s voice to the

Review: Grey Frequency - Immersion

This is what the imminence of extinction sounds like. Immersion is born on that strange perimeter of presence that gazes, eternally, into the unending twilight of absence. Death is only a matter of time. Even though these sounds (organs forcing out cold extended breaths, bass frequencies ghosting dormant engine rooms)

Interview: Joe Walker

Joe Walker is an architecture student at Arts University Bournemouth, UK. His practice explores the intersection of music and architecture; first through the invention of a new musical instrument, and then through a compositional process involving field recordings of abandoned spaces under the title “Extreme Territories”. It came about from

Review: D'Incise - O esplendor natural das coisas e inferno

Gravity increases tenfold. The energy of O esplendor natural das coisas e inferno points downward. Bass frequencies press against my head like a searing sun, alternating between the hum of a dying refrigerator and the grubby churn of a construction site crane engine. I feel like someone is forcing their

Review: Mark Templeton + Kyle Armstrong - Extensions

I’ve opened a door I shouldn’t have. The world is now rushing at me quicker than my brain can process it, with magma flow flickering out of hue as I stall under the weight of information in excess. Sensory data hits me like the pressurised output of a

Review: Jean D.L. - Early Nights

Jean D.L. introduced himself to me as an “experimental guitar player”, which set a certain expectation going in to Early Nights. For the first part of the record I feel as though I can’t hear Jean D.L. at all; instead, I hear ovular hums evaporating organically off

Review: Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard - SOUND X SOUND-MUSIC FOR 8 RECORDERS

At points during Music For 8 Recorders, I jolt back into consciousness. It’s so easy to forget that I’m listening exclusively to a woodwind instrument; the tone is so pure and breathless, verging on electronic in its clinical, perfectly rounded timbral shape, concealing the very organic act of

Review: Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt + Daniel Kaufman - Split

Marquardt ’s piece is like a draft coming through a crack in the ceiling. For ten minutes it seeps in as a high frequency wisp, somewhere between guitar feedback, headphone leakage and a straining elevator mechanism, while tiny wooden knocks mimics a broken clock hand, limping arrhythmically between 11 and

Interview: Six Organs Of Admittance

A little bit of context before I dive into this one. For his new record Hexadic, Ben Chasny (aka Six Organs Of Admittance) has developed his own compositional method entitled the Hexadic system. The results are surreal and immediately beautiful. I’d thoroughly recommend listening to “Wax Chance” here for

Review: Pepa Päivinen + Good Romans - Ghost Of A Dog

Pepa Päivinen carries himself with a charm that I’m reluctant to trust. His initial blast of tenor saxophone is like a firm handshake; a demonstration of strength concealed within amiable gesture, swooping between notes like a sensual lounge jazz soloist while channelling a force that could crush me, easily.

Review: Black Thread - Autumn Flowers

For how much longer will Autumn Flowers exist? At this point the sound is already shredded with the signs of age. Big folds of distortion have started to close up over its features. The tones warble and bow as the music’s skeletal tissue withers into sponge, and I freeze

Review: Datura Dilema - Spirals

None of these pieces have a genuine beginning or end. Melody is absent also. Essentially, Spirals is a set of four revolving geometric sculptures, enacting abstract strings of code that dictate such fundamentals of tempo, pitch and rhythmic intersection, as angular electronic motifs overlap the regimented techno thump in dazzling

Review: Follow The Sun - Gaze

There is no beat to hold “Fading Blue” down. The tremolo guitars melt together like distinctive cloud shapes pressing into eachother, while a simple chord progression grows warm with resolutory anticipation. It’s a landscape too rich to be real, like a meadows whose green hurts the eyes as much

Review: Skink - Distant Pale Horses

Voices summon Distant Pale Horses to life. The drone grows like a campfire flame, beckoned into brightness by a strange, hummed ritual refrain; a dissonant congregation scratching at the corporeal veil through sheer persistence, repeated until I feel each voice like a nail dragged gently down my cheek. By the

Review: Spyros Polychronopoulos - Electronic Music

What happens when the object I perceive becomes indistinguishable from the medium with which I perceive it? I begin to doubt myself. I begin to doubt Electronic Music. The record snubs the measures I have developed to assess the size, origin and proximity of sound objects in the corporeal universe,

Review: Docetism - Breaking The Circle Of Life

The drum pulse is so deep as to seemingly originate within me, like a heartbeart knocking on the wall of the womb, as electronics hit my retina as indulgent, shapeless wash of vibrant colour. Sensation swirls around me like liquid in transit. I am the only fixed element in Breaking

Interview: Dead Neanderthals

I just want to double-check. Was Prime recorded in one take? If so, was it a struggle to sustain that level of intensity for so long? I feel as though I’m hearing you laying waste to your own bodies. René Aquarius (drums): Prime is definitely recorded in a single

Novellino + Rosi + Mazurek + Barnes - Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

The basis of Objects In Mirror… is a set of field recordings made by Rosi and Novellino at Lanificio Leo: an active woollen mill founded back in 1873 in Calabria, Italy. The mill appears to me like an unmade jigsaw puzzle, with isolated portions of mechanism (collisions between weathered metal

Review: REFUSENIK - Musikaliszer Pinkos

Here’s the situation. Arturas Bumšteinas (aka REFUSENIK) picks up an old Polyvox synthesiser in Vilnius (the capital of his home country of Lithuania) and uses it to play pieces from a 1927 Hebrew music book by Abraham Berenstein entitled Musikaliszer Pinkos. I feel differently about the record now

Review: Roberto Opalio - Aurōra Coelestis

A delay effect splays Opalio’s glockenspiel into tiny droplets, and I imagine 1000 glass beads tumbling upon a table; little plops of attack and a multitude singing resonances catching all colours of light. If I soften my senses it begins to resemble a gracious gush from a water tap,

Review: Sloath - Deep Mountain

There’s a wonky little note-bend at the end of the main riff during “Persian Rug”, and it sounds a bit like someone prising their big toenail away from their foot and letting it snap back. Sloath do it over and over again. Deep Mountain is an album of instant

Review: The Thomas Family - Dub Variations

I spend the first 18 minutes staring down the eye of a flashlight, dazed in the dance of high frequency feedback and the swirl of circular retina flare. The sound is harsh but somewhat vacant. A strange ring shape rippling on the surface of the water, reflected from somewhere unknown,

Review: Michel Banabila + Oene Van Geel - Music For Viola And Electronics

When Music For Viola And Electronics is at its most patient and aloft, it’s like sculpture in watercolour. “Nothing But Blue Sky” is a beautiful amber cloud whose slow spinning put emphasis on each of its faces in turn, retaining the central shape even as the sides bulge and

Review: Nick Storring - Gardens

Gardens begins like a bunch of zoo animals waking up – strange croaks of unused voices and e-bow drones rolling drowsily onto their side, ridding joints and cords of stiffness while softly announcing a re-emergence into consciousness. Baby mobile melodies come tentatively and then slump back beneath the burden of morning

Review: Chris Strickland - Animal Expert

Strickland recommends that I listen to Animal Expert “a little louder than usual”. He also notes that it’s “not really a headphone work”. I’m happy to comply: lounge speaker setup, volume at 35 (30 is my default volume). In these conditions, the record is my focal point whether

Review: Vicious Circus - Troglodytes Troglodytes

Caution is advised. Elo Masing and Dave Maric are boundless improvisatory eccentrics, blowing raspberries and throwing vicious scowls in the direction of moderation and self-assessment. They do as they please: trampolining off of 90s electro-percussion and colliding in mid-air, tickling eachother until violins erupt into little vulpine squeals, freefalling down

Interview: Lawrence English

Madeiradig Festival seems pretty special. Both lineup and location look fantastic. Are you looking forward to it? I’ll admit it. Any chance to spend a moment with Tony Conrad is a moment I look forward to. It’s been about a decade since I first met Tony, we hosted

Review: Cestine - Level

Level doesn’t sound composed so much as nurtured and directed. The drone flows of its own accord, with the duo of Dominic Coppola and Theodore Schaefer charged with directing the energy through various curves and inclines; teasing out buds of overtone and cultivating little capsules of withheld quiet and

Review: Giacomo Fiore - IV: American Electric Guitars

Part of the intention behind IV: American Electric Guitars – which gathers pieces by four US composers – is to examine how the guitar is utilised as a classical “concert” instrument. It leads me to consider how I may perceive the guitar differently within a classical context. Perhaps the detachment of composer

Review: Rutger Zuydervelt - Stay Tuned

It’s a purely functional exercise, but it’s a beautiful one. When the orchestra all align upon an “A” note to get in tune with one another, every individual instrument dials into a shared understanding of time and space. A door of opportunity opens and promptly shuts; the orchestra

Review: Content Nullity - Chemtrail Conspiracy Theory

I open the cassette casing and half of the contents spill out: a tiny key, a piece of smashed circuitboard, a backpatch, pieces of unidentifiable plastic debris. I press play on the tape and it’s already mid-swing: a gigantic Gregorian hum rising and falling between pillars of laser beam,

Review: Lost Trail - The Afternoon Vision

Is this material meant for my eyes? Am I being intrusive? I find two mini-CDs embedded amongst a pile of infographics, poetic imagery and curious images: an in-depth soil survey covering areas of Cincinnati and West Virginia, pictures of doors that hum with the photographer’s desire to know what

Review: Nazoranai - 'the most painful time happens only once has it arrived already..?'

To be trapped inside this record is a disconcerting sensation, because Nazoranai don’t know where to stop. At a certain point in each piece, the player-sound relationship flips into a hideous reverse; gigantic arcs of distortion and reverb start to shower from the ceiling, while drums are dragged along

Interview: Sophie Cooper

I’m intrigued as to how the songs of Our Aquarius were written. Did they often start as songs for a single instrument and voice, or were those layers of drones and FX present during the initial composition process? Every track on ‘Our Aquarius’ started out with me experimenting around

Review: Liquidarlo Celuloide - Vértigo Magnético

Out from the mini-tornado of tinny space noise – spiralling upward, folding inward – comes a drumbeat full of that ‘tight-jeans’ sass that Billie Jean made its name on, attempting to diffuse the improvisational argument through the unquestionable discipline of disco. Neither rhythm nor anarchy back down. A smooth bass motif dances

Review: Andrea Belfi - Natura Morta

Belfi is a permeable performer. He doesn’t react to his surroundings but embodies them, incorporating them into his drumming, becoming a translucent presence through which the soundscape is refracted delicately. I can imagine his sticks fluttering deftly through the synthesiser mist, slipping in and out of visibility as soft

Review: Mohammad - Lamnè Gastama

Mohammad always sound like they’re sawing a gigantic tree down, pressing all of their bodily muscle into the motion back and forth. It’s part of the reason Lamnè Gastama bares down on me so heavily – where the guitars of other bands are strummed and then relieved to resonate

Review: Cyril M. - Diffraction

It grows, from the size of a snow globe to an inferno that moves of its own accord. Cyril M’s 27-minute live performance (recorded at Chapelle St Jean in Mulhouse) begins entirely within his control, as an observation of bowed guitar drones and their little overtone gleams; a small

Review: Sophie Cooper - Our Aquarius

The sounds are conjured from the instruments, not played on them. The slow bulging chords of “Blessed Angel And The Roses” (a warm, electronic waft) are teased into life as though beckoned out by an index finger, while Cooper’s voice wraps around the notes like a snake coiling upon

Review: Full Of Hell & Merzbow - S/T

Multiplied by the muscle of Merzbow, Full Of Hell pummel at the membrane of reality until it bursts open. There are moments where I feel myself flecked in sweat and at the butt of a wayward, flailing elbow; in the midst of a very human form of energy expulsion, surrounded

Interview: Lutine

You had your album launch gig the other week for your debut, White Flowers. From the videos I’ve seen, St Laurence Church seemed like a great venue for it. How did it go? Heather: It went really well! The audience were lovely, Bela Emerson’s set was incredible and

Review: Point Detractor - Demo 2014

To begin with, it feels as though the components of Point Detractor were never meant to be together. Distorted guitar that zaps like a grubby thick laser, drums and synths from an adolescent bedroom rave, villainous vocals that wandered in from a nearby small-town rock opera. There is a mutual

Review: Andrew Henry - Salvation

A phrase caught my eye on the release page for Salvation: “minor improvisation”. Tiny accidents, subtle responses. Like a marble on a table-top, drastically responsive to the tiniest of surface tilts. On this 38-minute track, transition accumulates from the momentum built from infinitesimal flickers in thought – new drones filter into

Review: Spectrical - Emergent Forms

The air is thick with electricity. By rendering audible the electronic signals of household objects – phones, fridges, computers, lights – Tim Allen generates a symphony that is happening all the time. In my living room, right now. Objects humming and sighing at eachother; continuous drones co-mingling over my head, slotting into

Review: We Will Fail - Verstörung 2.0

Two major aspects of dance music are control and imposition. Verstörung 2.0 has them both covered. The album is its own atmosphere; it regulates gravity and communicates in patterns of shadow and visible light. The bass frequencies are dense but precisely applied – metal girders that lower upon my head

Review: Ff - Ffeeling

On “Peggy Babcock”, I get my first pay off: a bloating bag of synthesiser bass, coated in psychedelic time-slur delay, waddling like a fat town mayor slowed by his lavish golden chains. Delicious. I’m abandoned shortly after, and Ffeeling starts to become irrational and manipulative: “Double Dip” drops a

Review: Spartak - Five Points

The last time I heard Spartak was through 2010’s Verona; an album of improvisation tumbling in all directions at once, with tom drums kicking up guitars and other ethereal matter like dust. Turns out they’ve obliterated their identity and reconstructed it, with legacy present in only name and

Review: Memnon Sa - Citadel

The first low power chord of Memnon Sa hits me like a death knell. There is an inescapable finality to Citadel; a blizzard of electronics shield me from natural light, while each return to that guttural root note brings my attention back to the demise that lays beneath me. It

Live: ArcTanGent Festival @ Fernhill Farm in Bristol, 29-30/08/14

A man leaps out at me as I leave my tent for the first time, praising my Slint hoodie while gleefully brandishing the t-shirt equivalent. Turns out he’s travelled all the way from Chicago just for ArcTanGent, because “you just don’t get festivals like this in the US!

Review: Maybeshewill - Fair Youth

Fair Youth is a continuous swoop between emotional extremes, as though the band have long suppressed every smile and weep only to let them forth in a single stream: a daisychain of fond and bitter memories in rich, spectacular colour, bursting and then brimming over and over again. It’s

Review: Rattle - EP

Rattle sound so utterly fresh. Drums and vocals, stark impact and warm emanation, monochrome beat and colour-rich melody; it’s a simple, unambiguous symbiosis, with two polarised shapes sat at opposite ends of the canvas. I take my seat in the large open space in between them – the resonant thumps

Review: Trans/Human - The (UN)Expected

I spend many long commutes listening to music and podcasts over a rather weak and temperamental car radio, floating through veils of static to arrive at pockets of clean signal. The (UN)Expected carries the same sense of temporal refuge; I am hoisted up by tornadoes of white noise and

Review: Xylouris White - Goats

Goats make for a wonderful metaphor for the music of Xylouris and White. Their rhythmic leaps are vast and improbable, but seemingly haphazard too – tom drums tumble like hooves scrambling to reassert footing upon near-vertical surfaces, and lute melodies gallop ahead of the rest of the body in dangerous reflexive

Review: Lutine - White Flowers

It’s not a past I entirely recognise. White Flowers feels like a relic whose erosion points to a history spent tipping between alternate geographies, like ancient folk that has rolled between Far Eastern mountaintop silence, sea-born myth and the tidal, multi-directional churn of the modern day. The image tells

Interview: Junko Hiroshige

I’m intrigued by the setup of your upcoming solo shows at Tusk Festival. I understand that they’re going to be limited to 10 people per performance. Are you able to share any details on what attendees can expect? I have a chance to play for several audience sometimes.

Review: Ship Canal + Lenina + Splashy The Blame-Shifter - Bourgeois Kerb Stomp

I’m made to feel like a psychological experiment subject: emotionally manipulated by memories I never had, rinsed of all thought and knowledge, knocked unconscious and brought back to life, issued subliminal instructions from manipulated voices. The structure of this three-way split – which has me continually passed back on forth

Review: Memory Drawings - There Is No Perfect Place

I imagine wheels turning. Wooden cart wheels tilting over a beaten path through wheat fields and numerous centuries; a direct path carved through pastor’s blanketed acres, wooden spokes gleaming in the glaze of a dry summer. The journey is pleasant but assured, ambling but in no doubt of destination,

Review: Francesco Giannico - Litania

It took a while for me to identify why Litania uplifts me, and longer still to figure out how to articulate it. His streams of synthesiser are like rivers running between everything; the neural circuits of the sonic universe. It hits me during “Organic”: piano spills over the tremble of

Review: Andrea Carri - Chronos

They’re not melodies as such, but daisy chains of alternation and arpeggiation strung through the air, or descending staircases into deeper states of thought. Carri’s acoustic diction runs through my hand like water, and he tilts the pace of his delivery like a dandelion nudged between movement and

Review: Fujako - Soul Buzz

The title track depicts hip-hop in a tug-of-war with the event horizon. Drums and synthesisers are forcibly curved as gravity drags them toward a singular point, pulsing back outward in jolts of survival instinct, writhing out of the sphere of crushed matter. The electronics flail with the panic and irrationality

Review: Big Brother On Acid - S/T

“GO!” It’s a dubstep rave in a skydive simulator. I’ve only just registered the bass throb tugging at my shoes and now I’m wearing it as a bandana: low frequencies turn to high, storms rip dancefloors in half, Amazonian fauna and flora sprout up where a neon

Review: Hildur Guðnadóttir - Saman

I watched a documentary on quantum physics yesterday. One particularly baffling aspect is that of “entanglement”, which says that the behaviour of two particles can be intrinsically linked in spite of any vast distance between them. I find myself returning to this as I listen to Guðnadóttir’s cello and

Interview: Fort Process

Daniel WJ Mackenzie discusses next week’s festival of sound and art at Newhaven Fort, in which the likes of Peter Brötzmann, Philippe Petit, Ex-Easter Island Head and Thomas Köner will interact with an eclectic and distinctive set of acoustic spaces: tunnels, huts, chambers. How did you become familiar with

Review: Dead Neanderthals + Machinefabriek - DNMF

DNMF should not be. It’s too heavy to be airborne, and yet there it is – a thick sack of tones with a demented fox for a mouth, leaving the ground under the command of one solitary drum. It’s a slow and agonising process, and the feedback and drones

Review: Origami Galaktika - One

Even as harsh sunlight spills through my windows, I sit within the pitch black of One. I hear cello strings and bubbling water intermingling with the dark; low frequencies blocking the moonlight out, squeals of flutes sidling out from behind the trees. I hear instruments mutating in the night, as

Review: Death Shanties - Crabs

There are moments when Renema pokes his saxophone snout against my eyes and brays, and I can feel the mix of spittle and warm exhalation condensing on my nose. Meanwhile, Neilson’s tom drums rap upon my knees until the caps fall off. Naturally, I’m riled and antagonised; berated

Review: Juan Carlos Vasquez - Collages

Collages is a whirlpool of reaction and sensation, of legacy and private detail. The album takes the solo works of several classical composers (Beethoven, Ysaye, Mussorgsky, Bach, Borges, Chopin, Satie), and smears it upon the palm of digital processing, wedging mirrors into performances that, in their original form, may appear

LIVE: SUPERNORMAL FESTIVAL @ BRAZIER’S PARK IN OXFORDSHIRE, 08-10/08/14

FRIDAY Once again, Friday takes me through the same sequence of events as in Supernormal 2012 and 2013. My head, still in the stiff and practical mode of part-time work, is gradually teased into pliability by the weekend’s programme openers. I’m tugged toward the jump-started drag racer of

Review: Infinite Particles - The Great Common Task

The record coats the floor like a liquid nitrogen carpet. I’m drawn downward – heart rate reduced, conscious mind softening until my thoughts appear like traffic lights obscured in fog. The Great Common Task is a state to be achieved through persistence, and rather than eclipsing my current universe without

Review: Reagan's Polyp - America Needs More Ass

I get the same sensation when listening to Ween. I can see the recording booth in my mind: a microphone jutting out from among a mountain of unwashed clothes, Frankenstein taxidermy, Crass records and disturbing crayon sketches. America Needs More Ass is the sound of lunacy festering in lunacy – an

Review: Seth Cluett - Forms Of Forgetting

Would Forms Of Forgetting sound the same if I could, at any time, vividly recall its opening moments? Perhaps the act of forgetting is not an inadequacy of cognition, but a perceptual device; a subconscious mixing desk across time rather than audio space, nudging out those elements whose familiarity can

Review: Blakkr Nið - Holy Hellfire

I feel the heat beating out of Holy Hellfire. Pressing play triggers a wall of flames to shoot up in front of my nose; the serrated lick of harsh distortion (so hot, it’s almost dagger cold) and solemn organs than grant the surface a certain wretched serenity. Scale down

Interview: Knifedoutofexistence

Whenever I wear my Knifedoutofexistence t-shirt, people label it as “morbid” or “violent”. In fact, I remember you mentioning that the project and the title actually derive from a positive place. Would you mind elaborating on that? I get this a lot. People are always telling me of the odd

Review: Osman Arabi - Destroying Symmetry

To read about Arabi’s initial guitar dilemma is to consider whether I, too, am a mere puppet for my own listening habits. Is my guitar playing a pure extension of my own creative will, or an amalgamative reflection of the guitar playing of others? Arguably, the consideration becomes even

Review: Loren Chasse - Characters At The Water Margin

Until now, I have undervalued that buoyant, weighty click of pebbles knocking together. The crumple of stone skidding against stone, no doubt dry and perfectly smooth if I could touch them; that placid grey that remains indifferent to the constant upheaval at the hands of the surging tide and Chasse’

Review: ZED aka Bernard Szajner - Visions Of Dune

Inward, inward, inward. Sometimes the creative process is a gradual, expansive accumulation of ideas; bringing sounds into communication with eachother, mixing colours to make new ones. Reaching outward beyond the present tense, always grasping at the other. But the other perhaps wasn’t as easily obtainable in 1979 – one could

Review: Fossil Aerosol Mining Project - 17 Years In Ektachrome

Listening to 17 Years… is like drifting through the fog on a wooden raft. The drapes of cicada noise and the clam of tropical humidity stunt all visibility, and I can only question the source of the mysterious debris that floats sporadically into view: animal carcasses, monastic robes, cooled meteorites,

Interview: ArcTanGent Festival

It’s great to see ArcTanGent returning for a second year. Seems to suggest that your debut was a success. Looking back, are you happy with how it all went? We couldn’t have been happier to be honest. Everything ran to plan and it made all the hard work

Review: John Kannenberg - A Sound Map Of The Art Institute Of Chicago

I’ve never been to the Art Institute Of Chicago, yet the sound that begins at 1:20 is unmistakable. It’s every cavernous museum entrance I’ve ever been to: the amplification of idle chatter into a nimbus blur of vowels and strung out sibilance, clinging to the hall’

Review: Fire! Orchestra - Enter

Fire! have learned to navigate the field of sound blindfolded, so that during those moments of transcendent blackout – where drums tumble like underwater pebbles swept into river current, and the bass riff swings impeccably like a self-perpetuating pendulum, and shrill voices collapse into lustful make-outs with wailing brass – they can

Interview: Field Sports

You played at Supernormal back in 2011 under your Outdoor Sports guise. How will this year’s performance compare, and what is signified by the name change to Field Sports? The original project was called Team Sports, which was an improv trio featuring Ian Watson using his handmade electronics, Jimmy

Review: Concrete/Field - A Theory Of Psychic Geography

Perimeter music. I never get there. I skirt the edge and peer inward, fixed upon my line of orbit by the curiosity that drags toward the centre and the mysterious magnetic repulsion that counters it. The record is a narrow avoidance of collision, or a storm cloud in a state

Interview: Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides

Conduit of the Bottomless Submundane is described as “searching for new ways of experiencing sound while camouflaging the processes”. I’ve always found that concealing the processes helps me to treat sound as its own entity, liberating my mind to place/perceive the sound however it sees fit. What is

Review: Janek Schaefer - Lay-by Lullaby

I drive down the M3 at least three times a week. My commute to work takes an hour and a half, and a predominant amount of this is spent on the motorway. It’s a strange sort of stillness; a constant blur and drone hangs on all sides, while I

Review: Luke Lund - Lost And Found

In tribute to the ethos behind Lost And Found, this review has been written entirely during 30-minute lunch break at work. If I wanted, I could drill within the record indefinitely; there is always inference within inference, with three new avenues of pursuit created with every asserted conclusion. And yet,

Review: Gog - S/T

“Stories of transformation are often painful primal and agonizing. The body rapidly twisting and contorting into some strange beast or monster is traditionally the tale told. Transformation at its best is invisible, stories of people evolving into something better or degenerating into something worse. Evolution, life and death, could be

Review: Silk Dune - Systemic Crevice

“Because birds are not human, their modulations provide schemas that are interesting in ways that are different from algebraic grids. The bird is a living being, part of a universe of muscle and nerves. Its algebra is organic, and so infinitely more complex than a series of dry numbers, and

Review: Yann Novak - Snowfall

I’m sat in my car by the beach as I write this, watching waves silently fold in on themselves beyond the glass, as Snowfall renders my soundscape as a sort of negative exposure. It’s July, and yet my ears see an Icelandic winter; snow and wind speaking in

Review: Sister Overdrive - The Shape Of Failures Past

There are the surgical forms of sound collage – assembly through micro-measurement and steady scissors – and there are those that fly out of silence like an uncontainable exclamation of punk or free jazz, too vital urgent to spare time for refinement. The Shape Of Failures Past is rigged with mashed words

Review: Sunwølf - Beholden To Nothing And No One

I reach the halfway point at the termination of “Heathens Rest”, and find myself airborne for just a moment. I exist in the horizon line, having bled into the earthly crust of the first 50 minutes, and prepare to dissipate into the ethereal open end of the final 30; I

Review: Ion Plasma Incineration - Outer Reality Engine

There is no deliberation or moderation. Outer Reality Engine is a cold, hard kamikaze of machine instinct – 1s and 0s in alternation, with the obliteration of apocalyptic presence striking within vacuums of pure absence. It’s numb and anti-euphoric; a meditation on the absolute, where the ecstatic extremes of kaleidoscopic

Review: Valerio Tricoli - Miseri Lares

The conversational hiss and clang of steam engine maintenance; the psychological haunt of whispering voices whose plosives pop with bubbles of moisture; the gentle rock of a torch suspended from the ceiling; watching overnight planes besides the splintering stream of a wood fire; re-plumbing the water supply of a military

Review: Erik K. Skodvin - Flame

Sound rises as if through séance; a conjuring in the centre of the room, as a congregation of baited, expectant voices drift in from the perimeter. Sustained piano notes – low, like late night murmurs – abseil into the quiet, while guitar feedback voices its whimpering anxiety from one corner, knocking restlessly

Cody Yantis + Nathan McLaughlin + Josh Mason + Joe Houpert - Line Drawings

It’s a theme that hits home. To use words is to draw lines, to categorise; asserting divisions between what is and what isn’t – like a concentrated slither of torchlight, illuminating one side and, by extension, declaring the rest as obsolete. Yet movement can be instilled within words through

Review: PAIN JERK-COURTIS - Pachinko Blast Anarchy

There is no buffer of air between me and Pachinko Blast Anarchy, and no illusionary stereo space for me to step into. The connection is direct, unmediated – a jack lead taped to a neuron, hardwiring the record onto my senses – and it’s as though I am merely part of

Review: Whisper Room - The Cruelest Month

It starts like the eternal music of a moored up boat. Guitars clang like pulleys swung into wood, while a giddy sequence of tones tug the melody back and forth over a central point; Whisper Room are sleeping, cradle-rocked. Even as the rhythm solidifies into a tunnel of hip hop

Review: Joshua Tristan Churchill - Walks

The path can never be familiar. It is not just a bald ribbon of earth or tarmac drawing a fracture through the landscape; it’s a meeting point for sensation, event and coincidence, with changes in direction instigated from within the transient brew of circumstance. As Churchill’s clarinet swerves

Review: Robert Curgenven - SIRÈNE

“Not a kind of nostalgia or looking back nor a looking forward into a future but instead seeing time, lineage, nationhood as a process and a continuum of change.” In which case, the past ripples with uncertainty in the same way the future does, and thus the notions of precursion

Review: Ingrid Schmoliner - карлицы сюита

“Prepared” piano is perhaps putting it lightly. There are moments where the piano sounds like a pile of splintered wood, ivory shards and loose strings diving in and out of the mess; strings buzz and try to wriggle out of a sandwich of glazed maple, while accidental languages of overtone

Review: Illuha - Akari

One second unrolls into a long, levitating minute as I hear a solitary piano note fading into the air around, with all other sounds frozen into quiet as though mesmerised by the graceful decay. Elsewhere, time is overlain at different speeds and in frictional chronology, with a stream of soft

Review: John Chantler - Even Clean Hands Damage The Work

Where The Luminous Ground seemed to feed voltage into two-dimensional space – synthesisers shimmying left and right through sudden angles of circuitry, zig-zagging directly across itself – Even Clean Hands Damage The Work sources more prominently from the kinetic palette of depth: electronic explosions vacuum-sucked into distant corners, drones rotated to unveil

Review: Knifedoutofexistence - Immaturity Of Movement

Immaturity Of Movement feels spherical, self-sustaining. There is nowhere for the noise to go but inward, and so expelled vibration becomes the instigator of new movement: loops push against their own edges until they buckle and crack, feedback serrates itself on grey beds of distortion, while vocals writhe into the

Review: Thought Broadcast - Votive Zero

I imagine somewhere tucked somewhere within a recess of history and architecture, where Votive Zero exists as an immaculate, 360-degree experience. I taste the fresh vibrations as they rattle out of a metallic amplifier grate, examining each crease within each cough of slapback delay; I make eye contact with the

Review: Godflesh - Decline & Fall

I hear the sound of rust in hydraulic mechanism, the rickety calibration slips of age, and the lag of deliberation and self-awareness tugging on the heels of vehement attack. Inevitably, dragging the past into the present has brought with it the residue of everything since; Decline & Fall is Godflesh

Review: Emiliano Romanelli - 333 Loops (Volume 1)

Technically this is Romanelli’s debut since his work with Tu m’ ceased back in 2011, but the connotations of debut feel somehow wrong; implying an opening statement, or the gateway into a path of re-evaluation and redevelopment. 333 Loops is already fully realised – it exists as every eventuality all

Interview: Sly & The Family Drone

How does it feel to be part of the “revival” of Supersonic Festival? Pretty mind-blowing for us. The lineups are always great; they book these incredible touring acts alongside smaller local bands. To be invited is absolutely ace, and playing with bands that we’ve been into for years…I’

Review: Chester Hawkins - Semisolids

What are we waiting for? Semisolids is an anticipation; minute hands cycling on the faces of factory floor clocks, bringing an empty future round again and again, ticking within a stasis that feels prone to imminent and dramatic change. The album is stuck in a void of timelessness: dreaming back

Interview: France Jobin

Tell me about your philosophy/event series, immersound. It’s fantastic to see that sound is being presented in an environment where every aspect of the experience is taken into consideration (lighting, sound reproduction, physical comfort etc). How and why did the series begin? How is the space itself optimised

Review: Prolonged Version - All Watched Over by Machines with Neurotic Disorders

The motion feels circular, perpetual: the whirr and recurrent crackles of rotary turbines, ungainly motors rattling within loose steel casing, hydraulic pumps gliding back and forth in rusty, frictional jerks. Somehow I feel intrusive – like I’ve snuck into the engine room in spite of the “WARNING” signs on the

Review: North Atlantic Drift + Northumbria - Split

North Atlantic Drift sound heartbroken beyond repair. As if acknowledging their irreversible decay into cold and loneliness, they wilt into death in the most beautiful manner possible. Synthesisers splay downward like melting stalactites, with minor thirds from bells splashing against stone like beads of glacial water; there is warmth and

Review: Cræsher - [π]oise

As each piece on [π]oise slips away from its algebraic root – mutating into new shapes and cascading into fresh harmonic relationship, shaking off its personality preset to form its own transient palette of behaviour – the question of authorship starts solidify. “Anyone can make this stuff” – it’s the classic,

Review: Sound Reasons - Epiphany

Epiphany: a sudden moment of realisation, thickening in the mind out of nothing. A patient, metronomic millipede scuttle shimmying out of the inertia of self-renewing chime decay (N0ngrata + edGeCut), or a fleeting acknowledgement of Zen-like cyclical completion within the warm draft and black soot of a clunky air ventilation unit

Review: Vittoria Fleet - Acht

Acht feels like a tribute to over-sensation, in all of its ecstasy and danger. Digital displacement (crackling, beeping computer processes) contradicts with tangible acoustics (the illusion of hearing an orchestra rehearsal from an adjacent corridor); elegant, far eastern drapes of pop try to establish simplicity within the bustling interconnections of

Live: Noxagt + MoE + Aiming For Enrike @ Cafe Blitz in Oslo, Norway, 10/05/2014

Computer word processing can feel too static sometimes, and perhaps my hand-written notepad scrawl better captures my experience with Aiming For Enrike. I can see where words have been rephrased and elaborations have been crammed in the margins; where one train of thought has been interrupted and recalibrated, revealing my

Review: Rudimentary Peni - Death Church

Like a mucus projectile, each track on Death Church splats and sticks. There’s no room for interruption or counter-argument – questions at the end, please – and in the split-second of recharge at the end of each burst (dimming cymbal abuse fallout, guitar strings choked to silence like a motorised chainsaw

Interview: Amenra

You’re soon due to play Beyond The Redshift festival, curated by Cult Of Luna. What are your thoughts on the event? The line up looks fantastic. We’re really looking forward to play the festival, and the Forum. It harbored one of my favorite shows of my life, Neurosis

Review: Danny Norbury - Light In August

The strings on Light In August are graceful but heavy, gliding laboriously like a boat tugged into harbour on mooring ropes. Piano steps methodically, tentatively – a staircase into a dark attic – and where so often such an instrument setup drifts with a weightless, almost ignorant delicacy, Norbury’s music stoops

Review: Thomas Ankersmit - Figueroa Terrace

Ankersmit’s circuitry is half-broken, covered in moss and sap. Figueroa Terrace does not seek completion and digital assurance within the electronic; rather, it fractures via the haphazard rustles and splinters of nature, taking sudden deviations away from its closed loops into the crackle of dehydrated leaves, gasps of gravel

Review: Stine Janvin Motland - In Labour

Her voice sounds like a scuttling rat in the bottom of a cargo crate, unseen by the labourers heaving hollow metal into the back of neutral-gear trucks. There’s an element of self-stifled panic – screams chopped into shallow, hyperventilated breaths – as though Motland shouldn’t be there, crouching wide-eyed in

Review: Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble - Intergalactic Beings

The album is totally rife with inner conflict. Even when a melody declares itself with the assertion of full-bodied diaphragm projectiles from brass and woodwind together – like a thought rendered with the clarity of a physical sphere, like a snooker ball held in the hand – there are scuffling disturbances happening

Interview: Kristoffer Rygg (Ulver)

Your Sunn O))) collaboration Terrestrials had been in the works for a while. How does it feel to finally get it out in the open? It’s kind of a relief. It feels good. And I think we all feel almost surprised by all the great response. We all had

Review: 1982 - A/B

It’s a dramatic hot air balloon flight, and the brass and woodwind sidle past me like wispy, cotton wall condensation, playfully nudging the yaw of my drift in grand chicanes across the skyline. Tiny breaths and clunking buttons sound like the vintage creaks of my wooden basket, or the

Review: The Astronaut Body Four - Murder City

Recorded in the drummer’s bedroom, it’s only inevitable that a wayward elbow would clatter into a wardrobe, or that the limbs of both body and saxophone would joust and jostle unintentionally. That’s what I imagine at least, as side one’s smooth, cyclical swing awkwardly negotiates the

Review: COH - TO BEAT

I enter the airlock of TO BEAT: an isolated zone away from the logic and consequence of a linear life, where rebellion and transformation materialise in time and then dissipate into the files of forgotten memory. The opening track tracks the compression of a constant sine tone into sharp punctuations

Review: Delusi - Cataclysmia

Just as apocalyptic warnings are being etched into the sky by meteor trails and patterns of alien light, my skull is being ravaged by all manner of scuttling bugs and electric shocks. Cataclysmia is a impending worldwide disaster and a catastrophe happening to me personally, and the sense of depth

Interview: Laurence Tompkins

For details on attending the two secret Bournemouth shows on April 23rd, get in touch here. So in a nutshell, what is Handy? It’s four days of gigs. I’ve written a piece for David Bainbridge on six-string banjo and I’m playing two saucepans, a harmonica and weird

Review: Kemper Norton - To Mahina

I see gigantic translucent ships that take to water as if weightless, carried on a sea that rises gently within the massage of intersecting currents. The drones feel ethereal and fading; perhaps they were violins once, although they’ve been unravelled into ribbons of air liberated from explicit instrument affiliation.

Interview: Fennesz

I just want to establish the pronunciation of the album title before we begin. It’s called Bécs [pronounced “baeetch”]. Peter Rehberg and I thought it’d be nice to use this title, but I knew that it’d be difficult for some people. I suppose the primary concern is

Review: Bruno Bavota - The Secret Of The Sea

Ultimately the album is a transcription of sadness, and the melodies flow forth in continuous cathartic evacuation via tunnels of piano and guitar; rising and weaving in momentary hope, resting upon minor keys that resonate with a solemn acceptance of feeling melancholic and ill at ease. If there is a

Review: Diane Cluck - Boneset

Like the tail of a blue whale, Cluck’s voice flicks upward and descends elegantly back down; it’s a mountain road now, curving tightly around chords and straightening out again momentarily; it’s a candle flickering now, ticking into sudden right angles in a dramatic overreaction to a gentle

Review: Noxagt - Brutage

There’s nowhere for Noxagt to go. This is not repetition as a foundation for anywhere higher, but as a termination point; a place of stagnancy where the band can gravely run the counter down, beating their heads against a wall of cymbal and fractured concrete. Snare drums crack too

Review: The Bongoloids feat. The Xanadu Sound - Fig. 10

It’s that sensation of waking on a train, and the confusion and uncertainty that dangles from the pit of the stomach as the mind ingests the sudden transformation of place. I have cross-faded to somewhere else now, and peer between The Bongoloids’ broken guitars and dull brass to try

Live: Nathaniel Mann + Dead Rat Orchestra - Rough Music @ Ovada Warehouse, 29/03/2014

“Play the long notes as if you’ve forgotten the melody.” Indeed, they hang like a boat pushed out from dock and left to drift, or like an open mouth waiting for words to come. Daniel Merrill is playing an alternate version of “Scarborough Fair” on solo violin, to which

Interview: Nathaniel Mann

This performance will mark the end of your Embedded residency. Could you take us through what you’ve been up to the past 18 months? 18 months is a long time, so I’ve had the opportunity to do quite a lot. It’s a Sound And Music programme, and

Review: Francisco López - Presque Tout (Quiet Pieces: 1997 - 2013)

A pair of sunglasses crashes to the floor as I’m listening to Presque Tout, and in the midst of such a subtle and gently rotating soundscape, the impact feels like the loudest sound I’ve ever heard in my life. The collection is a remarkable demonstration of how hearing

Review: Nicolas Wise + mise_en_scene - Introjection

It won’t be long before the form and function of the digital realm starts to leak out of its square screens, beyond the hard lines that currently render it distinct from the corporeal. To me, Introjection sounds like that chaotic moment of connection between the digital and physical, where

Review: Mortal Morning - The Lost Line

The other release that comes to mind here is Chris Watson’s El Tren Fantasma, which documents the journey of the Mexican “Ghost Train” from Los Mochis to Veracruz; an album that unfolds from the expectation set by its cover image, with galloping metal and jets of steam carving up

Review: Eric Thielemans - Sprang

I can sometimes hear my cat scampering around the living room as I lay in bed on weekends, as an over-active imagination and a night’s worth of potential energy collide in jolts of play; sudden surges of limbs tumbling over the wooden floor, chasing the phantom mice that flash

Review: A.R.C. Soundtracks - Archive: Volume One

Archive: Volume One is a dead end; the act of being carried out on an ellipsis, pushed from colour into drear and vacancy. If there is a mutual agenda among the meandering instruments, it’s to expel the depositories of life in the absence of purpose – the co-ordinates are set

Review: Ashlar - St James' Gardens

There are drones cast above the field recordings of “Winding Nature” are like pylon wires overseeing an autumnal suburbia; dipping and rising in trapezoidal chords, laced like a spider’s web over the declarative yelps of children playing, and the distant traffic noise that crossfades elegantly with the brittle trees

Interview: 20.SV

The Great Sonic Wave is the culmination of five years’ work. The something very “definitive” about such a title; does the recorded version represent the “wave” in its completed form, or a snapshot of an entity that could grow and expand indefinitely? I haven’t had a conscious thought about

Review: Chris Campbell - Things You Already Know

How does something become part of your life? How do you bring that integrated, non-dual state of mind into the messy reality we live in? How do you express that through the very specific lens of self? In a sense, these questions posed by Campbell on the CD inlay only

Review: Sketches For Albinos - Fireworks And The Dead City Radio

Fireworks And The Dead City Radio is daydreaming to me. Not only for the partially formed thoughts that bend in their vaguely recalled shape, but for the narrative movement that sees gateways into new thoughts within the molecular details of others; the manner and warmth of resonant guitar decay brings

Review: Anne Guthrie - Codiaeum Variegatum

The sounds of nature are not merely overlain; not draped like thick blankets over horns and violins that jut out in protest at poor placement, forever pulling away from the field recordings that never fully fused in the first place. Landscape and instrument writhe within one another; ivy curls out

Review: Kay Hill - Cold Title

It’s makes some sort of paradoxical sense that Cold Title should be either a CD or a set of digital files, carrying its contents within the spotless, symmetrical vessels of binary clusters. Because while the release amplifies the sounds of friction and accident – the skidded landing of a record

Review: Bast - Spectres

Spectres opens up like the last sunset I’ll ever see. Bass drum pulsates on a mechanical rapid fire, sending ripples through the guitars whose sombre symphonia conjures all manners of deep amber and radiant, sky-washing red; it’s an eruption of the miserable, capturing the very point at which

Review: My Cat Is An Alien - PSYCHO-SYSTEM

I begin and end my journey on the precipice. PSYCHO-SYSTEM is a rumbling beneath me, the deathly choir glinting in the sky, the prophetic creaking of joints prior to breakdown, the curdling of thought like fog. For almost four hours – across six canyon-wide pieces, each 29 minutes plus – I am

Review: Derek Piotr - Tempatempat

On Tempatempat, time is sliding across itself. The beats are fierce – the rumble of loose skin and guttural resonance bins, like the feet and bellows of animal deities – and they count seconds passing with the rigidity of a clock hand, snapping from one moment to the next with a deliberate

Review: Adrian Knight - Cheap Love

It’s the way those notes smoosh together; the musical equivalent of moon-eyed desire, played out on an electric piano that makes them glisten under the peripheral wash of slow-sweeping disco strobes. It’s a romantic record, but not of a romance I’ve ever known – too smooth and faultless

Review: Glottalstop - Woodsmoke

Woodsmoke refuses to become, and clings to the corner of recollection as a half memory; an echo of event bouncing down synaptic corridors, distinctive in its sensory detail yet evading the trap of concrete context. I see the blurry image of an old wooden cart, rattling over cobbled road and

Live: Multipletap @ Cafe Oto in London, 23/02/2014

Multipletap awakes gradually, lurching into life with what sounds like a 1980s computer malfunctioning on start up – a hard drive stalling through catalogues of digitised information, with extended beeps whose prolonged tones spell error in cyber vowel. Takahiro Kawaguchi and Kou Katsuyoshi seem to gather up the excitable tension in

Review: France Jobin - The Illusion Of Infinitesimal

My first listen to The Illusion Of Infinitesimal happened without my knowing. I was playing an entirely different record for the umpteenth time – Barren Harvest’s Subtle Cruelties, as it happens – when I began to notice elements of the landscape that didn’t exist before; gigantic agitations of low frequency

Review: Sun Araw - Belomancie

At 1:44 into opener “Scrim”, everything cuts out apart from a ungated buzz wobbling out of a left-side amplifier. It bobs up and down as it navigates through a vibrato pedal, idly nodding, jaws open and awaiting the warm, bubbling shapes of signal. The illustrious, hallucinatory nature of my

Review: Toby Driver + Timba Harris + Russell Greenberg - Ichneumonidae

Sound slots beautifully into concept and purpose. Or perhaps vice versa. Ichneumonidae seems to have a very human movement – the violin in particular seems to slide like feet across the floor and arpeggiate in graceful twirls, halting occasionally to rebalance and emphasise a particular pose; momentarily still, with the smooth

Review: Jeremiah Cymerman - Pale Horse

Pale Horse is smothering, disturbing. Any time one member of this trio makes a sound – whether it’s a paranoid whimper or a brash, night terror yelp – it is forced to writhe across the personal space of the other two; each instrument is constantly trying to recoil away from the

Review: Henry Blacker - Hungry Dogs Will Eat Dirty Puddings

Hungry Dogs Will Eat Dirty Puddings is an insatiable craving, a stomach with a hole. I feel like Henry Blacker aren’t in it for the journey, but rather for the prize that constantly teases from afar – it’s an album that itches with renewed thirst, running on empty but

Interview: Rie Nakajima

It was fantastic to see your performance at Queen Elizabeth Hall; it’s rare to see experimental sound on that sort of scale. How was it for you? It was quite tough. The space was big. Everyone who knows my work was worried about if my object sound is loud

Live: Current 93 + Shirley Collins + MacGillivray @ Union Chapel in London, 08/02/2014

MacGillivray looks startled and curious, and sometimes it’s as though she’s discovering these songs (and her voice, for that matter) for the first time, marvelling at their changes in direction as if they move of an independent will. There’s nothing particularly complicated about her music– which is

Review: The Ceramic Hobs - Spirit World Circle Jerk

Paint and colours abound. Bits of text slapped down atop pictures kidnapped from elsewhere; the intrusive outside pokes its head through open windows, blending and merging with a sermon or narrative that tries to slither above babbling radio stations and the noises that congregate around a microphone left on to

Review: Good Romans - Open This Door, Never Look Back

A delicate feedback starts to leak into “Ode For Spar” about halfway through, and it’s as though a clamshell is opening up to let the reflective light of the pearl glare softly outward; a soft glow parting the rumble of water pressure that feels (rather eerily) like my own

Review: Nagual - S/T

The room is tense with electricity. In places I can hear the buzzing of two loose wires in contact – groaning, petering out – while at others it’s less explicit; perhaps a low transistor hum below the floorboards, whirring with dangerous life, or soft lights spilling out of burning bulbs. Ultimately

Review: Krokofant - S/T

Those downtuned stabs are instantly familiar, and the teenaged Meshuggah fan in me leaps right out of my mouth every time I hear opener “Polyfant” fire up. That muscular execution seems to re-imagine diaphragms and arms as hissing, slamming hydraulic mechanisms, while the cold reverb wafting off of the drums

Review: Swefn - Varities Of Anomalous Experience

Is Varieties Of Anomalous Experience trying to communicate with me? There’s something about the way in which the electronics arrive in splutters and clumps – broken up and malformed from their journey down the wires – which brings me to anticipate the delivery of a message of sorts: the coarse, Velcro

Review: Talk West - Canyon Lip

I imagine a water mill, rusted but still operational; its movement a sequence of lurches and tiny stalls, and its age accumulating in unoiled song sidling out of the turbine, seeping between the droplets of guitar that tumble off the paddles. Each repetition gathers up a greater strain, and friction

Review: Aymeric De Tapol - Méridiens

Méridiens utilises all of the impulse and ellipsis of a travel scrapbook; a slapdash account of personal experience that reshapes the sound through its cheap microphones like a memory rendered thin and hazy through forgetting. It’s rough, subjective – booming parades and voices in unison fade beneath the sound of

Feature: Sound On The Edge Of Sleep

I was on a gigantic set of stairs that stretched out endlessly before me, descending. Each step was about 10 feet tall and made out these massive sheets of taut, trampoline-esque elastic, bathed in a mixture of yellow, blue and pink neon lights that also spilled out onto the surrounding

Review: Amnertia - Spider Hashish

Just as Lumen places its central character in the midst of the barely explainable – breaching the bizarre with one foot on the periphery of reason, leading to a murky swirl of abstract rationalisations and haunts of self-doubt – Spider Hashish reveals only flashes of human origin, both in terms of the

Review: Oikos - Vigilia

Vigilia’s title track leaves all brushstrokes visible. It is not an immaculate atmosphere that exists before I arrive, hiding its history somewhere within the stirrings of the present tense – I bear witness to its very construction, observing as each layer of guitar descends and compacts onto the existing mass

Live: The New Experimentalists @ Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, 14/01/2014

I walk in, and the atmosphere of a performance in progress swallows me whole. The Queen Elizabeth Hall is unquestionably an auditorium – luxury tiered seating, low lighting, a high sloped ceiling somewhere up there in the darkness – and its formidable call for silence is a roar in itself. But it’

Review: Bly De Blyant - Hindsight Bias

“Rock music” is such a loose term, and that’s a fantastic thing. Hindsight Bias borrows rock’s propulsion and unambiguity – though intricate and decorative, the beats here lay the road ahead like a steel railway line – and uses its throbs of energy to power the more melodious textures that

Live: Richard Youngs + Eric Chenaux @ Cafe Oto In London, 11/01/2014

Guitar soloing is so often a demonstration of virtuosity and technical confidence, but it sounds drunk and weak-limbed under Chenaux’s command; the exaggerated wah pedal movements sound like massive bubbles ready to pop, and the vibrato makes held notes shiver like a bottom lip heralding an imminent outburst of

Review: Hanetration - Timelapse

Music is building in the room above me, in the air in front of me, in the corridor through the open doorway. At some points, Timelapse sounds like those psychotic horror movie moments where clocks and kitchen utensils activate themselves in rhythmic unison, as though there is a will within

Review: Mothlite - Máthair

Perhaps it’s because I’m staring into Máthair’s artwork as the opening track, “Dawn Lake”, starts to constellate like some astral debris. But the imagery here is a sort of panorama of human emotion; a planetarium projecting the heavier and more worrisome thoughts, like some sort of ballading

Review: Steve Hilmy + Daniel Barbiero - Take A Sound. Do Something To It. Do Something Else To It.

Straining, I can hear the double bass improvisation that sits beneath the electronic disorientation and melodrama: the actions of two arms as they methodically negotiate pitch and attack, moving between light bow scrubs that sound like a frog hopping between lily pads and the twang of an index finger swept

Review: Dąbrowski Sorey Duo - Steps

Steps is Dąbrowski’s first ever duo, and it’s through his enthusiastic exploration of the two-person dynamic that I remember what a difference it makes to have just one other in musical company. I feel as though I can hear his deep inhalations as he falls quiet; the sudden

Review: Black Dirt Oak - Wawayanda Patent

Wawayanda Patent sounds to me like an isolated record. Not just during those moments where grubby fingernails send banjo strings into twang, painting an image of a sloping shack of a recording studio lodged uncomfortably among fields of corn, somewhere upon a rippling scorched horizon; more for the way in

Review: Posset - Goose Shat Silver Dollars

Along with its explicit primary purpose, the tape is a haven of alternative reality strands and whispered micro-detail. There is a hidden music, backmasking phantoms, words slithering out between the momentary gaps between phonemes – it’s all there, ready to be tapped by those that perceive the malleability of the

Review: The Truth About Frank - The Carrion EP

The Carrion is “rut” music; the sensation of being jammed down the gap between two states of mind, locked in the moment after meaning dissipates and before new significance can materialise. I feel like I’m cycling through FM radio frequencies, picking up the tail ends of words and emotional

Feature: Review Of 2013

My 2013 began with a review of The Pentaki Slopes by Kangding Ray. I have a strong memory of listening to this release as I ran through Tottenham to catch a football game, with the hard beats and synthesiser strobes running in perfect parallel to High Road’s straight line

Review: Ex-Easter Island Head - Mallet Guitars Three

Ex-Easter Island Head are sonic detoxifiers, whose mallet taps initiate the liberation of debris trapped within the instrument fibre – lush tones pour out of each impact with the peaceful exhalation of a body cleansed, while the shivers of scraped strings kneed out a tension between wood and metallic tendon. The

Review: Richard Moult + David Colohan - Hexameron

Each sound on Hexameron is like a cliff edge, leaving ever step of my journey in transitory uncertainty and suspension. Moments are held open in the weightless expectation that the future will come to catch them – pianos hang with held breaths, with open chords beckoning the response that will endorse

Live: Mike Majikowski + Seiji Morimoto + Piotr Tkacz + Frank Gratkowski @ 38 Flughafenstrasse in Berlin, 13/12/2013

Upon walking past, 38 Flughafenstrasse appears to be a tiny gallery space with room for performance equipment or an audience, and both at a stretch. As I step inside, I realise it’s a mini-network of four interconnected rooms, which Quiet Cue utilise to break up the immobilising intensity of

Review: Domnitch + Gelfand + CoH + Prudence + Lopez + Tietchens - Liquified Sky

There’s something frightening about the fact that quantum behaviour can be observed on a scale we can visually perceive. Gone is the buffer of inarticulability and incomprehension, which held such alien processes within the realm of the mythic while the large-scale world continued to unfold within our cocooned understanding

Review: Spandril - 22/7

Perhaps 22/7 is the last thing I’m ever going to hear? I can’t quite identify why this tape makes me feel this way, but the silence that follows its conclusion feels eerily absolute; I’m left with the embers of the melody that has just mournfully dipped

Review: kajkyt - II

II achieves a really strategic form of intimidation, like a cluster of concrete pillars sparingly arranged so as to block out the entirety of the sun’s circadian trajectory. I’m reminded of Godflesh for the record’s repressed violence; the sense of the seething unspoken, reduced to internalised revolts

Review: The Living Earth Show - High Art

For those who fell in love with Earth’s post-millennial reincarnation as a ghost town blues band, the movements of Samuel Carl Adams’ “Tension Study” will no doubt feel familiar. It’s an elephantine ballet; a precise alternation between hesitation (stifled percussion, muted muscle contraction) and luxurious release – a to-and-fro

Live: Breaking The Mirror Of Silence: Yiorgis Sakellariou + Robbie Judkins + Howie Lee @ Angus-Hughes Gallery in London, 30/11/2013

Yiorgis Sakellariou’s piece drops onto my ears in the pitch black; a faint noise curling out of the speakers like a thin smoke, loaded with the explosive potential of the composer’s pre-performance assertion that the piece will be virtually inaudible at some points and potentially intolerably loud at

Review: 20.SV - The Great Sonic Wave

The Great Sonic Wave is like a bug stuck in tar; slurping, lurching, heaving limbs upward to a viscous smack that only galvanises immobility further, gathering matter until distinction is subsumed into a syrup of microchip malfunction, broken club music and the horrifying human wretch that signifies sanity and reason

Review: Larry Goves + Matthew Welton / Laurie Tompkins + Sam Quill - Virtual Airport / SHUCK!

It’s difficult to determine how Virtual Airport was put together. About 3:50 into the sixth movement, there’s an understated moment of union; a seemingly calculated moment of parallel thought, as though the spiralling trajectories of each individual instrument – voices, cello, piano, electronics – have miraculously encountered a mutual

Review: Oiseaux-Tempête - S/T

It’s like witnessing water crystalise under freezing temperatures. The guitars rise up from sparing, soft ripples of individual note – planted on silence like pebbles dropped gently into the water – into spewing blizzard jets that shower over cymbals and other loose energy splashes, arcing upward with the fizz of a

Review: Kink Gong - Voices

Where am I? An unnamed island thousands of miles off the coast of Asia perhaps; close enough to the mainland so that the echoes of sonic tradition lap up gently at the shores, but disconnected to the point that these influences are dragged into an independent path of development; mashed

Review: Cathy Lane - The Hebrides Suite

The sounds opening The Hebrides Suite are instantly familiar: the wind that wraps round my head like a sandpaper scarf, the metronomic warning beeps and electronic whirrs of ferry mechanism, the tinny and half-croaked tannoy announcement that cuts the ribbon on my overseas journey and verbally unravels the path ahead.

Live: Martin A. Smith - NOISE and whispers @ GV Art, 14/11/2013

“I should be doing something.” So says a gentle, uneasy voice on Clay Gold’s work for headphones. I imagine a figure sat in a living room, poised awkwardly on the edge of a chair and absently ingesting the birdsong that trickles in through a window overlooking a garden, while

Review: Noothgrush + Coffins - Split

Midway through Noothgrush, I feel like I’m trying to walk uphill in chainmail. Each step is a very deliberate upheave of flesh and iron, and each subsequent stomp is an ecstatic relief in gravity and fracturing impact; a constant cycle of agonising muscular retraction and gushes of euphoric alleviation,

Review: Lend Me Your Underbelly - Giant Tadpoles Among Us

The elements force the melodies here into crooked growth. Each track on Giant Tadpoles Among Us carries a sort of phototropic slant; set on a giddy diagonal by the field recording confetti (cascades of sucked in words crafted from reversed conversation, wooden scrapes and impact tacked together into an organic

Review: Circuit Breaker - Grid

Just as with Cairn, I’m immediately drawn into playful, imaginary speculations of how Grid may have been recorded. This time I’m thinking of a room on a severe tilt, with the gravity cranked up so that instrument tunings start to sag; voices wobble and panic in complaint at

Live: Cut Hands + Container + Blood Music + Black Amiga @ The Island in Bristol, 22/11/2013

There’s already a sense of imposition when I walk into The Island tonight; a sensation of being squeezed inward by the dense brickwork and low ceilings, of being penned in by the darkness and the walls that feel as though they’re jostling me on either side. As it

Review: Atom Eye - The Otolith Sessions

Accompanying The Otolith Sessions is a gorgeous colour booklet, gathering a year of compulsive audio experiments into a series of photographs and written instructions: close-up shots of wires intertwining and arcing, chaotic spills of tape regurgitated into a tangle, dials and buttons beckoning creative decision. The booklet is a scrapbook

Review: MUfi.re - These Walls Resemble Absence

These Walls Resemble Absence was recorded in an old abandoned factory, and everything started to make sense when I realised this. There is a very slight infiltration of the outside – a muffed sea of public conversation, eerily distinct droplets of birdsong, a slight wind rippling and crackling across the ceiling

Interview: Sam Underwood (If Wet, ORE)

ILLUSTRATED BY ALEX BERTRAM-POWELL So what exactly is If Wet? It’s a monthly event we run in my village hall; a sort of grand show and tell for sound artists / musicians. It’s a place for them to showcase and test their latest sonic works and research. For the

Review: Nate Wooley - Seven Storey Mountain III + IV

There is an incredible point in both of these Seven Storey Mountain editions – I made it to be about 27 minutes into III and 25 minutes into IV – where I subconsciously cease to make distinction between individual energies and start see these pieces as coherent, inseparable bodies of sound. What

Review: Kevin Hufnagel - Ashland

In Ashland resides the ecstatic relief of contrast; the ability to linger over one syllable for as long as Hufnagel deems necessary, while allowing others to become little skips or faint shadows in around the other utterances. Liberated from the merciless urgency that makes Gorguts so incessantly loud and explosive,

Live: Enablers + Sweet Williams @ The Dalston Victoria in London, 13/11/2013

I feel as though The Victoria is swaying like a ship; Sweet Williams slur and groan as gravity shifts beneath them, their music slipping nauseously off axis. But while there’s a wooziness trickling out of the gaps – open strings rubbing up against the chords, consonances lost to a drunken

Review: Circuit Des Yeux - Overdue

Even as the strings of “Lithonia” swoop romantically into their own reflection – like a dove playfully greeting itself in a mirror – there are glints of violence bubbling between the majestic melodic arcs. Sure enough, the rest of Overdue plays out this prophesised feud between palatial grandeur and the seething unrest

Review: BLK w/Bear - The Final Mapping Of New Constellations

Through the lens of BLK w/Bear, the act of composition becomes as temporal and elusive as sound itself. The Final Mapping Of New Constellations uses the remix to unravel any perspective of a finished “song” as an immaculate and immortal sculpture; rather, it is a chance collision of several

Review: Queen Elephantine - Scarab

Here’s proof that you can create a record of phenomenal weight without cranking the guitars right into the red. For the most part, tonality lurks through Scarab as either a buried, tectonic implication or a thin stream of desert breeze, acting as the murmuring by-product of the album’s

Review: ÄÄNIPÄÄ - Through A Pre-Memory

Nothing sits right. Everything is slithering out of something else; crooked amplifier spill dribbles from snot bubbles of electronic beat, while strings penetrate the ceiling like light squeezing through cracks in an otherwise pitch-black concrete cell. In fact, it sounds as though the whole record may have been composed in

Review: Various Artists - Vernacular

The very medium that makes Vernacular possible could also threaten its conceptual potency. Physical locality is no longer a factor contributing to the ease of information exchange; international artistic collaborations can be established through file-swapping or even real-time streams, and compilations such as this one can be arranged through a

Review: The Kendal Mintcake - The Kendal Mintcake's Insignificant Digits

It’s like a teleportation gone wrong. Upward synthesiser cascades make me feels as though I’m hurtling through an inter-dimensional gateway – swirling past my head like gigantic hoops of light – and immediately I’m hauled away from gravity and tangible living. Yet as the electronics pull back and cast

Live: Guillaume Viltard + Audrey Lauro + Mark Sanders + Rachel Musson @ OTO Project Space in London, 02/11/2013

The Project Space offers a much more raw and earthly performance experience compared to the main hub of Café Oto; warmth and atmosphere is swapped out for more of a “white canvas” effect, plotting the music against a primitive combination of fresh timber and cascading sand bags. All seats point

Interview: Container

You’ll be performing in an abandoned police station at this Bristol show, which sounds like a great place to host your music. Are there particular types of venues you enjoy playing in most? Lately I’ve been playing at such a mix of venues, from real dance club type

Review: Yannick Dauby - 蛙界蒙薰

Dauby pitches his part of the dialogue perfectly. He doesn’t mimic the frogs outright; rather, he empathises with them, co-exists with them – his synthesisers become mysterious figments of the amphibious habitat, embedding themselves amongst the damp foliage as accepted members of the ecological chorus. Yet there’s a deliberate

Review: The Doomed Bird Of Providence - Blind Mouths Eat

Blind Mouths Eat is the music of a weary onward journey; laboured steps announced by wobbly tom hits, melancholy that clings to the feet like a viscous mud, vocals and violins that slur and groan like the exhales of strain under a burdening weight. There’s something sombre about its

Review: Ryoji Ikeda - Supercodex

Ikeda’s music has always been high-volume headphone music for me. I saw a live rendition of Test Pattern at the Barbican last year, and while there was a primitive pleasure in having gigantic whirrs of bass cutting through my guts, the music was also coated in an inevitable acoustic

Review: Revglow - Sound Post Tension

By the time I reach third track “Phantom Theatre”, I’m aware of something mantra-like in Revglow’s sound – the totem-like rhythmic pulse beckons all other instruments into synchronous congregation, with the encircling guitars and synthesisers forming a hypnotic monotony in culmination. The vocals (female, gentle) stray and swoop like

Review: Melt Banana - Fetch

“Candy Gun” is precisely what I expected. Ruthless but also sickly; a pleasure excess that makes me feel like I’m in a washing machine full of vibrant pools of paint; little pockets of galloping punk engaging in a white knuckle call-and-response with sudden booms of kaleidoscopic meltdown. Many of

Review: Abandon - S/T

This is cited as being a “new, more organic path” for Abandon. “Organic” is a term I utilise often myself in reviews, although it’s meaning is mercurial; it comes to describe different characteristics depending on the context of its application. Within the framework of Abandon’s weaving ivy guitars

Review: Antlered Man - This Devil Is Them

This Devil Is Them sounds dangerous. The guitars are excessively distorted, and with each unnatural riff – a nasty, exorcism spasm of contorted body, decorated with little bleeds of plectrum noise, octaver and pinch harmonic – the band feel close to breaking themselves, puncturing skin with broken bone. Movement is brisk and

Review: Sly & The Family Drone - Unnecessary Woe

Unnecessary Woe begins like a haunted house building itself. It’s just clatters of movement to begin with; things falling off of shelves onto concrete floor; cymbals squealing under a rough, horse hair friction; kicked up high frequency dust that hits the microphone as puffs of static. Soon it’s

Review: Matana Roberts - Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile

The most remarkable aspect of Mississippi Moonchile is the way it maintains movement. It’s constantly either speeding up or slowing down; bubbling to climaxes of volume or fading into silence like smoke dispersing in the air; bringing piano to a halt so that drums can swoop chiming over the

Review: Benjamin Finger - Listen To My Nerves Hum

In a transition that mimics someone moving from the bustle of the capital city to the clarity and open space of the rural countryside, Listen To My Nerves Hum is a drastic breakaway from the rhythmic fragmentation and acoustic/electronic blurring of 2011’s For You, Sleepsleeper. Time unfolds in

Review: Ralf Wehowsky + Anla Courtis - Aseleuch Tendrradero

In the midst of Aseleuch Tendrradero I am reduced to the state of an infant, abandoning all thought to sound sources to merely marvel at sound as an alien and somewhat intimidating independent entity. My soundscape is strange and threatening, cartoonishly exaggerated and operating on a logic that I fail

Review: Gunslingers - Massacre-Rock Deviant Inquisitors

Gunslingers are straight out of the blocks: guitar screaming and writhing through boisterous rock ‘n’ roll improv, bass slinking between the frets with bite and seduction in equal part, vocals drool sass into vintage microphone, and drums propelled by a ride cymbal that ticks away with the same juvenile incessancy

Live: Ring @ Pavilion Dance in Bournemouth, 02/10/2013

Out of all my senses, my hearing is most prone to tipping off the rails of the rational. Ring places me in absolute pitch black, rendering me immediately aware of how sound is so often stabilised within the frame of reality by vision, and in absence of all light, the

Interview: Brian Chippendale (Black Pus, Lightning Bolt)

So you’ve done a couple of dates in Holland already? Yeah. Amsterdam, Tilburg and then over to the UK. So this is day six of 22 shows. And how has it been so far? It’s been nice. I think I’m in the swing of it now. The

Review: Arovane - Ve Palor

Uwe Zahn was right to wait patiently. No doubt he considered forcing out Ve Palor in its entirety back in 2002, when its first tracks were initially conceived – instead, he allowed the record to slip out of creative hibernation on its own accord, despite the fact that it would take

Review: Total Life - Radiator

It’s the serration that hits me first – the jagged lip of Radiator’s solid wall of hum, sanding down my ear canals as buzzes into my head. The force of the sound is inescapable, and my concentration is consumed instantly as the record cuts into full volume from the

Interview: That Fucking Tank

What was the thinking behind recording A Document Of The Last Set in a studio rather than capturing a live show? I think it was just so it would sound better! There was an idea of us playing in front of an audience. When we first did that A Document

Review: Stave - Reform

Initially, Reform comes to me as a corporeally rooted space: a heaving industrial workshop with high ceilings and generous metallic acoustics (“Gun Control”), a cold corridor of techno illuminated by throbbing red lights (“The Fear”), an exceedingly high viewing platform from which both the space-earth boundary and planetary curvature are

Review: MooM - Retarded Memory

Retarded Memory is a strange space: both a musical reflex that draws its power from spiritual connection, and a complete slackening of all the rules and restraints that normally govern the creative mind – playful and care-free collision of the accidental and the intentionally noisy (dying penny whistles, toppled percussion, voices

Review: Be My Friend In Exile - The Silence, The Darkness

“We continued our journey in a silence, which was by no means unpleasant, just a little shy” This is the title of the album’s 10-minute centrepiece. The track itself brings back the sensation of falling asleep on the motorway (as a passenger, obviously): the muffled hiss of traffic filtering

Review: Monochromie - Enlighten Yourself While You Sleep

The chords of “A Cold Sunset” surge into the air like chimney smoke, suddenly released from strict shape and yet still bearing the remnants of form; songs caught in the act of illustrious blossom, spilling over the lines yet still driven upward by their own glorious, optimistic intent. What would

Review: Denton / Watson - Latencies

“More questions: Shall we set out a maximum or ideal duration? …also are these efforts intended to be laid over one another or kept as separate recordings?” It’s a premise from which streams of sonic creativity and contemplative thought both flow forth: two artists recording simultaneously at separate locations,

Review: Ikebana - When You Arrive There

When You Arrive There comes into being almost entirely by itself. Guitar strums resonate in open tunings, with minimal fretwork filtering melody through the string vibration, while vocal melodies are carried into the ether on exhaled breaths, the underlying sighs audible as a hiss of respiratory vacation lurking behind the

Interview: Oren Ambarchi

The last time I saw you solo was April last year at Café Oto; I recall a very intense, high-volume performance consisting of drawn-out bass frequencies, humming drones and manipulated guitar noise. Has your approach or equipment setup for solo performances changed much in the meantime? What can we expect

Review: That Fucking Tank - A Document Of The Last Set

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing That Fucking Tank on two occasions. The first was in the modest setup of the BBC Introducing Stage at Reading Festival in 2008, just barely beyond the rumble of the Main Stage, during which many a weary passer-by stumbled into their stalling, booming

Review: L'eclipse Nue - Because I Hate You

Because I Hate You is lost and perversely playful; the psychologically shaken rants of a court jester losing his head, channelling anger into theatre and vice versa. Rhythm comes in debris and splatters – coughed up squelches of synthesiser and bass drums, funnelled up the stairways that lead down to Tokyo

Review: Roscoe Mitchell + Tony Marsh + John Edwards - Improvisations

Improvisations lurches with caution and injury. John Edwards’ double bass babbles for seconds at a time before suddenly falling silent, like someone catching themselves mid-rant prior to spilling something scandalous. Tony Marsh’s drums stomps with the fluidity and balance of a ballet dancer in clogs, sporadically punctuating ungainly movement

Review: Simon Thacker's Svara Kanti - Rakshasa

The closing bars of “Dhumaketu” – a frantic but impeccably synchronised climax of strings, guitar and tabla, comprised of panicked descents and sudden leaps between octaves that ping with a brisk, elasticated propulsion – could comfortably be translated into swooping guitar solos and explosive power-chords, bringing a symphonic heavy metal epic to

Review: Orla Wren - Book Of The Folded Forest

It’s bleak but bustling too; a snow globe in which skeletal tree branches glitch and chink against curved glass and voices roll round the perimeter, teased upside down and gently shaken so that electronics shower onto pools of soft synthesiser cream, which in turn dribble down the sides of

Review: Eliane Radigue - Adnos I-III

The pace of Adnos is meticulously judged. The swells and recessions within each of these pieces could be due to my ears delicately shifting focus between each strand of detail – thus subconsciously teasing certain frequencies to the fore and sending others into near silence – or they could be genuine evolutions

Review: Ricarda Cometa - S/T

The opening drums of “Dale Matraca” stomp and stumble like a drunk trying to dance. There’s a pumping, dancefloor-worthy intention in there somewhere, but it’s been dashed by a whiskey-hazed sense of balance, meaning that bass drum limps into snare with the grace of someone falling flat on

Review: Katsura Mouri + Tim Olive - Various Histories

Various Histories was apparently recorded on a clammy summer day in Kyoto, without the cool respite of air conditioning. The impact this has had on the creative process is unmistakable – sound presses itself against my skin and suffocates my pores, either as burps of noise rasping off a turntable or

Live: Supernormal Festival @ Brazier’s Park in Oxfordshire, 09-11/08/13

FRIDAY The recent spate of unpredictable weather has evoked fears that rain will turn Supernormal’s luscious green plains into brown, skiddy slop over the weekend, but Friday is an absolute scorcher. Fantastic news, although ribbon-cutters Unicorn Dad vrs Robot Dad must be sweltering under their intricate costumes of cardboard

Review: Takeshi Nishimoto - Lavandula

At some points, Lavandula carries all of the engaging traits I associate with “solo guitar”: the tiny etch marks of fret noise galloping between the notes, the unmistakable sound of skin and neatly-clipped nail striking half-worn metal strings, the chair creaks of preparation and relief that bookend each piece, and

Review: Yannick Frank + Craig Hilton - Flowers For L.P.

Flowers For L.P. is the audio equivalent of an image seen through an unfocussed lens; shapes neither end nor begin, and movement is only identifiable through organic quivers and shifts occurring within big blocks of colour, implying a life and drama trapped beyond the blur of blindness. At times

Review: Steel Hook Prostheses - The Empirics Guild

As each track fades up, I feel like I’ve woken up after weeks of unconsciousness. The walls are dirty and throbbing, processed voices are slinking out through metal grills, and there’s a psychological aftertaste of trauma and unpleasantness curling its way around my mouth, as though my mind

Review: Tom McKinney - TMK

Strange things can happen when composer and performer are split into separate entities. So often, the acoustic guitar can be a sponge for habitual composition; the constant, subconscious application of routine movements and personal technique, carving out identity through the persistent reprise of homely melodic progressions and particular quirks. TMK

Review: Rashad Becker - Traditional Music Of Notional Species Vol. I

Many of the sounds populating Rashad Becker’s PAN debut are “slurps”: watery, bubbly slugs of glissando that travel up the side of my head like a tongue licking me from my cheekbone to my crown. Each track starts with just a couple of these sorts of sounds – sparingly used

Review: The Body - Christs, Redeemers

While newcomers to The Body may unknowingly allow themselves to be swept up in its opening verse – a beautiful, folk-esque serenade, disturbingly still in amongst a tornado of choirs and rattling fences – frequenters will be waiting for its ethereal turbulence to give way. Sure enough, the choral membrane splits open

Review: Richard Youngs - Summer Through My Mind

Where many artists spend years carving and refining a particular artistic shape – adding detail and extra definition with each sonic emission – Richard Youngs exists more as ethos than object. He is a traveller that itches when stationary, driven by the inexorable will to ingest new places and perceptions; the silence

Interview: Ghost Fuck

[audio:/content/images/wordpress/2013/08/Ghost-Fuck-Interview.mp3] Supernormal Zines Tumblr – http://supernormalzines.tumblr.com/ Supernormal Festival website – http://www.supernormalfestival.co.uk/ Ghost Fuck Tumblr – http://ghostfuckzine.tumblr.com/

Review: Cristal - Homegoing

I am submerged; sound is both muffled and muffling, cloaking my head and rushing past my ears in bubbling jets. Homegoing feels like an perfect title when I spend so much of the record disorientated and directionless; the thick drones and avalanches of spray blocks my vision, leaving me aware

Review: 0 - Soñando

Each of these seven pieces hangs like a wind chime, tethered above low frequencies as delicate formations of metallic resonance, swaying and clanging as acoustic melody is threaded gently through the bars. Sound arrives as finger-plucked cascades and softly spoken interplays between the glockenspiels and chimes that cradle the inner

Review: My Cat Is An Alien - Art Is A Tear Of Noise And Infinite Silence

It’s an album title that appears to slot in beautifully with My Cat Is An Alien’s way of working. The duo always seem to be channelling something so momentary and unpredictable, immersed in a sudden rupture in normality’s flat-lining stasis – in deep concentration and bodily escape simultaneously,

Review: Marta Sainz - Tres Piezas

The sound and space of Tres Piezas hits instantly. A flanger splutters from the other end of the room; a voice choked out by walkie-talkie distortion and a phased whoosh that bends and twists the tone beyond human resemblance, coughed up from a doubled-over silhouette in the corner. It becomes

Review: Aquarelle - August Undone

August Undone bursts upward; vertical jets of guitar resound in celebration, as an orchestra seeping through a white noise waterfall. Like a homage to the oft under-estimated might of the liquid form (crescendos materialising as pressurised fountain explosions, weighty major-key tides rolling in unison and almighty crashing waves coming down

Interview: Randall Dunn (Master Musicians Of Bukkake)

PHOTO BY ALISON SCARPULLA So for how long have you been working on Far West? Far West is a concept. It came around through Totem 2, and existing far longer as a concept than it did as any actual recording or writing. Two of the pieces came together about a

Review: Hati + Z'EV - Collusion

To listen to Collusion is to appreciate that all sound is collaboration – that sound is a moment of miraculous assembly, rousing energy from the collision of physical fibre, and then between vibration and space; between overtone and reflection, between mallet and humidity, between mood and material tension, between an equilibrium

Interview: Jennifer Allum

PHOTO BY DAMIR ŽIŽIĆ Have you been to Supernormal before? How did you come to know about the festival? No. I came to know about Supernormal through Kevin Nickells, who I met at ‘Cordyceps Is Your Friend’ earlier this year. Kevin is one of the organisers of Bang the Bore,

Review: Shelling - S/T

Like a zeppelin embarking on a turbulent flight, Shelling evokes the sensation of floating airborne while still comprising of weighty and rather brutish parts, without its seams ripping open under its own self-imposed incongruence. It’s an illusion realised using the looser, echo-saturated melodic rushes that run through the gaps;

Live: At The Moment Of Being Heard @ South London Gallery, 11/07/13

Where so much sound art exhibition is forced into becoming an unbashful orgy of noise and ideas – sound and vision overlapped into a sensory pileup, mangling the work of one artist into the next and drowning a space in light and vibration – At The Moment Of Being Heard is startlingly

Review: Ian Hawgood And Friends - Wolven (A Modern Interpretation)

With Wolven, Ian Hawgood highlights the co-dependent nature of exorcising ideas. The album is an expansion of his album Wolfskin from 2009 – a record centred on childhood dreams and nightmares, and the first ever release on the wonderful Hibernate label – and finally brings the concept of that record into fuller

Review: Dethscalator - Racial Golf Course, No Bitches

Racial Golf Course, No Bitches has no cruise control. Even when it gathers speed – with singer Dan Chandler’s head flung out the window, hollering in a strange confusion of commanding ecstasy and paralysing fear – its movements are jerked and contorted, tugging power chords and snare punctuations out of joint

Review: Millipede - The Lower World

As the first mash of harmony and fizz bursts out of the opening track of The Lower World, Millipede returns in an instant, as if continuing a sentence he started prior to falling into a coma. This is the second in a “dark fantasy” trilogy following 2011’s Realms, and

Review: Reese Williams - Long Tide

The fact that both tracks on Long Tide are precisely 24 minutes long suggests that duration is an irrelevant concept here. In actuality, they are snapshots of a cyclical infinity – an immortal momentum viewed through a mortal eye, its implication understood and its actuality never experienced. Both take the form

Review: Erlen Meyer - S/T

Erlen Meyer’s debut is an ugly thing. Its grim and solitary melodic language is pumped outward with an extroversive force, vibrating under the strain of pulling inwards and bursting outward simultaneously. Those that recall Cult Of Luna’s early recordings – pretty much a doom-centric interpretation of dark matter collapsing

Interview: Aaron Harris (Palms)

So you have a Palms rehearsal in about half an hour then? Yeah, it’s a rehearsal for our debut shows in a few weeks here, so we’re just getting the set together and getting things worked out. How are you feeling about it at this stage? I feel

Interview: Frank Bretschneider

So you’re playing NODE Festival in a couple of days’ time? It’s on Saturday (15th June), yes. It’s the live premier of Super.Trigger. I always have visuals with the concerts, and I’m busy preparing the visual stuff for this premier of the new album. How

Review: Jérémie Mathes - Efequén

For a record that acts as a geomorphological picture of the crumbly, grey landscape of Lanzarote, water is in surprisingly lively abundance. Then again, as with any land mass, its presence is heavily defined by the polarity of its immediate surroundings; its dryness can be sonically realised by water fizzing

Review: Ayelet Lerman + Wade Matthews + Carmel Raz - Growing Carrots In A Concrete Floor

The trio begin by taking that agonising shriek of train brakes – a horrific tangle of high-pitched tones forced forth from clamped metal – and reels it out for eight minutes. Neither friction nor motion give way, and the instruments (violin, viola, synthesis/field recordings) become locked in a miserable state of

Review: Stems - Polemics

As reflected in the decision to house Polemics in tracing paper (on which wiry pink tree roots writhe across sketches of the band members in action), Stems choose to exist in plain view; these pieces are simple and spaciously produced, with the voice of each instrument clearly pronounced and unhidden

Live: Bang The Bore - Displacement Activity @ John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 16/06/13

LOCATION COMPOSITE #1 - PHOTO BY LIZZY MARIES I walk in, and Seth Cooke’s contribution to Displacement Activity has already begun. The audience are looking up toward the ceiling, gathered around a machine without an operator. Bird song climbs above the wind, while a tuneful (yet irritated) buzzing noise

Review: Savaran - Halcyon Days

Just how human memory restructures our perception of places and events into a sensory essence pricked with a few protrusive sonic characteristics, Mark Walters summarises experience into a soft tilting cloud of atmosphere – a pale, vague recollection of amalgamated thought and emotion, rendering tangible that strange concept of a place’

Review: Grumbling Fur - Glynnaestra

Grumbling Fur is fast revealing itself as a shape-shifter, with each new release subverting the identity present in the previous work. In retrospect, clues to the band’s transient self were present all through their debut Furrier; an album built on a curious, indefinite noise half-hidden by foliage and swamp

Review: Boards Of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest

Something is always swirling in the background of Tomorrow’s Harvest: glimmering, drifting unknown on the perimeter of audibility; a beckoning slither of light in the sky, placed intangibility high above an earth of murk and washed out shades. Eight years after the infinite summer of The Campfire Headphase comes

Review: Lasse-Marc Riek - Helgoland

Despite Helgoland being blown up in 1947 and serving as a training site for British bombers in the years after, birds have since become a triumphantly present sonic life force on the island. In fact it’s one of the most bird-dense spots in the whole of Europe, and sure

Live: Eli Keszler + Jennifer Allum + John Chantler @ Cafe Oto in London, 25/05/13

John Chantler’s set originates from the back of the room – where his modular synthesiser sits beneath a network of patch leads – but the sound itself greets Oto from all sides, flooding out of the PA at the front of the stage and emitting squashed signals from two guitar amplifiers

Review: Evan Parker - Vaincu. Va! Live At The Western Front 1978

So many aspects of Vaincu. Va! Live At The Western Front 1978 evoke total disbelief. That the work is the product of a solo musician – as in one person, as in one human being subjected to the same respiratory and dexterous limits as all of us; that the work is

Review: Hectic Zeniths - Type One Era

With Type One Era’s central thumping beats, Hectic Zeniths bring elements into congruence that otherwise have little business in eachother’s proximity. All sorts of samples are prised away from their birthing context – split-seconds of string sections extracted from romantic symphonies, vocals pitch-shifted to sound like the croons of

Review: Simon Lomax - Zone Of Cold

Back when I was 15, Maitreya’s .74 album played a prominent part in the evolution of my own listening behaviour. I’m sure I’m not alone in acknowledging the change in perspective that accompanies the entry into meditative and reflective music; for me personally, it involved peeling away

Review: Mary Lattimore - The Withdrawing Room

The harp may have an inseparable synonymity with peace and beauty, but not in the form exhibited here. Often we hear the instrument played with a ballerina-esque precision; grace as a result of ruthless calculation, and the sonic manifestation of a quest for pure, teardrop-shaped tone; glossed to a point

Review: Gaspar Claus - Jo Ha Kyu

The first sound on Jo Ha Kyu is an assertively plucked low note from Claus’ cello, which rattles very slightly before cutting out on a warm, resonant hum. It’s like a doorway swinging open; an invitation for the album’s collaborators to enter Claus’ creative space and be heard,

Review: Minneapolis Guitar Quartet - Thrum

This is my very first experience of Minneapolis Guitar Quartet, who have actually been performing as a collective since 1996. It feels like a great place to start. Even if the quartet’s talents extend beyond what can be heard on this disc, the collection is an allusion to this

Review: Nicolas Wiese - Living Theory Without Anecdotes

It opens with a chime that resists a smooth and swift decay, slurping up in volume again to resonate for as long as it can, as though cherishing every nanosecond of existence in the doorway to silence and death. Much of Living Theory Without Anecdotes plays with sound in this

Review: Philippe Lamy - Drop Diary

Like sound, water adopts an almost limitless range of forms and sparks countless connotations – it varies drastically in terms of shape, weight and volume, as well as interacting differently under each treatment and against each surface – and as such, it exists almost conceptually, almost immaterially. When taken in absolute isolation,

Review: Florent Colautti - NanoM+ / Untitled#ºº

“nanoM+” opens deceptively – parallel-running drones simmer gently and expand, seemingly destined for a very gradual unfolding, barely rousing itself into a state of subconscious. A couple of glitches in the first few minutes allude to something amiss, before the piece spills open and fully unveils its state of instability and

Review: Rangda + Dead C - Split

Where the jams of last year’s Rangda full-length (Formerly Extinct) were bone dry in production and taut in execution – even the passages of improvisation felt as though they were carved out of desert rock – their contribution to this new split is soft and fluid; a slackening exhalation and blissful

Review: Svarte Greiner - Black Tie

This is deeply organic music. Even the more surreal elements here feel like the phantom ancestors of living, breathing sound – vapour trails of flesh and soul particles, flickering embers of corpse ash. Slowly and patiently, each moment of “Black Tie” is inhaled in its entirety before the next action commences;

Review: Bad Suburban Nightmare + Left Hand Cuts Off The Right - Split

The guitar playing of Dan Hrekow (aka Bad Suburban Nightmare) is a musical response to dead air; a bluesy serenade feeding off of tape crackle, which forms a bleak and receding backdrop like light rain hammering a thin glass window. It’s a duet of acknowledged solitude – the point where

Review: Matthew Collings - Splintered Instruments

According to Collings, Splintered Instruments is a “revolt against machines” – not only those used to make music (although the vast predominance of organic and acoustic sounds indicates this to be a factor), but also for the way that machines “exist”; the predestination of their narrative and the unambiguity and simplicity

Review: Jeremiah Cymerman - Sky Burial

The collaborative improvisation here is far from conversational. This is a seething, animalistic fight to the death, with saxophone, clarinet and trumpet rendered hoarse and broken by the spite of their attack. High pitched notes convulse and pant down one another’s necks, sharp blasts of breath send projectile growls

Review: Params - Hydrogen Black

A quick search on “underwater sound surveillance” throws up information on SOSUS: a chain of underwater listening posts used by the US Navy to locate Russian submarines, which used the detection of low frequencies to calculate the positions of submarines – up to hundreds of miles away – by triangulation. I’m

Review: Superlith - Plasma Clusters

In Plasma Clusters, two instruments that could be seen to lack too much common ground, collaboratively speaking, begin to intimately co-empathise and find solace in eachother once their players bring them into a choking, spluttering demise. Julius Masri’s circuit-bent Casio keyoards scream as their wires are wrenched out of

Review: Javier - Expresión / Abstracción

There is a paradox in the mainstream club environment. Hordes of people gather in a darkened room, only to bathe in music that strives for a euphoric ecstasy beyond the sweat and low ceilings – seeking transcendence amongst a blanket of bodies that heaves and jostle as one blanket of drunken

Review: Budhaditya Chattopadhyay - Elegy For Bangalore

While Elegy For Bangalore centres on an unmistakable drone of petrol combustion, bustling people and building site whirr, Chattopadhyay’s sonic representation of India’s emerging urban developments sounds warped. Somehow the environment is both distant and enveloping, manifesting a both a 360-degree immersion and an intangible snow globe of

Review: Endless Melancholy - Five Songs

It’s not an unfamiliar production style. Just as Nils Frahm hibernates inside the piano to observe the percussive mechanism behind the soft and graceful melody emitted externally, each note on Five Songs is rendered crucial and deliberate by the clunk of wooden hammer that precedes it. Equally, the notes

Review: Liz Christine - Sweet Mellow Cat

Displacement and replacement. Liz Christine’s music is like a warm, cosy commune for loops and motifs that have broke free from their source, be it sickly romantic movie score or the playful mews from a cat’s tiny vocal cords. Here they find themselves in unlikely but welcoming company,

Review: Tom Jackson + Benedict Taylor - Songs From Badly-Lit Rooms

When one views the world through an improvisatory lens, location is as much a musical acquaintance as the players themselves. Songs From Badly-Lit Rooms is an adoring exploration of space as a personality; one that uproots the illusion of surrounding architecture as an invariable, as Jackson and Taylor continually strike

Review: Bad Guys - S/T

It’s hardly surprising to read that Bad Guys have previously shared a lineup with Finland’s euphoric krautrock collective, Circle. Both bands share a knack for wafting both menace and shit-eating glee out of their amplifiers simultaneously, pushing psychedelia through spewed granite. It’s like paint bubbling up through

Review: Pjusk - Tele

Of all of the Glacial Movements releases I’ve heard, Tele is the one that stirs most potently within the label’s chosen aesthetic. The album was predominantly recorded in a cabin in the mountains and inspired by the harsh weather of Norway, and it’s almost as though the

Review: Eventless Plot - Recon

Recon is restless and placeless. The roster of performers is continuously swapped, while the sounds themselves pop into nothing and re-appear at the opposing end of the stereo field; it’s an unfriending shapeshifter of split-second reflex and vanishing vibrations, juxtaposed against slower-moving objects to cause time to unfold at

Interview: Stephen O'Malley (Ensemble Pearl)

So how did Ensemble Pearl come together? There’s a French theatre director I’ve worked with for several years named Gisèle Vienne and she started working on a new theatre piece in 2009 and 2010. One of her partners for producing that piece was a Japanese contemporary arts centre

Review: Steven Naylor - Lieux Imaginaires

It’s quite a trip. Lieux Imaginaires is like some bizarre, metamorphosing wormhole of abstract texture and human experience; a strange co-ordination of both real-world sounds and vibrant dollops of imagined landscape, constantly transforming into new and unforeseen states. Even when I become fully mindful of the record’s skittish

Review: Perry Frank - Music To Disappear

With something of a twinkling, naïve romance – synthesisers whirring triumphantly over the dainty sprinkle of chimes – Music To Disappear comes into being. On one hand, the record is one of rich, almost exaggerated emotional response; unflinching declarations of love fall instantly into inescapable minor-key misery, as if Perry Frank is

Review: Old Komm - Ventspils EP

Spindly metal cranes arcing over the water’s edge, dreary angular factory buildings, monolithic rusting sculptures of industrial shipping equipment. Not only can one hear the influence of Ventspils – an ex-USSR Baltic port city in Latvia – but also one can actually hear Ventspils itself, cast into pensive, creeping re-assemblies of

Review: Mohalabonga - Psychic Voyages

So after ten minutes of rickety, hand-assembled electro-funk – all jabs of drum machine, ramblings under breath and pocket-sweet synthesisers – something peculiar happens to Psychic Voyages. Two granite blocks of distortion come slamming in from both sides, crumbling around a drum machine that hisses and crashes in its strive to keep

Interview: Helm

How did you come to be involved in this project with Charles Atlas at the Tate? I’d got an invitation to do it out of the blue, pretty much – apparently Charles had heard some of my records and I guess he enjoyed them. He got in touch with me

Review: Micromelancolié + Sindre Bjerga ‎– Prayer Calls

The fade-up of Prayer Calls sounds like stumbling upon a jet plane crash in the middle of a stormy forest; rainwater cascading over ripe leaves, crowds of distant bird squawk and crackling interjections of unanswered pilot intercom. A muffled, somewhat reverent chord starts to rise up through the centre – a

Review: GREYGHOST - Memoirs Of Dementia

“Purple Dye #5” tilts gently back and forth between two warm synthesiser chords. Coupled with the title, one imagines a small globule of paint rolling around a sloped surface; soft and graceful in motion, gliding as a ball of harmony and colour. As though mesmerised by its perpetual return, GREYGHOST

Interview: BugBrand

Your performance supporting Keith Fullerton Whitman at Arnolfini was the first time I’ve seen you play. Before your set, you mentioned that it’s important for you to do a talk prior to playing. Why is that? I think it’s a reaction to quite a lot of electronic

Review: Ashley Paul - Line The Clouds

Like some disastrous tightrope act, Ashley Paul’s beautifully fragile patches of song – gently quivering, poised in a state of equilibrium – are surrounded by the threat of collapse. Even its spots of explicit beauty (first seen in hushed vocals and cascading guitar petals of “Clouds”) feel destined to lose balance,

Review: B/B/S/ - Brick Mask

Within those lurking, echo-washed guitar notes opening up “Brick” comes the inevitability of upward ascent. These early intrusions on silence are like the initial conversational remarks between strangers – cautious, stifled into single notes and fleeting swells that lay out the first few items in each collaborator’s timbral shop window

Review: Fossils - What A Drag

Is that the twang of guitar abuse chiming over What A Drag’s opening minutes, or the sound of something rummaging through a box of crockery? Both perhaps? It’s one of many noises on the tape that rustle and creak beyond the ease of sonic categorisation, and as the

Review: Yvonne Troxler - Brouhaha

Troxler seems to unpeel the supposed immediacy of sound to reveal the potential for music that resides within and behind; music tucked away within the bustle of the everyday, stashed underneath the most mysterious of sonic unknowns – even music that lurks within music, expanding seemingly flat sonic surfaces to position

Review: Chaines + Tom Rose - SPLIT

Rather than present each artist in its own distinct block, SPLIT alternates back and forth between tracks by its two participants. It swings pendulum-like between two states, placing emphasis on the point of transition between them; that “similar but different” co-dependency that renders the split format somewhat awkwardly poised, relishing

Review: Mike Jourgensen - Sealed

Even an extensive scour of the internet couldn’t throw up much information on Mike Jourgensen. Sealed allures to an eclectic point of origin; an album that delights in both sickly guitar solo bombast and the grind of serrated industrial gears, calling upon everything from punk’s mindless energy rush

Review: Ensemble Pearl - S/T

There is no central gravitational point on Ensemble Pearl. Each track is a fluid unravelling of all progress; a continuous dislodging of meaning and correlation, tilting the floor beneath just as it appears to settle on a stabilising axis. Six tracks and a full hour come to pass, and I’

Review: William Basinski + Richard Chartier - Aurora Liminalis

As I drift ever deeper into Aurora Liminalis, I am drawn into a certain descriptive phrase used during its press release: “undulating trails of light”. Rather than use it as a launch pad from which my own mental visuals take flight, I’m traveling in reverse; the more I listen,

Record: Circuit Breaker - Cairn

The circuit is already broken, it seems. The songs are disjointed things; tugging in multiple directions at once as a commotion of overlain ideas, remaining in some taut limbo between phasing electronic drones, guitars and vocals that drawl through bleak and unspacious slap-back delay. They don’t jar exactly, and

Review: Derek Piotr - Raj

Raj stands like a totem pole, its core elements (marching bass drum thumps, aggressive synthesisers, chopped up vocal moans) stacked towards the sky. It’s a meditation on a solitary vision – a sort of vertical liberation that arises from its insistence on reprising the same sonic arrangement over and over

Review: Koboku Senju - Joining The Queue To Become One Of Those Ordinary Ghosts

I feel as though I’m stuck in a cramped elevator; brass and woodwind grunt and gasp as they shuffle to release trapped limbs, feedback sets every surrounding wall into unsteadying vibration, thin strips of noisy electronics writhe through any slight gap they can find. The sound is far too

Review: tmymtur - Yusei

It’s a strange paradox; a work built entirely out of the most tangible and intimate sonic building block available, rendered somewhat supernatural and otherworldly by the manner of its use. Not only does Yusei weave the human voice into something beautiful and unrecognisable, but it also works to highlight

Review: Decoy And Joe McPhee - Spontaneous Combustion

I try and venture up to Cafe Oto when I can, but I wasn’t there on this occasion. At one point, the Bo’Weavil Recordings page for Oto (an earlier live recording of the group captured back in 2009) claims that Steve Noble’s solo stretch for untethered cymbals

Review: Robert Stillman And The Archaic Future Players - Station Wagon Interior Perspective (A Requiem For John Fahey)

Carrying an ungainly waltzing swagger, Station Wagon Interior Perspective stumbles into view, occasionally stopping to rekindle its frail sense of balance. Like a drunken big band quartet falling asleep in a smoky bar, or perhaps a hobbling locomotive crawling forth on its very last legs, Stillman’s music fumbles with

Review: The Volume Settings Folder - Ivan Hoe And Other Tales

My first listen to “Ivan Hoe” – the opening track of the Ivan Hoe And Other Tales – comes only a few days after my most recent listen to Florian Hecker’s Chimerization. Hecker’s work places a recital of an experimental libretto through a gauze of distortion, flanger and electronics, tearing

Review: Sebastiane Hegarty - Southerlies

“My walking, like my listening, has a tendency to wander”. This quote from Hegarty is made incredibly apparently during his sonic exploration of Winchester Cathedral: the gorgeous lull of choir song wafting warmly around the building’s large interior is cut off abruptly by the slam of a metal gate,

Review: Xambuca - カムィ

Given the album’s underlying cause, it’s most appropriate thatカムィ should avoid direct imitation of the Ainu traditions; after all, what better way to demean a call for cultural preservation than to offer up a botched sonic reflection of the culture itself? Rather, the record views Ainu culture with

Review: Krill.Minima - Sekundenschlaf

The best sections of Sekundenschlaf are those scattered across a plain of quiet; distinct objects with generous gaps in between them, arranged like art pieces set sparingly over a large, clinically white gallery space. Each aquatic throb of synthesiser hangs patiently in the wake of its own bright, crisp reverberation,

Review: Gunshae - Out Of Darkness...Light

Out Of Darkness, Light is airborne, limitless – ecstatically liberated from tension and restraints, propelled into a newfound sense of relief. In some respects it’s the antithesis of “dubstep”, the style of music for which Kuma is renown – the anchorage of low frequency is scooped out and the demand of

Live: Cult Of Luna + Amenra + Humanfly @ The Garage, London, 22/01/13

There’s no bombast in Humanfly’s transition between precise time-signature gymnastics and loose, outwardly flowing psychedelic rock. Call-and-response guitar solos melt into reverberant transcendence in seconds flat, while vocals arch overhead like bird calls swooping over a canyon; sometimes it’s not unlike the gut-punch grooves of Torche, while

Live: Keith Fullerton Whitman + BugBrand @ Arnolfini, Bristol, 02/02/13

Two very different modular synthesisers sit at the centre of Arnolfini’s venue space, lit by spotlight in an otherwise dark room like the sole stars of a theatre production. One of them is opened out with wires spewing over eachother in a bewildering tangle, like a torso ripped apart

Review: Ian Watson - BBV3

BBV3 is like a swamp that bubbles with noise and occasional implications of melody; it ripples with distortion and wobbles off pitch, nudging squawks of violin and dying choral pads to its murky surface. Watson considers this tape as a sort of soundtrack to the artwork in his Brain Blood

Review: David Fenech - Grand Huit

Grand Huit quivers its way off key and stumbles out of 4/4 rhythmic confines, warbling into cheap microphones and pushing the incessant return of flimsy drum samples to the fore. There’s a potent sense of hand-assembly surrounding David Fenech’s first ever full-length; a lo-fi reimagining via musical

Review: Bruno Sanfilippo - Piano Textures 3

“My master used to say, on the lighted stage or in front of the awaken microphones, dream! Don’t be really there while you improvise, then you will make your audience dream as well.” Perhaps Bruno Sanfilippo actually intended for this liner note statement to be as ambiguous as it

Review: Art Of Burning Water - This Disgrace

It was at King Alfred’s pub in Southampton that I first heard Art Of Burning Water, during a run of UK dates late last year. What I remember is this: a muddy gush of volume surging out of PA and amplifiers with crooked scraps of hardcore jutting out of

Review: Petals - Where Textus Became Textus, And How I Operated Within

I don’t know whether anyone else has experienced that delusional (or revelatory?) process of listening so intently within a particular space – a generator room or a forest, for example – that one starts to uncover a hidden music and harmony that exists between its unique and fortuitous congregation of sounds.

Review: Northumbria - S/T

It’s instantly evident why followers of TQA Records – headed by Eric Quach of Thisquietarmy – would have been quick to snap this one up. Northumbria and Quach’s project are like neighbouring stars in the cosmos; it’s “planetarium music” if you will, immense in the panorama of its stereo

Review: Banabila + Machinefabriek - S/T

By the sounds of it, the sheer magnitude of creative momentum driving this remote collaboration was unforeseen by either participant. Initially expecting to carry the construction process through into early 2013, Machinefabriek and Banabila found themselves caught in a more spontaneous and pacier file-swapping process than they ever anticipated – the

Review: John Aulich - Suite 001: For Kazimierz

Suite 001 – For Kazimierz was inspired by the war stories of John Aulich’s late grandfather, and such a concept sparks two prominent, juxtaposing stereotypes in my mind. One is of the indulgently reminiscent grandpa, whose tales come dogged with alienating reference points and seemingly meaningless details, strung into an

Review: Zbeen - Stasis

I was hit with mild heartbreak as I took scissors to my copy of Stasis, which arrived at ATTN:HQ in a vacuum-sealed silver plastic pack. Ultimately I’m glad that I did it, as such an action broke my preconceptions of the music that resided within based on visual

Review: Tiny Leaves - What We Dream Of

The music assembles carefully as if keen not to wake you, like dawning sunlight peering cautiously through an open window. Tremolo guitar rides gentle whispers, synthesiser chord changes sway as softly implied sighs – everything sweeps around my ears with the soft embrace of a pillow, light and friendly in colour

Review: Lawrence English - Songs Of The Living And The Lived In

As a start-to-finish journey, Songs Of The Living is pretty startling. No doubt these recordings have been picked for their ability to enlighten us to those animal sounds that exist outside of our familiar sonic routines; far away from the sounds of a Western world that cradles many of us

Review: Holly Hunt - Year One

My experience of Year One feels similar in spirit to The Light Carriers by Hyatari – both share the sense of spanning their music out into an infinite vertical line, at once a concentrated, primitive surge of instinct and a transcendent trip to the universe’s farthest reaches. There’s also

Review: En + Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Split

The foundations for Blood were recorded around April 2012, as EN prepared to join Grouper for a handful of dates in Japan. I can imagine the atmospheric contrast sparked in the transition between the two artists. Where Liz Harris’ music evokes a certain murky disconnection – an artist losing her sense

Review: Daniel Barbiero - Not One Nor

If I wasn’t made aware of the fact that the double bass is the instrument at the point of focus here, would I have been able to guess? The friction of taut coarse hair against string is an unmistakable sound – drones and slithering overtones wrestling over the rasp of

Review: Clockwork Orchestra - Friends Without Names

Bedroom recording has often been considered in the context of democratising the art of music creation, but Friends Without Names really made me consider darker consequences of allowing virtually anyone to cast their imagined fantasies into the sonic realm. The album paints the artistic persona of Paul Mangan as someone

Review: Kangding Ray - The Pentaki Slopes

I can’t quite put my finger on it. There’s something about Kangding Ray that seems to leap out into the physical world without ever actually leaving the techno realm; the bass drum feels more akin to an actual material impact rather than being a mere intangible construction of

Review: Gabriel Saloman - Adhere

There almost the sense that if you peeled away the agitation and serrated edges from an album like Yellow Swans’ Going Places, then an album like Adhere would lie somewhere beneath. Saloman seems to have carried through his old project’s sense of wondrous breadth – the sounds here originate in

Review: Darryl Burke Mahoney - Untitled

“Muller Hill” is like standing in the shadow of an ugly grey helicopter, with the sound of blades through chopped air forming an ominous backdrop to a bleak, monochrome blotch of melody. Apparently these sounds make atmospheric reference to Mahoney’s hometown of Lachine, Quebec. I’ve never been, but

Interview: Cult Of Luna

I’ve seen it mentioned that the recording process of Vertikal was longer and more scattered than ever before. Were there any particular reasons for that? Well there’s the most obvious reason of us not living in the same cities. We all have very busy schedules, and to meet

Review: Jay-Dea Lopez - Systemic Collapse

The air is thick, and there’s something wondrous about that. The sound of crickets clots the sky – an invisible choir that amasses to a shrill, aggressive cloud of sound without definable origin – while the buzz of electricity (perhaps from a nearby power generator) veils the soundscape with a similarly

Review: PJE - Permanent Memory

It begins with an assembly of held tones, like a single point in time strung out into the distance. Violins glisten brightly as they span out into pleasantly dissonant harmonies – like the off-axis drones of Tony Conrad with the serrated edges of bow attack sanded down – while voices (or at

Review: Herbert Deutsch - From Moog To Mac

“It doesn’t sound like much when I play it. Maybe someone with more musicianship and imagination can get some good things out of it”. This is Robert Moog during his introduction the Abominatron: the first prototype modular synthesiser. Naturally Robert is cited as the inventor of the Moog Synthesiser,

Feature: Review Of 2012

2012 has been an electrifying year in my own personal narrative of sonic experience. Last year I opted to boil 2011 down to five key releases that had made the most prominent and frequent return to my speakers and headphones, but to apply the same method to the sheer volume

Review: Øe - Transfer

One of the primary discussion points surrounding the rise of computerised media has been the changes in the way we interact with eachother and define ourselves – the merge of culture and opinion that blurs our sense of geography and social belonging, while exposing our minds to a whole wealth of

Review: Luca Nasciuti - Vanishing Point

Like a gloomy drone séance in a haunted loft space, the sighs of passing ghosts whizz upward between creaky floorboards, brushing piano strings and keys on their way through. “Ark” is a place disturbed – tape playback is chewed up and spat out into reversed, vari-sped lurches, while other low frequency

Review: Richard Chartier - Recurrence

When listening to Recurrence, I think back to Chartier’s Transparency (Performance) – one of the first Line releases to grace the pages of ATTN – and appreciate the ways which he is capable of manipulating one’s perception of surrounding space and the listener’s own body. Transparency evokes a hyper-awareness,

Review: James Ferraro - Sushi

Sushi is sexy. Not just for the blatant moon-eyed romanticism of its floaty chord exchanges, or for the slow-shifting hums of bass that slink into the pit of the stomach as vibration and then work their way down; it’s also curvaceous and smooth in shape, comprised of soft, rainbow-coloured

Review: Sylvain Chauveau + Stephan Mathieu - Palimpsest

Collaboration is often at its most wonderful when the addition of another perspective results in a radical shift in the creative direction; not the mere affirmation or expansion of a proposed idea, but its drastic re-evaluation and re-contextualisation. As it turns out, there was a hidden potential within Stephan Mathieu’

Live: Russell Haswell + Marc Hurtado + Jim O'Rourke @ South London Gallery, 29/11/12

Deliberate or not, the efforts of tonight’s three artists appear to find unity in their links to the visual, be it in the form of projected imagery, the presence of a performer or the absence of visible sound sources. It comes a week after my visit to Corsica studios

Review: Goves - A Creche For The Lonely And Peculiar

Even the very first sound on A Creche For The Lonely And Peculiar treads an ambiguous line between an organic, real-word tangibility and the abstract realms of electronics: is it the amplified scrape of a thin nail on a dry wall perhaps, or maybe just static modulated and reshaped? Such

Review: Contact Group Of Homemade Experimental Electronic Music & Noise - Election USA 2012: A Sound Reaction

Recently I was sat at the breakfast table of a quaint B&B farmhouse in the Cotswolds, talking to an American couple about their muddy treks across countryside walking routes and visits to cutesy nearby villages (Broadway, Hidcote, Stanway). My girlfriend then posed a question about the US elections

Review: Map 165 - The Fatigue Of Sunlight And Wine

It feels strange to be immersed in The Fatigue Of Sunlight And Wine during a particularly bitter evening November, shut away in my bedroom with tea close at hand and a strong incense thickening in the air. Surely the mood is all wrong. How can the album’s core scenario

Review: The Rainbow Body - Return Unto Void

It seems that the term “void” is loaded with more negative connotations than positive. As a noun, it often depicts somewhere shut off, disconnected from life and the physical, stripped of light and soul; to occupy the void is to embody loneliness, and to exist (or perhaps non-exist) in a

Live: Cage Rattling #2 - Echo Of Nothing @ Kings Palace, London, 05/11/2011

An eerie, childish laughter down a telephone, broken violins in giddy see-saw, crickets chirping, a strange gurgling that sounds like the amplification of some alien micro-organism. “Junk Operatic” – a pre-recorded tape piece featuring the contributions of Gen Ken Montgomery, Seymour Glass, T Mikawa (Incapacitants), Doglady and I’DM Theftable, overlaid

Review: Action Beat - The Condition

Anyone searching for pointers on how the essence of a raucous live performance can be brought into the recorded format could do wore than to turn their ears in the direction of Action Beat’s The Condition. In terms of its composition and the execution of its performance, it’s

Review: 900piesek + rbnx - Prague Bratislava

Shortly after playing this live performance in Prague, 900piesek was robbed of all of his musical gear. Not only does this recording immortalise a setup and sound that will no longer be attributed to 900piesek in the live environment, but it also captures this equipment in unknowing swansong, instilling those

Review: Dead Wood - Forest

A day before listening to Forest for the first time, I’d stumbled across an old pocket memo voice recorder that I hadn’t seen in years. I played back the old tape inside over its crackly internal speaker: a warbly demo of my brother playing acoustic guitar and singing,

Review: Erdem Helvacioglu + Ulrich Mertin - Planet X

“Without warning, a new object – Planet X – appeared in the heavens: a mysterious entity intruding upon a vast ancient system. Hailed as a paradise by some, an expeditionary force discovers instead that it represents a menace to human existence. Hunted by a superior alien intelligence and explorer is trapped and

Review: Nadja - Dagdrøm

It’s long been a recurring “what if” of mine to hear Nadja with live drums at the rhythmic helm. This isn’t driven by a distaste for Aidan Baker’s programming – those lumbering doom beats and machine gun snares have beautifully propelled the atmosphere of all of those albums

Review: Sunwølf - Beyond The Sun

On some occasions, I am reminded of the collaboration between Jim Jarmusch and lute player Jozef Van Wissem, which centres on sweeping, watercolour strokes of feedback and drone lingering behind the more clearly defined melody propulsions. A similar relationship arises during Sunwølf’s quieter sections: bleak minor key unwinds in

Review: Artificial Memory Trace - Boto [Encantado]

The hand of the composer adopts a translucent presence throughout Boto [Encantado]. Natural landscape is decomposed and then reassembled; the end result is imaginary but entirely believable, gently guided through narrative and transitory emphasis without sacrificing the sense of place and immersion. Kwi is both at the mercy of his

Interview: Supersilent

How did John Paul Jones come to be involved in Supersilent?  He was doing a solo performance of an electronic piece at the Punkt Festival in Kristiansand, Norway in 2010, and we asked him if he would like to join us for our concert. We had a 10-minute soundcheck and

Review: Equimus - S/T

Equimus is a collage book of sorts. A plethora of different sounds are ungracefully torn out and stuck down into different patterns; disjointed in terms of the texture contrasts that are thrust spontaneously together and yet possessive of a soft fluidity that gushes through the album’s micro-detailed rhythmic patterns.

Review: Angus Carlyle + Rupert Cox - Air Pressure

While it’s been 32 years since the Japanese government played their “checkmate” in a 12-year struggle against the farmers of Sanrizuka and Toho – conquering countless protests and demonstrations to open a new airport over a large portion of their farming land – the tension and opposition between the two sides

Review: Aaron Dilloway + Jason Lescalleet - Grapes And Snakes

It’s as though the record player needle has developed a serrated edge, crawling laboriously through the grooves and cutting untidily into the vinyl surface. Despite being the product of remote collaboration, Grapes And Snakes carries an ugly, visceral intimacy that evokes the illusion of a physical and real-time contact

Review: The Horse Loom - S/T

Each thumb-plucked note is a solitary thread in The Horse Loom’s blanket of acoustic guitar harmony, and Steve Malley often feels akin to the likes of Mark Kozelek and James Blackshaw in this respect; embarking on intricate sweeps between chords that constantly mutate through Malley’s endlessly active fretwork.

Review: Jessica Bailiff - At The Down-Turned Jagged Rim Of The Sky

So often when albums take off in the manner of opener “Your Ghost Is Not Enough” – with dizzy vocal sighs and soft snare hits lifting the experience gently skyward – they never come down again, submitting themselves to the bliss of dreamy, drifty detachment until the closure of the final track

Review: Florian Hecker - Chimerization

There’s something rather teasing about the process behind Chimerization, which centres on a recital of an experimental libretto by Iranian writer/philosopher Reza Negarestani. Recorded in an anechoic chamber in three different languages (Iranian, English, German) – and in the case of the English version, articulated in part in immaculate

Live: Ed Atkins - Us Dead Talk Love @ Chisenhale Gallery, London, 28/10/12

“I wanted to ask whether you thought that finding an eyelash under your foreskin was significant?” So comes the flatly pronounced central query (well, an expression of intent to pose a query) from which Us Dead Talk Love unfolds, spoken by a bald, computer generated male head on one of

Review: SRFélix - S/T

Opening track “We Walk Until The End” is a grand underwater corridor into which the listener is swept – watery collations of violin and flute ripple on either side, with the shimmering lights of feedback and e-bow drones announcing themselves through steady, tidal surges. It’s a warmth that floods inwards,

Review: David Newlyn - The Misspelled Numbers

The release date of The Misspelled Numbers is supposedly 1912, according to the release page up on Wist Rec. The EP doesn’t sound like times of old – the various bleeps and other electronic touches place the music very much in the now or recent past – but rather seems to

Review: Schemawound - They Want To Make Your Body Move. I Want To Hold You Perfectly Still.

It’s an intriguing title for sure. Are “they” the DJs that pump unrelenting 4/4 into massive clubs at drunken punters, or perhaps the “system” that quashes opportunities for meditation and contemplation in favour of long days spent in factories and offices? Is the “body” that of a human,

Review: Philip Corner - For Dancers In France

In one respect, For Dancers In France often shares its locational and instrumental components with that of meditation and a certain solitary contemplation. “La Cloche Aux Bois” combines the bright clang and rich resonance of sonorous metals with the sounds of the Autumnal open air – singing bowls are gently beaten

Review: Roland Etzin - TransMongolian

I’ve not been to any of the places that feature on Roland Etzin’s TransMongolian. Nonetheless, hearing or reading the words “China”, “Russia” or “Japan” instantly conjures a wealth of mental visual, derived largely from photographs and documentaries seen in magazines, on the Internet or on television – all of

Review: Pillowdiver - Cassette Recordings

There’s nothing new about smudging the twang of the electric guitar into blurrier shapes via distortion, reverb and delay pedals, and Pillowdiver never pretends that there is. Neither does René Margraff offer any startlingly fresh sounds to what is already well-documented palette of possibilities within the realms of affected

Review: Tim Olive + Alfredo Costa Monteiro - 33 Bays

At many points throughout 33 Bays – the very first release on the 845 Audio label – I find myself reminded of a piece of Velcro being teased apart with agonising elongation. Both Tim Olive and Alfredo Costa Monteiro appear to derive a mutual pleasure in dramatizing moments of friction and contact

Review: Fescal - Moods & Views

Although presented as one 55-minute track, Moods & Views actually comprises of two long pieces. With a lack of distinct track markers to separate the two sides, I find myself drawn more intimately into the relationship (perhaps even co-dependence) between them; the points at which they contrast, the common themes,

Review: Sun Hammer + Radere - Lotophagen

Having listened to the solo work of both Radere and Sun Hammer in the past, the listening experience has undoubtedly thrown up a few notable similarities. Both feel as though they evoke soundscapes hinged on physical experience and memory; nostalgic, sound-driven returns to fondly remembered places, sonic materialisations of current

Review: Chihei Hatakeyama - Norma

It may not announce itself through percussion or explicitly recurrent motif, but there is rhythm within Chihei Hatakeyama’s work, and it’s about ten minutes into “Benetnasch” that I find myself sinking into it. Taken second by second, the track is fluid and constantly changing – hums of tone rub

Review: Celer - Epicentral Examples Of The More Or Less

In a sense, Epicentral Examples Of The More Or Less feels like Will Long lifting the ambient veil just a tiny bit. Tightrope was the last Celer release to grace ATTN’s review pages, consisting of 24 tracks stacked and assembled into a solitary 70-minute work – an eclectic palette of

Review: David Kechley - Colliding Objects

In many ways, Kechley seems to be bypassing the notions of what percussion could be to focus on what percussion is: it’s an impact, a duration, a decay, an anticipation, a presence, an absence, an exertion, an action. There’s undoubtedly a certain whiff of abstraction throughout Colliding Objects

Interview: Russell Haswell

Your upcoming performance at South London Gallery will feature the use of “phase scope projections”. Similarly, last year’s Acid nO!se Synthesis was designed to be experienced alongside a phase scope/oscilloscope. What does this visual element bring to the experience for you? Direct correlation between sound and image…

Review: Mutamassik - Rekkez

Who knows if Mutamassik’s bizarre stylistic mesh is the direct result of her multicultural upbringing, but it certainly feels as though it’s played a part. Having been born in Italy to an Egyptian mother, Guilia Loli moved between Egypt and the USA before returning to Italy once again;

Review: David Michael - The Slaughterhouse

The Slaughterhouse isn’t the tirade of rattling cages and screaming animals that I anticipated it to be. Of course, David Michael could have chosen to have focused solely on the gorier, more blatantly harrowing processes that occur in a working slaughterhouse (admittedly, I came into the work expecting an

Review: Darsombra - Climax Community

A “climax community” is “an ecological community in which populations of plants or animals remain stable and exist in balance with each other and their environment”. There is a purity of conviction within Darsombra’s album of the same name that justifies such a title; each panoramic sweep of power

Review: Christian Bouchard - Automacité

The opening section of Automacité is “Impasto” which, according to Bouchard himself, is an exploration of “the spontaneity of composition, information density, intentional awkwardness…” And while this description may conjure mental images as to the nature and dynamic of the piece – sudden implosions, zig-zags between volume extremes, sheer inundations of

Review: Paulo Chagas + Wilhelm Matthies - Lark [markings]

Initially I felt somewhat naïve for being absolutely clueless as to what a “Mosesa 2” actually was; as it turns out, it’s not too surprising that I was unfamiliar with this unusual instrument existing in an edition of one. The Mosesa 2 appears to comprise of two empty washing

Live: CoH @ BE OPEN Sound Portal in Trafalgar Square, London, 19/09/12

While the BE OPEN Sound Portal may have adopted a bizarre presence in amongst one of London’s most iconic spaces – it is, after all, some sort of gigantic hockey puck plonked not far from the foot of Nelson’s Column – it’s also a faceless one, visually speaking. What

Review: Leo Abrahams + Oliver Coates - Crystals Are Always Forming

Only the second ever release from Manchester’s Slip Discs, Crystals Are Always Forming resumes the label’s fresh-thinking meld of organic and artificial sources, this time homing in on a collaboration between the cello of Oliver Coates and the electronic conjurings of Leo Abrahams. But rather than burrow into

Review: Russell Haswell - FACTUAL

It barely warrants explicit clarification that a track name of “BLACK METAL INSTRUMEMTAL INTRO DEMO” reeks of the working title – something impulsively scribbled down in the moment that screams the eventual need for revision and change, reducing to its most prominent traits as a means of temporary identification. But it’

Review: Lawrence English - For / Not For John Cage

A blurry mushroom lingers ghost-like on the cover of For/Not For John Cage. Here, the centenarian composer manifests through the hazy lens of English’s sound: outlines and textures smudged together, colours bleeding outward via thick applications of reverberation, with shapes retained but definition lost to the soft mercurial

Interview: Pain Jerk

You’re due to play a few shows over here in the UK very soon, including a performance at this year’s Tusk Festival. How do you find playing in the UK? I will participate in LUFF 2012 held in Switzerland in mid-October, and I was actually going to tour

Interview: NHK’Koyxeи

You have several projects to your name, and your performance at Tusk Festival has been credited to your NHK’Koyxeи pseudonym. Are we right to expect a set in the style of your recent Dance Classics Vol.I release on PAN? Don’t decide what should i do for, but

Review: RedRails - S/T

There is something blacker and more jagged waiting to emerge from within the early string movements of Redrails. A jew’s harp boings between percussive thumps, together coaxing a violin into gorgeous swoops and slithers; almost like watching a snake charmer display silhouetted gloomily against a cave wall, with an

Review: SWARTZ et - Respire

Respire can be seen as the amplification of life and relationships – a physicalisation of both the existence of the individual and the existence of communication between bodies and minds. Its premise (the artist and a group of friends sharing a small room together and breathing into microphones, with additional instrumentation

Review: cM nG + Spoils & Relics - Split

Recorded where? In a dingy little room with wires tangled round cymbal stands and players forced into hunching under low ceilings? That’s certainly the impression given by cM nG’s side of this split, consisting of improvised drum thuds and tinkling cymbal wash rustling beneath an assortment of eerie

Review: Cédric Stevens - The Syncopated Elevators Legacy

The Syncopated Elevators Legacy gathers up various recordings from between 1997 and 2005, coupling them with a fresh selection of remixes (courtesy of Christian Fennesz, Burning Star Core, My Cat Is An Alien and more) and placing the whole lot in a lovely 2xLP package. Stevens’ work falls within the

Review: Akatombo - False Positives

Rhythm is the harness in False Positives; the one grounding element that prevents the listener from becoming lost and overwhelmed by Akatombo’s eclectic mix of texture plucked from all sorts of genre extremities. Sound rises up in waves, taking fleeting spells in the foreground before fading within the fresh

Live: Bruce Nauman's Days + SOUNDWORKS @ ICA in London, 19/06/12 - 16/09/12

DAYS Initially I’m under the impression that the commotion of chattering voices is emanating from ICA’s small café situated across the hall (it later transpires during my own coffee stop that the attendees are far more respectful and dignified), but actually this is the sound of Bruce Nauman’

Review: Australasia - Sin4tr4

Australasia comes bearing that very sickly minor-key melancholy that the fierce distortion can only do so much to disguise; the sort that comes surging up with anthemic metal choruses and follows post-rock to its most sparse and contemplative comedowns. It’s difficult to embrace such melodic devices that have already

Review: Isnaj Dui - Abstracts On Solitude

Abstracts In Solitude opens with what appears to be a stark contrast. Two minutes of gently weaved flute clouds fades out, and a warm buzz and stutter of electronics takes its place. Before long, the two emerge into duet – circuit board loops squeaking and buzzing in a steady loop, woodwind

Live: Supernormal Festival @ Brazier's Park in Oxfordshire, 10-12/08/12

SLY AND THE FAMILY DRONE For all of the eclecticism that scatters Supernormal’s programme across visual art, exhibitions, poetry, football, food, comedy and of course, experimental music in a plethora of forms, there is an underlying aesthetic and atmosphere that renders the whole experience incredibly cohesive. There is a

Review: Pleq + Lüüp - The Redemption Bells EP

It’s like cowering by the doorway of a ghost town saloon; swinging doors whump and creak as a heavy, restless wind streams through them, with distant bells clanging incessantly in an ominous warning call. The Redemption Bells is the sound of staying in one spot, seeking change and progression

Review: Mika Vainio + Kevin Drumm + Axel Dörner + Lucio Capece - Venexia

The release page for this four-way collaboration highlights the various lines of connection between each of the participants (Capece and Vainio’s work in the Vladislav Delay Quartet, Drumm’s previous trio work with Dörner and Capece etc), as though Venexia was an inevitability, merely awaiting for the paths to

Review: Loopool - Notation Improvisations II

Notation Improvisations is a series of works that look to strip habit and intention out of music; to nullify the presence of the composer and leave the music as a free-standing, self-defining entity. The second instalment achieves this in a similar manner to the first: by utilising a computer program

Review: Scott Miller + Carla Rees - Devices And Desires

Scott Miller launches all sorts of surroundings and contexts at floutist Carla Rees, with the intrigue of Devices And Desires arising as the decisions made by one player begin to bend the walls and alter the hue for the other. Miller’s opening throws of tremolo noise fragments and skittery

Review: Cinchel - Stereo Stasis

Cinchel keeps the elements in gentle balance. The most notable demonstration of this resides in those little waves of low frequency that emerge and recede during “Static (homeward bound)”; delicately sliding beneath the looped bell tones and soft gloopy synth pools, retaining a certain pendulumic equilibrium in its back and

Review: Sky Thing - Garbage Strike

The music is definitely there, and John Collins McCormick is determined to enlighten the listener to this fact. The main base of Garbage Strike is stasis – elements left to unfold without dramatic change, often manifesting as a vigorous and atonal rustle that dominate the foreground – and what originally appear to

Review: Gabriel Profokiev + Peter Gregson - Cello Multitracks

Cello Multitracks is both a merge of classical music and contemporary electronic dance, and a reconnection of classical dance music with its original, contemporarily aware aesthetic. According to composer Gabriel Profokiev, “Classical music has a long history of using dance forms that are popular at the time; a very exciting

Review: Kyle Bobby Dunn - Bring Me The Head Of...

For an album described as “some of the most brutally honest and complex” material of Kyle Bobby Dunn’s career, Bring Me The Head Of… is more warped and obscured than ever. Last year’s Ways Of Meaning was a very slight emergence from within the reverb, just enough to

Review: Colin Webster + Mark Holub - The Claw

Webster has his instrument in a stranglehold during the first track of The Claw. Tone is strained out between jets of spit and residue, rasping into all kinds of accidental overtones and distortions and restricted to the most ghastly of wheezing breaths. Meanwhile, Holub’s percussion is lively and taunting;

Live: Martin A. Smith (live soundtrack to L'Inferno) @ V22 in London, 13/07/12

The audience for Martin A. Smith’s live scoring of L’Inferno sat tucked in one corner of V22’s empty warehousing space, barely occupying a fraction of the cavernous room. Nevertheless, the entire space was utilised: once for its striking acoustic properties, and again for the atmosphere that subsumes

Feature: Latitudes

“None of this has much to do with the epic grooves that Dälek laid down on this session. And it has everything to do with it.” So says Allison Schnackenberg of Southern Records, commenting on the coincidence of Dälek’s Latitudes experience with the 2005 London bombings, and the way

Review: Helm - Impossible Symmetry

In a first for Helm’s Luke Younger, Impossible Symmetry is founded on live improvisation rather than studio sessions. Personally I’m unfamiliar with Helm’s previous output (which extends back to 2006 and includes four previous full lengths), but it’s certainly feasible to see how the live environment

Review: Wil Bolton - Under A Name That Hides Her

Once you know that the musical influences of Bolton’s youth are embedded in this album, it’s hard not to smile as they all start to magically pop up at the fore. Those rich, jangly strums suddenly sound as though they’ve been ripped away from a particularly melancholic

Review: Alan Morse Davies + Gillian Stevens - Y Crythor Du a’r Bleiddiaid / The Black Crwth Player And The Wolves

“Coedwig – Ogrof” swells into the air like a church organ in a grand cathedral; devoid of source and utterly immersive, both distant and intimately embracing. Its penetrative minor key resonates with a sort of deep and spiritual morning, with weeping bows of crwth (a traditional Welsh stringed instrument) dispersing gradually

Review: Yann Novak + Robert Crouch - Fata Morgana

The term “fata morgana” refers to a mirage effect that most strikingly presents itself on the horizon of grand expanses of land or sea. Boats are contorted into rippling strips of white clinging to the water’s surface, while mountains are squashed and blurred into the sky; where the contrast

Review: Points Of Light - SLP001

My edition of SLP001 will be different to yours. My initials are stenciled onto the paper ribbon in silver font, sheathing the individually stenciled card sleeve within, which in turn holds the individually stenciled CD. Needless to say, the opening statement of the Slip Disc label places strong emphasis on

Review: Nils Quak - Aether

Aether manifests not so much as the presence of process and action, but as a ripple within equilibrium; a lapse in stasis, with energy spilling out of the tension release brought on by the imbalance. It’s far from what I expected from a record devised primarily on one modular

Review: The Sleeper Has Awakened - S/T

Just as the opening beat of “Kill Me First, Fast And Again” begin to sound laboriously mechanical, The Sleeper Has Awakened unexpectedly tear their momentum into shreds. The first couple of minutes heave and ho like the hydraulics and weighty impact of industrial routine, lumbering between beats like a robot

Review: Being - The Folkestone Lighthouse EP

Where to start? Opening up The Folkestone Lighthouse EP instantly presents the listener/explorer with a loose wad of folded card: a muddle of text and image, beautifully crafted and yet haphazardly presented. It’s not ready yet. To open the Jackdaw folder is to feel as though one is

Review: Metallic Taste Of Blood - S/T

It’s quite an album opening for anyone oblivious as to what to suspect. A low lingering piano note, a flutter of distorted noise, and then a drum groove of a production somewhere between that bright 80s snare snap and Steve Albini’s oaky, enveloping sense of space. On one

Review: Fungal Abyss - Bardo Abgrund Temple

Of course, one can choose to plunge into the abyss as well. Bardo Abgrund Temple was improvised and recorded under the influence of Teonanacatl (the Aztec term for Psilocybe, meaning “divine mushroom”), and perhaps there’s something to be gained from the listener consuming the mushroom too, as a way

Feature: LINE

PHOTO BY ROBERT ECKHARDT Line works explore our relationship with space and location, translate visual art concepts into audio, question our relationship with sound and unsettle our preconceptions of live music performance. Many of these releases derive from sound installations, in which physical factors – location, setup, perhaps even time of

Review: Hanetration - Tenth Oar EP

Tenth Oar is a dense mesh of sound, and barely any of it feels attributable to conventional instruments or even recognisable objects. A vast majority of the audio here has been crafted, moulded, twisted, disguised – filtered through FX and processing until beats and clicks become groans and scrapes – yet despite

Review: Pinkcourtesyphone - Foley Folly Folio

Line’s primary output is an intensive dissection (and reassembly) of sound. Each release comes wrapped in a thorough description of its context and purpose, and even though the label’s back catalogue amounts to an eclectic body of sound analysis, the premise that unites the releases is actually rather

Review: Nuojuva - Otavaiset Otsakkaha

Otavaiset Otsakkaha feels like a lost music, much like William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops. The sounds are souvenirs from a time long gone; clambering over the crackling erosion of time to resonate into the present day, wavering in pitch as though rendered brittle with age. Just as with Basinski’s

Review: ada - Extended Transmissions

In a manner rather appropriate for a release affiliated with the UK’s first (and only) sound art gallery, Extended Transmissions is as much to do with the observation of sound as it is to do with the utilisation of it. Various different tones are combined – some identifiable (feedback, field

Interview: Ufomammut

How has the European tour been so far? Poia: It’s a short tour – we are just testing our new record, and it’s doing good. Little by little, I’m discovering that I like to play this new record a lot. Obviously when you record an album, you don’

Review: Gareth Davis + Frances-Marie Uitii - Gramercy

The tones of Davies and Uitti sound joined at the waist. One slips gently in between the overtones of the other, mimicking pace and dynamic so as to move in inseparably synchronised waves, their cohesion gently assisted by a deep reverb that causes bellows of woodwind to melt into low

Interview: Helen Frosi (SOUND//SPACE)

What exactly is SOUND//SPACE? SOUND//SPACE is a mutifaceted art project. With an independent record store at its heart, SOUND//SPACE becomes a community hub celebrating the culture and virtues of independent thinking, making and doing in contemporary music and sound art. Focussing on the handmade and designed via

Review: Celer - Tightrope

The 70 continuous minutes of Tightrope is actually 24 separate pieces, but there are no explicit transitions to show for it. In bringing each composition together, Long decided to do more than simply thread them together in chronological sequence; rather, the pieces are interwoven and placed over one another, forming

Review: Axel Dörner + Jassem Hindi - Waterkil

Dörner and Hindi often treat the boundary between sound and silence as some sort of treacherous tightrope. Waterkil is sometimes no more than a wispy exhalation of air hissing lightly into one corner of the soundscape; sometimes no more than a speck of static scuttling around an empty room, or

Review: Ben Vida - esstends-esstends-esstends

“Higher amplitude will help to reveal” claims the press blurb of esstends-esstends-esstends. True to word, increasing the playback volume appears to push the walls outward and backward, ballooning the sounds themselves to bigger sizes and shunting them to extremes of distance. The album toys with the listener’s place within

Live: A Whisper In The Noise + Max Bondi + Quinta @ Cafe Oto, 16/05/12

Quinta filter onto the stage one by one: their faces painted white, their hair held stiffly in place by means of a cardboard loo roll tube, breathing into crinkled paper bags and taking charge of all kinds of sound-making devices. Saws are bowed to produce quivering whistles, glasses of water

Review: KTL - V

The most disturbing aspect of V is that the music feels capable of manifesting as absolutely anything. Where previous albums have often focused more on the collaborative to-and-fro between O’Malley and Rehberg, their fifth full-length removes all sense of “duo” dynamic; the sounds feel like the dimensions and details

Review: Sun Hammer - A Dream In Blood

A Dream In Blood embarks on the most gradual drifts between states. Molecules are swapped and re-positioned one by one, as the album’s grand sonic structures dismantle and reshape: fizzling drones recede beneath swarms of bass frequency, while shards of noise fracture and peel open the silence until beams

Review: Charlemagne Palestine + Janek Schaefer - Day Of The Demons

My initiation into the world of Charlemagne Palestine has pushed my tolerance in more ways than one. Strumming Music was an instant love: timbre and harmony churned into sound mush in the relentless rapid-fire of their execution, stretched out over an hour that pushes listener endurance for all its worth

Review: Lucia H Chung + Yuki Aida - Colour Of Quantum

Lucia H Chung’s side to Colour Of Quantum is always there, but often only just. There are points at which it appears to kiss the very brink of silence, its underbelly gliding across the surface of digital nothing, poised in a delicate balance of volume and frequency, as though

Review: Frank Bretschneider - Kippschwingungen

With my previous exposure to Bretschneider’s working consisting exclusively of Rhythm, EXP and last year’s Komet, Kippschwingungen is something of a surprise. The album was primarily devised on the near-extinct Subharchord synthesizer, which was initially intended to provide sonic special effects for television and film back in the

Review: NHK'Koyxeи - Dance Classics Vol.I

Even for someone with no previous exposure to the music of Kouhei Matsunaga (such as myself), a quick glance at his collaborative history is enough to suggest the eclecticism of his artistic output: partnerships alongside the blistering volume of Merzbow right the way through to the ambient micro-movements of Asmus

Review: Steve Roden + Machinefabriek - Lichtung

Inevitably, Lichtung has to undergo comparison with its original installation context. Let’s get it out of the way first. Initially devised as a four-channel audio/visual presentation and completed by a floor covered with leaves, the audio aspect of this work is just that – an aspect – and therefore the

Film Review: Fuck You - Fucking Noise In China Now

“What do I think? What do I think about what?” queries a bewildered Wang Changcun. Shortly after, a voice out of shot chimes in: “Okay, so, Guy-Marc – what is your actual question?” The fact that Fuck You! is in a constant struggle with its raison d’etre is both its

Review: Om - Advaitic Songs

Listening to Advaitic Songs helped me to understand the potential reasons behind my dissatisfaction with God Is Good. I’m not an Om “purist”, and don’t feel any betrayal in the duo’s decision to expand on the bass/drum core that was strictly – almost religiously – adhered to throughout

Review: Tomas Gris - Clarifications Of The Concept Of Object

Rather than bring to a mind a more familiar collaborative setup – with musicians either arranged facing eachother, or all projecting outward toward their audience – Clarifications Of The Concept Of Object evokes a sense of being directly imposed upon as an individual, and being communicated to as an audience of one.

Review: Zbeen - K-frame

“Sequences, combinations, rotations and reflections, series and dimensions. Sounds act as vectors and they can be regarded as the representation of quantities like force and velocity, which are defined by magnitude and direction. As vectors, sounds generate spaces whose dimension is the size of a maximal basis set.” Just when

Live: Meshuggah + Animals As Leaders + We Are Knuckle Dragger @ HMV Forum in London, 20/04/12

To what extent are Meshuggah “a metal band”? On record, it’s sometimes easy to forget; the band’s pursuit of polymetric rhythm in the evocation of something mechanical and alien has been at the expense of many of their metal ties, and it’s only with the occasional wail

Review: Liberez - The Letter

As well as being the title of The Letter’s opening track proper (following a cool announcement of the album title by vocalist Nina Bosnic), the word “- Gag” slots in perfectly with the atmosphere at work here. Everything sounds stifled: rasping distortion is strained out in sickening dry heaves,

Review: Genus Inkasso - Occasionally Slumping, Smiling Weakly

It’s an odd collage, but always an audibly pleasing one. Occasionally Slumping, Smiling Weakly is crumpled, glitchy and torn – it stumbles through rhythms, flits suddenly between styles and landscapes, and traps itself in loops that momentarily feel utterly inescapable. Its movement is labyrinthine and unpredictable, dictated by a jittery

Review: Jeremy Haladyna - Mayan Time Mayan Tales

Magic is materialising within the drip and splash of water on cold stone, illuminating the leaky cave walls in brief and sporadic bursts. One imagines the sound as a mysterious light that flashes throughout the pitch black, dancing with a vibrancy that gifts life and activity to a predominantly dormant

Review: Good Weather For An Airstrike - Underneath The Stars

Drifting constantly between definitive place and hazy tunnels of transition, Underneath The Stars is an ambience of movement and a melancholic loss of home; it moves constantly, stripped of anchorage and free to drift outward and upward, wandering between states with only a tentative level of trust for any of

Review: Birchall/Cheetham Duo - Tipping Point

When homing in on the minute details of Tipping Point – the sounds and mutations that occur second by second – David Birchall (guitar) and Andrew Cheetham (drums) appear to have a very warped, jittery relationship. Taut strings are pinged and flicked, pitches are bent untidily like the output of a broken

Review: Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf - Mutatis Mutandis

Mutatis Mutandis is sparse and at a distance. It hums and crackles into an empty space, swamped by a reverberant gloom that brings to mind an underground sewer system, complete with intermittent drips that snap on impact with cold concrete. As it progresses, the distance dissolves at the hands of

Review: Mirrorring - Foreign Body

As noted on the Kranky release page for Foreign Body, “one could try to assess what part of the album each artist was responsible for, but that would prevent one from seeing the proverbial forest for the trees.” It is true that there are points at which “signature” sounds appear

Review: Army Of 2600 - Return Of The Bloop Beep Buzz

I’m far too young to have owned or even played an Atari (believe it or not, the Nintendo 64 was the prominent console of my childhood), but the proud ownership of several Gameboys and a hand-me-down NES means that the sound of 8-bit evokes very vivid memories for me:

Live: Maja Ratkje + Ikue Mori, John Wiese + Evan Parker @ Cafe Oto

John Wiese and Evan Parker have been musically acquainted before: initially as part of the Free Noise tour 2008, and then on the collaborative release C-Section, released on PAN back in 2009. Having never witnessed the pairing myself, I’m left somewhat optimistic in the knowledge that previous meetings had

Interview: Ikue Mori

You’ve worked with an eclectic array of collaborators throughout your career. Is it always easy for you to adapt to different collaborative company? It’s not always easy. Sometimes the chemistry doesn’t work so well and you have a hard time making music together, but fortunately that didn’

Review: AUN - Phantom Ghost

Whether the transition between Black Pyramid and Phantom Ghost was consciously executed or not, the transformation has been pretty drastic. Gone are the thick jets of sonic granite that characterised the likes of “Taurus”, and the reverberant distortion circulating across the grand expanse of “Phoenix”; Phantom Ghost feel comparatively loose

Review: Marco Panella - In the Age of Batteries

Panella’s Eastern Landscapes has been receiving regular spins here at ATTN since its release back in late 2010. His style is an unexplainably addictive one: part meticulous composition, part lazy flows of visceral, fingerpicked guitar improvisation. Drums stumble into audibility and then slump out again, as if unable to

Interview: Justin Broadrick

You’ve got a new album out soon as JK Flesh. Where does this project fit in with the rest of your creative output? Firstly the intention was to continue ground that I was treading with Kevin Martin in Techno Animal. We folded Techno Animal and stopped working together in

Exhibition: Graham Dunning - For Posterity @ SoundFjord, 15/03/12 - 21/04/12

“First of all, apologies for this unsolicited letter. I’m trying to contact a family who lived at ******* ***, ***********, between 1958 and mid-1965. I realise that this is a long shot but please allow me to explain my story.” And so begins Graham Dunning’s first attempt at contact with a

Interview: Maja S. K. Ratkje

PHOTO BY KRISTIN SVORTE You’ve worked with an eclectic array of collaborators throughout your career. Is it always easy for you to adapt to different collaborative company? No, and I carefully choose my collaborators, but I also need to take chances, and ad hoc constellations are sometimes very inspiring,

Review: Rivulets - Yearlings

Having summoned the talents of his live band (and the acoustics of the Sacred Heart Centre) to turn the introspective songs of We’re Fucked into a powerful outward force, Yearlings feels more geared toward “one-to-one” listening, through which Amundson can remove the guise of illustrious reverb and collaborative company

Interview: Daniel Menche

Your new album Guts is an assault/dissection of a piano. Can you tell us about the piano in question? About 10 years ago I was driving around, and I saw this old piano sitting on the street. I had a pick-up truck so I pulled over and asked the

Review: Adrian Anioł - Arrhythmia OST

My listening experiences of Arrhythmia have been in absolute isolation from its context within the film it is intended to soundtrack; I have no visual reference point to which I can attribute the sounds, and thus the album’s atmosphere emerges gradually out of the dark, devoid of any preconceptions

Interview: Trevor Shelley-de Brauw (Pelican, Chord)

PELICAN (L-R): LARRY HERWEG, BRIAN HERWEG, TREVOR SHELLEY-DE BRAUW, LAURENT LEBEC What was the thinking behind recording Ataraxia/Taraxis in multiple studios? It was partly an experiment that we wanted to try, but it was also a matter of necessity; our drummer Larry [Herweg] lives in LA, and Bryan [Herweg,

Review: France Jobin - Valence

Working exclusively with processed field recordings taken from across North America and Europe, Jobin’s conscious mind dances cautiously with her source material; she is compelled by its potential significance but reluctant to unveil its mystique by sparing it too much thought. As she states herself: “there is a likelihood

Interview: Dylan Carlson (Earth)

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Review: Philip Blackburn - Ghostly Psalms

I can imagine that to be in the presence of the “Duluth Harbor Serenade” recording session must have been a most surreal experience. While the harbor’s sonic fingerprint usually manifests over the course of a day – conducted by the ritualistic, day-to-day triggers upon which each sound resounds in the

Review: Pulseve - Magnet

“30 minutes of unconventional drum and bass” claims the press release, in reference to its two instrumental components rather than the UK club scene’s genre of the hour. In reality, Pulseve’s sound resides in closer company to the likes of Zu and 37500 Yens; restless drum beats that

Review: South Of No North - Octopussies Liquor Store

Like the vibrant, flailing concoction of aquatic limbs and curious eyes floating across the cover of Octopussies Liquor Store, the music’s first 15 minutes are a bizarre mixture of sounds of withheld origins (keyboards? Guitars?), dancing and droning across the audio space like alien voices, often bubbling and mutated

Review: A Whisper In The Noise - To Forget

To Forget sounds caught within the wake of emotional destruction. It’s that initial clamber onto weary legs after the desolate blow of heartbreak; still undoubtedly hurt, but just starting to sense those initial tingles of regained strength. Its movements are fragile and cautious, with instruments guided softly into life

Review: Gultskra Artikler - Abtu Anet

Galatika was not the music of this planet. Gultskra Artikler’s previous full length resided within its own humid alien jungle – it chattered with the cyber-calls of mutant birds, and wafted in an electronic mist that clogged any empty space, leaving the listener to wade through a thick and oppressive

Review: Keith Rowe + John Tilbury - E.E. Tension And Circumstance

There is quite backstory to the 58 minutes of E.E. Tension and Circumstance that I was initially completely oblivious to. To summarise: Rowe and Tilbury were regular collaborative colleagues from 1980 right the way through until 2004, as part of the group AMM. At this point, Rowe left following

Review: Mark Harris - An Idea Of North / Learning To Walk

Having been snowed into his studio back in Winter 2010, Mark Harris melted down his feelings of isolation and fed them straight into 44 minutes of improvisation. Unlike the situation in which the record was composed, Harris’ composition feels liberated and free to roam between atmospheres; An Idea of North/

Review: Will Montgomery + Robert Curgenven - Split

The warm crackle of Montgomery feeds neatly into that of Curgenven. That aged rustle of vinyl is a constant presence through this split, and provides the necessary overlap to allow for it to work effortlessly as a singular listening session. The crackle represents the point of culmination: it’s a

Review: Richard Youngs - Amaranthine

Much of Amaranthine is loose and without pre-determining thought. Its percussion pounds and shakes and clangs, ignorant to rhythmic unity in favour of simply sounding and expressing; rhythm is there, but it exists as an energy and a voice rather than as a mere timekeeper. Youngs’ voice is beautiful – quivering

Review: Various Artists - Rivers Home

Unsurprisingly, the sound that appears most frequently throughout the Rivers Home series is that of running water. But just like the rivers themselves that have gifted their influence to each of the series’ participants, this water takes on a distinctly different form in each instance: free-flowing as a constant gush

Review: Chubby Wolf - Turkey Decoy

Turkey Decoy is very much a portrayal of sound as an organic and largely independent entity, as though Danielle Baquet-Long need merely guide it in a general direction and watch the intricacies take place on their own accord. Sound is as water, with changes in dynamic and harmony rippling outward;

Review: Easychord - Not In My Family Tree

Not In My Family Tree derives some of its most prominent features from what could be termed as the “common traits” of electronic ambient music. I refer to those rippling synthesizer pools, in which origination and placement become lost within their own reverberant afterglows – sound as a billowing gas or

Review: Radere - I'll Make You Quiet

I’ll Make You Quiet documents Carl Ritger’s recent move from Philadelphia to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. All of the uncertainty that arises when departing home comforts is present, and finds itself coupled with (and in some respects, amplified by) the beautiful, daunting new landscapes by which Ritger

Review: Sam Cleeve - Foundation Studies

Those sparse, unresolved piano chords drip sparsely at the start of “Gemütlich” like the soundtrack to a particularly contemplative scene in a Hollywood movie, in which gaping holes of quiet form the spaces in which thought can slot snugly into coherence, with strings flickering into life as the mind begins

Review: Marc Broude - NREM

NREM often feels like the amplification of sound that would otherwise be inaudible to the naked ear. Its intricate detail, and the blanket of interference that sometimes obscures it, makes it seem as though it’s exploring micro-processes, or the inaudible sound of dormant spaces – even during its most violent

Review: Earth - Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II

Despite a year standing between the release of each part, this second instalment of Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light was actually recorded in the same two-week session as the first. So it’s no surprise that the same minimal instrument palette returns: ideas and momentum are passed and expanded

Review: signalsundertests - Nascent

There was no telling where Ricky Graham would go following Mecca, which was more of a gathering of a material than an album or EP as such. While this previous release showcased an interest in pursuing a multitude of different directions, his marriage of clean guitars and glacial electronics could

Review: Peter Bjärgö - The Architecture of Melancholy

The Architecture of Melancholy may open on the ritualistic drum cycles, streaming background drones and cavernous echo that place it squarely within the Cyclic Law bracket, but Peter Bjärgö’s sound begins to bleed out of this dark ambient core rather rapidly. This process begins with the introduction of his

Review: Joe Frawley - Carnival

One thought will cascade into the next. Carnival is constantly moving between states; overlapping between shrieks of fireworks and gentle and introspective piano movements, studded with choral pads, phantom synthesiser and rather deliberate and over-acted fragments of conversation and monologue. Just as our minds leap back and forth through our

Review: Will Long - Rosy Reflections

There is melody within Rosy Reflections, although it’s only upon its recurrence that it becomes possible to recognise it as such. Both tracks on Will Long’s latest release utilise a thick tonal blanket caught within a dynamic cycle of rise and fall; gooey blurs of synthesiser that surge

Review: John Wiese - Seven of Wands

It’s easy to underestimate the effect a good track title can have on the atmospheric provocation of a musical piece. The second track of John Wiese’s Seven of Wands is a thick stream of abrasive sound – ghoulish wails, metallic scrapes, motor grinds – that cascades past the listener’s

Review: He Died While Hunting - We Used To Dream Awake

We Used to Dream Awake appears to take a retrospective look at childhood, sounding both fond and sombre in nature. It casts an eye back to the brief and wondrous romances, the triviality of day to day concerns and the playful energy that gradually start to pale and discolour through

Interview: Eli Keszler

What makes Boston’s Cyclorama an appropriate venue for the Cold Pin installation? The massive size of the space allowed me to make the piece at the scale I imagined it to be. It’s an incredibly high dome, so the sound is very special in there. There was so

Review: The Beautiful Schizophonic + Yui Onodera - Night Blossom

Opening track “Dreaming in the Proximity of Mars” demonstrates why I perceive the piano as a most difficult tool to incorporate into ambient music. Incorporating its regimented pitches and rhythmic plonks (regardless of any attempt to mercurialise its sound into a fluid spillage of notes) often results in a very

Review: Eyvind Kang - The Narrow Garden

I imagine that Kang’s string arrangements for Sunn 0)))’s “Alice” helped to introduce his name to numerous new ears within a whole new stylistic listenership sector; myself included. Listening to The Narrow Garden for the first time, I was immediately struck by a slight atmospheric crossover between his

Review: Kleefstra + Pruiksma + Kleefstra - Deislieper

There’s such a restless sense of restraint running through Deislieper. Each instrument is stroked and tapped rather that smashed and twanged, and the players feel as though they’re in a constant battle to hold the dynamics down; hollers of feedback are strangled into silence as quickly as they

Review: Josh Preston - Exchanges 1-4

According to its maker, Exchanges 1-4 is “the sound of trade, exchange, interrelation and operability”. There’s a sense that, more specifically, the EP references the machines and mechanical process that reside within these concepts: the initiation of action, reactive consequence, and the resulting progression. Factory sirens and beeps set

Review: Eli Keszler - Cold Pin

Cold Pin is essentially an improvised performance dictated by the fierce, rattling emissions of several piano strings arranged across a looming curved wall; a motor is attached to each, which taps against the string in sporadically sequenced rapid-fire bursts. Those few initial growls of the motor attacking the piano string

Review: My Cat is an Alien - Living on the Invisible Line

Out of the silence of this album’s first track comes an eerie acoustic loop that folds back in on itself in waves of reverse delay. It’s present throughout the 14-minute piece – becoming a touch more chilling with each repetition – as a growing sense of cabin fever sinks in

Review: Alex Cobb + Aquarelle - Split LP

While Alex Cobb and Aquarelle each contribute just 13 minutes of material to this latest split on Low Point, the gorgeous way in which both halves interact will no doubt compel the listener to many a repeat spin. Little pieces of feedback, guitar, synth chords and bowed strings crackle out

Review: Hamann + Fractal - Solo Para Dementes

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that this could be ATTN’s first contact with Peruvian improvisatory music, and it’s nice to be able to commemorate such an occasion with a positive review. Solo Para Dementes brings together Wilder Gonzales A. (aka Fractal) on the oscillator

Review: Three Fields - Wild Blue Yonder

Like those fleeting “ambient” interludes that come scattered amongst Boards of Canada tracks, or those tentative forays into ambient music by Brian Eno back in the 70s, Wild Blue Yonder feels torn between evoking an otherworldly mysteriousness and staying firmly harnessed to the more traditionally musical structures and textures. Synthesizer

Review: Manuel Mota + Jason Kahn - Espírito Santo

Espírito Santo is one of those albums in which the location of the recording is as integral as the actions of the performers. Both of these pieces were recorded in the cellar of the “Espírito Santo” building in Lisbon – a space that not only announces its presence as a ghostly

Review: Heatsick - Intersex

The two minutes of “Axi Zum No” – the opening track of Intersex – makes for an interesting introduction to the album’s atmosphere and aesthetic. Its combination of a wavering, unsteady string loop and Steven Warwick’s half-minded hums bare little stylistic relation to the dance-orientated jams that seize the floor

Review: Craig Colorusso - Sun Boxes

Sun Boxes is a travelling sound installation by Craig Colorusso, consisting of 20 solar-powered speakers that the listener is free to roam amongst and in between. Culminatively, they create a Bb chord of pre-recorded guitar notes, formed always in part as notes drift in and out of audibility – there’s

Interview: Nathan Amundson (Rivulets)

The message behind We’re Fucked seems to partially derive from what you refer to as a “vapid cultural/musical landscape”. Would you care to elaborate on what you mean by that? Well the label were doing their promotional stuff, and they asked me to give them a blurb. I

Review: Aidan Baker - The Spectrum of Distraction

99% of the time, the shuffle button is not a muso’s best friend. But sadly, it now stands for the way in which the general attitude to music has changed in the digital age. Albums are not standalone products to be appreciated in their own isolated narratives; they are

Review: Ben Fleury-Steiner - The Places that Find You

A large part of what prevents The Places that Find You from being just another drop in the vast pool of electro-ambient is the sense of agitation that buzzes through it. Even the title is implicative of the record’s sharp edge: the places find you – imposing themselves upon a

Feature: The Book Report Series

I’ll be honest. I can’t think of anything new to say in contribution to the debate on how our interaction with music, film and literature has changed due to advances in technology, and neither do I want to spend too much time re-iterating what others have said, and

Review: Scissors and Sellotape - For the Tired and Ill at Ease

Nils Frahm’s Felt has already championed the act of conveying warmth and life through the piano this year, and John McCaffrey (aka Scissors and Sellotape) seems to carry a similar objective with this latest full length. But where the intimacy of Frahm’s effort originates from night-time sessions in

Review: Leonardo Rosado - Mute Words

With his latest full length, Leonardo Rosado explores “the delicate boundary between thoughts and words”. From my perspective, it seems to occupy the space just either side of that boundary or directly upon it – its words and sounds track this crystallisation process, through which vaporous whisps of cognition begin to

Review: Manuel Zurria - Loops4ever

Loops4ever goes beyond merely reconstructing pieces and awkwardly planting the “Zurria” trademark on top. The double album is part of an extensive research project into repetition in music that has also included the triple CD Repeat! (put out on Die Schactel back in 2008), taking him beyond the loops themselves

Review: thisquietarmy - Resurgence

Resurgence is the culmination of four years of writing and recording, interspersed between Eric Quach’s various other EPs, albums and splits. So expansive is its coverage – hurtling between pools of reverb-heavy guitar drone, hypnotic space rock and lurching shoegaze ballads – that there’s a sense that the album is

Interview: Greg Anderson (Sunn 0))), Goatsnake)

So how did the writing process work for 00 Void? What we decided to do for this one was for each person to bring in an idea, and then actually hash it out in the studio. So there wasn’t really any prior rehearsal – it was really just about getting

Review: Anna Thorvaldsdottir - Rhízōma

Rhízōma operates on the sort of scale that could either have only spawned from the influence of natural landmarks (canyons, mountains), or that which has been painted illustriously on the cavernous insides of the imagination. High strings resemble eerie slithers of light penetrating an absolute pitch black. Hostility lurks in

Feature: Top Five Records of 2011

5. Radiohead – The King of Limbs After the overblown – and overlong – Hail to the Thief in 2004, it’s strange to think that Radiohead would be mastering the art of understatement just two albums later. The eight tracks of The King of Limbs are built on fragile frames of light,

Review: Hiroki Sasajima - Bells

As the blur of tones mutates and blends between harmonic shapes, Bells changes from billowy ambient clouds into restless storms of noise, and then on into turbulent hums of microphone feedback. The presence of sound is a constant, but the atmosphere is not; one thing Sasajima accomplishes very effectively is

Review: Nils Frahm - Felt

Upon first hearing Felt, I’d presumed that the title was to be taken as the past-tense verb form of “feel”. The album places heavy focus on the mechanism through which each piano note is born, with melodies surrounded by the amplified clunk and click as downward pressure on keys

Review: Benoît Honoré Pioulard - Plays Thelma

It’s as though Benoît Honoré Pioulard merely sets the sounds in motion, at which point nature takes over to see them through the unfolding process. Slow surges of cello imitate the tidal cycles of the sea. Sudden excitements of feedback repeat in meditative tone sequences, which would almost resemble

Review: Pascal Savy - Liminal

A purchase of Liminal comes with a choice of one of four poems, each sharing its title with one of the EP’s four tracks. A consistent theme across the poetry is the writer’s dissociation with the physical world as he places himself right on the seam between reality

Review: Alexander Berne and the Abandoned Orchestra - Flickers of Mime / Death of Memes

Something about the album’s first disc – Flickers of Mime – feels deceptive. It toys with listener expectation as turns in the narrative emerge and collapse within seconds. It meddles with recollection as new textures fade into nothing quickly enough to feel as though they might just be figments of the

Interview: White Hills

How has the European tour been? It’s been amazing! Any reason for that? Well I think it’s a few different things. With every release we have a higher profile – we’ve also been touring over here for some years now, so each time it gets better and better.

Interview: Martin A. Smith

Your exhibition explores sound’s interaction with “the spirit of place, memory and environment”. What methods have you used to explore this?  I have tried to use a variety of sounds, music, and field recordings to capture the essence, feel or emotional response to the landscape or sense of place.

Review: Broken Harbour - Gramophone Transmissions

The pacing and harmony choice of Gramophone Transmissions – during the first half in particular – seems to suggest that Blake Gibson has derived more than just the project name from Stars of the Lid (taken from the Texan duo’s “Broken Harbors” suite, I’m guessing). Both parts of “The Ballad

Review: Dean McPhee - Son of the Black Peace

Son of the Black Peace is the sound of being alone with one’s thoughts; like a monologue that unravels contemplation into a smooth, clear narrative in which each emotion and thought is carefully pronounced out loud, one at a time. It’s the sound of being at peace and

Review: Thorsten Soltau + Preslav Literary School - Grün wie Milch / Alamut

Although recorded and edited back in October 2010, Thorsten Soltau’s side to this split wasn’t actually mixed and compiled until September this year. Such a gap may have been employed to make Soltau’s sound library start to feel like just that – a sound library – rather than a

Review: Bleaklow - The Sunless Country

There’s little here that can’t be ticked off on the list of firmly established post-metal “trademarks”, but this Sheffield three-piece aren’t pretending to break any new ground anyway – Bleaklow exist to exploit the capabilities of the pre-existing stylistic template rather than re-invent it, and make no bones

Review: Tomoyoshi Date - Otoha

Track titles such as “Unfurling of Young Leaves”, “Floating Light on the Waves” and “The Sound of the Moon” elude explicitly to the uninterrupted serenity that occupies Otoha. Like the most gently executed moments of Cendre by Fennesz and Sakamoto, the music of Tomoyoshi Date could barely rouse the listener

Review: Yann Novak - Presence

Presence started life as a sound performance at Torrance Art Museum in California back in June 2010, in which digitally enhanced cell phone recordings were combined in a manner designed to travel “smoothly through a number of emotional and physical states”. But just as with emotion itself, Presence never exists

Interview: Enablers

This is quite a big tour for your guys. How is it going so far? Peter Simonelli: It’s going really well. I mean, there have been a couple of duds but that’s to be expected. For the most part it’s been really good. And this is starting

Review: SlowPitch - REPLCMNT

Cheldon Paterson’s first sonic statement as SlowPitch is a brief and enigmatic selection of turntable collages; sudden jumps between sounds and states, inflections of warped vocal samples paranoid whispers, juxtapositions between steady drones and fidgety staccato electronics. When placed in comparison with the more experienced turntable musicians, he’s

Review: Richard Knox + Frédéric D. Oberland - The Rustle of the Stars

Whereas countless other string-centric ambient artists tend to soundtrack the ungraspable extents of outer space (Stars of the Lid, Christina Vantzou), Knox and Oberland join the likes of Richard Skelton in having a stronger affiliation (from my perspective as listener) with the earth – in particular, the way in which mood

Review: Talvihorros - Descent into Delta

True to its title, Descent into Delta feels as though it’s sinking into the earth. The waves of life and activity that flicker into life during “Gamma” – and flourish during the densely built “Beta” – feel attributable to the outside, anchored by thick hums of bass and distortion but stacked

Review: Heinali + Matt Finney - Ain't No Night

Ain’t No Night is the fourth album collaboration between two artists working within typically introverted fields. For this release, Ukraine’s Heinali crafts what would most likely fall under the “doomgaze” scene: equal parts lush ambience and ultra-fizzed guitar distortion, all trundling at a wearily slow tempo. America’s

Review: Steve Roden - Proximities

On Roden’s last work on Line, 2005’s Airforms, he used Wallace Neff’s experimental house designs as inspiration. Neff inflated balloons and then sprayed them with concrete, with the resultant shape organically formed by the pressure of air expulsion. Roden transferred this idea to his sound work, and

Review: Caretaker/Undersmile - Split

Nice to hear some quality heavy music being made just a mere stone’s throw from ATTN HQ. This split between Caretaker and Undersmile (from Winchester and Oxford respectively) is an interesting one; a brief, 11-minute blast of downtuned riffs and guitar interplay from the former, and 24 minutes of

Live: Supersonic Festival 2011 Diary (@ The Custard Factory in Birmingham, 21-23/10/11)

Not only is this Capsule’s ninth annual edition of Supersonic Festival, but it’s the fifth time in six years that I’ve traipsed up to Birmingham to attend. The quality of the line-up has been ever consistent – the Capsule girls have always known what’s good in terms

Review: signalsundertests - Mecca

Collecting together material recorded by Ricky Graham in 2010, Mecca is plays like a single with an extended stream of B-sides. Accompanying the title track are a few guitar-centric ambient work-outs (looped, nestled in bitcrusher and flecked with synthesizer strokes), a remix and two tracks featuring guest vocalists. It’s

Review: Pleq + Marihiko Hara - The Dawn Came Behind The Fog

Branching off from father-son venture Somehow Recordings, micro-label Twisted Tree Line dedicates itself to limited-run “postcard releases” on 3” CDR. Just as this format might suggest, these are fleeting insights into various elsewheres – captured points of time and place, channelled back in a deliberately limiting format (in terms of duration

Interview: John Richards (Dirty Electronics)

We live in the era of touch screen; our fingers glide quickly on the screens of tablets and smart phones, and the applications are endless and for all tastes. But placing your finger on the Mute Synth created by the Dirty Electronics and Mute Records label is a very different

Interview: Tremoro Tarantura

PICTURE TAKEN BY CHRISTINA UNDRUM What don’t you like about the studio environment? Mateusx: I don’t like to rush. Tremoro Tarantura has a pretty complex sound and it takes time to make things sound right. A lot of studios are very sterile, anonymous and boring – just like hospitals

Review: Morkobot - Morbo

Morbo is as angular and precise as any self-proclaimed “robot rock” record should be. Like the individual mechanisms of a machine, Morkobot’s three components (drums and two bass guitars) often manage to play three rhythms across eachother simultaneously, in a complex mesh of snare crack, cymbal crash, staccato low-end

Review: Tom Johnson - Orgelpark Color Chart

“I have two good minimalist composer friends who have been writing drone music for many years: Phill Niblock and Eliane Radigue. When I told them I had finally left my metric melodies and harmonies and was writing a one-note piece, they were quite surprised and pleased. So am I.” Namedropping

Review: Asmus Tietchens - Soirée

“Is it really necessary to create further new electronic music,” Tietchens queries, “if only one piece as a nucleus is sufficient to derive hundreds and hundreds of different distinct individual variants?” This is “recycling” – not “remixing” – and I imagine Tietchen’s insistence on this distinction stems from connotations of each.

Live: Enablers + Headquarters + Black Octagon @ The Lexington, 12/10/11

The intensity swells through the line up tonight: lingering on the edge of explosion throughout openers Black Octagon, building further and oozing gently out of the pores of Headquarters (though still slightly withheld as if forced out through gritted teeth) and finally giving way once Enablers hit the stage, held

Review: Bio + Larkian + Les Poissons Autistes - S/T

Despite Switzerland-based three:four records referring to this as their first “totally Swiss” release, this collaboration was still constructed by remote file-swapping; fragments of tracks were sent back and forth to be re-shaped and expanded upon, circling between the individual studio environments of each contributor. So even if there’s

Review: Kammerflimmer Kollektief - Teufelskamin

Just leave Kammerflimmer Kollektief to jam it out and then see what they come up with. This seems to be the way to coax the very best out of this German group: set the brush kit rolling in pattering beats, and then witness gently effected guitars, skittering woodwind and a

Review: Millipede - Realms

Joseph Davenport (aka Millipede) describes Realms as “harsh noise shoegaze”. Perhaps that should be “shoegaze harsh noise” instead? This is very much a shoegaze variant of harsh noise rather than the inverse, and while Davenport’s guitar strums may have existed as wispy melodies at some point in the creation

Review: Lawrence English - The Peregrine

I suppose it wouldn’t be too unfair to mention the antique crackle and weathering distortion of Philip Jeck, or the constantly morphing tone cloud formations of Tim Hecker, when talking about The Peregrine. It would, however, be unfair to dismiss this album as a direct derivative of either. Based

Review: Ryan Scott - Maki Ishii Live

Composed between 1988 and 1992, the three pieces of Maki Ishii Live highlight a point at which Ishii focused his attention on the percussion concerto. The way he approaches percussion is as though he’s discovering it for the first time – these three pieces marvel at the most primitive sonic

Review: Alva Noto - univrs

As with previous album unitxt, Alva Noto’s univrs presents Carsten Nicolai’s own interpretation of club music (see our interview with the man himself for more). It goes without saying that the club scene is infinitely more eclectic in Germany than it is over here in the UK, and

Interview: Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto)

univrs seems to be continuation of the concept raised in your previous album, unitxt. Was there any reason for deciding to revisit/expand on the concept? Was it spurred by a want to return to a more rhythmically-driven sound? First of all, unitxt was a set mainly produced for clubs,

Review: Annelies Monseré + Richard Youngs - Three:four Split Series Volume 3

The third volume of the three:four split series taps into the pursuit of singlular ideas. The striking (and rather beautiful) cat on the cover slots in with this idea rather appropriately – it’s caught in thought, freezing in time for a split second to contemplate, with a gaze that

Review: Sol Rezza - SPIT

SPIT has an unusual relationship with the natural world. While artists such as Chris Watson glorify environmental soundscapes by leaving them largely untouched, intervening only to apply the most subtle brushstrokes of emphasis, Sol Rezza transforms these soundscapes into drastically different figures. Yet her motive and message isn’t actually

Review: Harley Gaber - In Memoriam 2010

Just like the smudged, distorted gibbous of a half-hidden planet earth on the album’s cover, the music within is muffled, blurred and spun out of shape. Sometimes it sounds like alien chatter heard beneath murky water, phased into communicative pulses and shrieking in high, theremin-esque wails. But at other

Review: Absent Without Leave - 'Neath the Tumbling Stars

Truth be told, there’s a chance you’ve heard something reminiscent of ‘Neath The Tumbling Stars already. George Mastrokostas seems to be part of the “bedroom ambience” movement that spawned in the wake of Eluvium’s Lambent Material and the like, capturing panoramic ambition of ambient escapism within intimate,

Review: PopeWAFFEN - S/T

The opening statement of Berlin’s Corvo Records is a tirade of phased distortion, electronic squeals, sweeping metallic chimes – somewhat anarchic, yet unarguably cohesive – acting as a cathartic, all-at-once release of pressure, and a rowdy proclamation as to what PopeWAFFEN are all about. But while “Easter Sunday Raid” perhaps a

Review: Omega Massif - Karpatia

Omega Massif take their place alongside the likes of Lento and Ufomammut as forerunners in the sludge/post-metal/doom hybrid movement, and Karpatia sufficiently asserts their right to be there. It’s not a “novelty” style of music anymore – gritting up post-rock a bit will no longer guarantee a fanbase,

Review: Premonition Factory - The Sense of Time

The Sense of Time may be expansive, but it’s not infinitely so. This is the sort of ambience that sounds as if it’s lapping up against the concrete walls of aircraft hangers rather than drifting into space without return, and I find myself reminded of Deep Listening (collaboration

Review: Ekca Liena - Slow Music for Rapid Eye Movement

Originally released in 2008, Slow Music For Rapid Eye Movement is Ekca Liena’s ambitious 75-minute debut. It doesn’t so much forge its own signature imprint than flick the lights up on an endless panoramic landscape of Mackenzie’s own making, with the music starting off in expansive ambient

Review: Ghédalia Tazartès - Repas Froid

Repas Froid arrives like an incomprehensible flashback. Music samples, ritualistic/religious singing, spoken sections, rickety noises, and countless other sonic extracts are fragmented and chucked into the audio melting pot. Sounds are prised away from their source context, stripped of their motive or meaning, with an overwhelmed listener stuck in

Review: Anna Rose Carter + Pleq - My Piano Is Broken

I’m often hesitant when it comes to approaching albums that fuse abstract atmospherics with the tonally rigid melodies of conventional instrumentation. There’s a danger of spoiling the subtle mystique, or hauling even the most convincing and immersive soundscapes back to the status of “music”; any authentic sense of

Review: Ezramo - come ho imparato a volare

Ezramo has found herself present on both of Corvo Record’s debut releases. But while PopeWAFFEN calls upon her abilities to interact and improvise with a stark variety of other performers, come ho imparato a volare allows her to occupy a space all of her own. The voice she adopts

Review: Farewell Poetry - Hoping for the Invisible to Ignite

Blending the folksy melancholy and fluid poetry of recent Current 93 with the moody romance of Mono, opening piece “As True As Troilus” advances and recedes cautiously to begin with. Only after 14 minutes does it burst through the floodgates as distortion, wailing vibrato leads and thick white noise jets

Review: R/S - USA

USA documents Rehberg and Schmickler’s 2009 tour across the states, and presents three noise improvisations captured live (two from Chicago, one from New York). This is brash, agitated stuff – synthesizers overlap in warbling, fizzing, quivering gestures all happening at the same time, with both members outright refusing to step

Interview: Z'EV

PHOTO BY DEIMANTE DEMENTAVICIUTE What is Rhythmajik, and how did you become affiliated with it? How did I become affiliated with it? I wrote the book with that title (Rhythmajik: Practical Uses of Number, Rhythm and Sound). It was published in 1992 by Temple Press, who went out of business

Interview: Kogumaza

Are you looking forward to playing Supersonic 2011? Chris: Very much so. We’ve all been attendees over the years so it’ll be great to play. Do you know much about the festival? What are your favourite aspects of it? C: I think I’ve only missed one year

Interview: Alexander Tucker

How was your first experience of Supersonic, back in 2006? Well it was good…although I don’t know if you remember, but I turned up with my guitar and was going to play a set with that, and my battery had died in my pickup. Obviously I’d been

Review: Obake - S/T

Obake means “a thing that changes” in Japanese, although its definition also extends to signify a “ghost of a deceased human being”. Both capture the mercuriality of this full-length – Obake refuse to establish a “core” sound, with the album continuously throwing entirely fresh shapes right up until its closing moments.

Review: Pombagira - Iconoclast Dream

The aspect of Iconoclast Dream that most explicitly demands praise is, without a doubt, the production. The track is an impeccable document of the band’s worship of sludgy, girthy low end, harnessing a real sense of rehearsal space rawness, while leaving enough clarity to bring immediacy to Pombagira’s

Review: Blue Sausage Infant - Negative Space

Fading into being as a concoction of chattering astral synthesisers, muffled murmurs of sleep talk and an eerie xylophonic loop, Blue Sausage Infant is as sonically bewildering as the project name might suggest. Coil are the most immediate reference point during opening track “Motion Parallax”, which provokes a sort of

Review: Picastro + Nadja - Fool, Redeemer

It’s nice to hear a split release that doesn’t use the “split” aspect as an excuse to throw out any idea of musical cohesion. Fool, Redeemer, flows very neatly as a start-to-finish listening experience. According to my recent interview with Aidan Baker, this wasn’t something that was

Review: Rainbo Video - Shadow Relics

As the shimmering glitch/loop of guitar strums announces the start of “Ultraviolet”, Shadow Relics begins to form itself. The album has a distinctive character for the most part – identifiable in recurrences in timbre, mood and structure, and gradually unveiled as each element takes its place over the course of

Review: Ramesses - Possessed By The Rise Of Magik

After feeling rather underwhelmed by Ramesses’ Chrome Pineal (at best, an incoherently executed and half-baked EP) it’s an absolute relief to hear a dense, gut-punch of conviction like “Invisible Ritual”. Dipping ever so slightly into the murky production of black metal, the album’s opening track is a concise

Review: Gurun Gurun - S/T

Gurun Gurun create a real three-dimensional clatter and commotion, through which structured melody is just barely able to establish a presence. It’s as though the musicians are clumsily stumbling into their instruments rather than taking charge of them, and often sounds like Fennesz’s Endless Summer set in a

Review: Premonition 13 - 13

Premonition 13 is the latest project of Scott “Wino” Weinrich, whose involvement in heavy music over the past 30 years – be it in St Vitus, The Obsessed, Spirit Caravan, The Hidden Hand or Shrinebuilder – has granted him “legend” status in the eyes of many, and this record demonstrates that he’

Review: Sankt Otten - Gottes Synthesizer

Having not followed Sankt Otten’s activities since Wunden Gibt Es Immer Wieder (released back in 2008), Gottes Synthesizer surprised me somewhat. Gone are the organic layers – the rich flutters of strings, the clatter of real percussion – with a whole host of 70s/80s synthesisers and reverberant electro-drums taking their

Interview: Aidan Baker (Nadja, Whisper Room, Infinite Light Ltd)

Let’s start with your latest solo effort, Still Lives. I’ve seen you refer to it as a bit of a departure from previous material – was it always the intention to try something a bit different? Well the most obvious difference is that there’s no guitar on it

Review: Pikacyu*Makoto - OM Sweet Home: We Are Shining Stars From Darkside

Makoto Kawabata and Pikacyu’s collaborative meeting point is some sort of astral playground: drums tumble and roll around phased guitar psychedelics, while vocals yelp and overlap on all sides. For an album comprised of just two players, things can get very busy, and the listener isn’t expected to

Review: Nate Wooley/Chris Corsano/C Spencer Yeh - 7 Storey Mountain

In the words of Nate Wooley (the project’s main creative force), the Seven Storey Mountain series uses “tape manipulation, long forms with simple written musical directions, (in) an attempt to reach some sort of musical ecstaticism”. Two excellent collaborators join him here: drummer Chris Corsano (who has worked alongside

Review: Offthesky - The Beautiful Nowhere

True to its title, The Beautiful Nowhere feels suspended above time and place. Melodies and textures meander through emptiness, nudged this way and that by soft electronic inflections and samples. Tracks close on abrupt fade-outs and anti-resolutions, providing brief snapshots of sonic states of limbo – purpose and significance feel forever

Review: Ellen Fullman - Through Glass Panes

Twenty years on from when she first crafted her “long string instrument” – dozens of 20-metre wires “bowed” with rosin-coated fingers – Ellen Fullman continues to re-assert her synonymy with it. I’ve been shamefully oblivious to her work up until this point (even her collaborations with the likes of Pauline Oliveros

Review: Seth Horvitz - Eight Studies For Automatic Piano

As I expected coming into this release, it’s unusual to hear such an expressive, vibrant instrument, traditionally most effective when channelling the fluid and natural playing style of its performer, turned into an automatic performance machine. Eight Studies… flits between moments that are seemingly within a human’s technical

Review: The Cosmic Dead - S/T

Steady drum rhythms, reverberant wah pedal guitar leads, outer-space synthesisers, and the fuzzy hum of monotonous basslines. The Cosmic Dead is a collection of instrumental psychedelic jams, and never is there any implication that the band desire to create anything but. On one hand, it’s not exactly an ambitious

Live: Eliane Radigue (L'île re-Sonante) @ St Stephen Walbrook, 25/06/11

For the past two weeks, Sound And Music has presented a two-week retrospective of the work of Eliane Radigue. St Stephen Walbrook church has showcased her electronic works over the last eight evenings, and tonight’s performance of “L’île re-Sonante” – the final piece Eliane composed on her once beloved

Review: Eliane Radigue - Transamorem Transmortem

Tying in nicely with a retrospective of her work over here in the UK, “Transamorem Transmortem” is a piece originally debuted in 1974, both as a sound installation and for conventional listening. It was written and performed before her initial contact with Tibetan Buddhism, but only just – as with all

Review: Ramesses - Chrome Pineal

It’s a pity that the longest of these new studio tracks is a dithering and dissatisfying nine-minute jam. A gradual build up is punctuated by a distorted “climax” that creates the mere mirage of progress and cathartic release – in fact, the piece comes to a close without having accomplished

Review: Winter - Into Darkness

It seems fitting that Into Darkness gets a re-release on Southern Lord – if you’re not sure why, opening instrumental “Oppression Freedom Oppression” should spell it out nicely for you. The slow-motion guitar chord changes, the tumbling snare fills, the dismal and spiralling atmospheric pads…Winter wouldn’t sound out

Review: Benjamin Finger - For You, Sleepsleeper

The music of Benjamin Finger is often like a mash of dissociated elements, torn from their original source and desperately trying to incorporate themselves in new pieces. Fragments of drumbeat enter at jarring tempos, melodies make wary ascensions on tenuous foundations of free-flowing harmonies, and the album works best when

Review: Kogumaza - S/T

Kogumaza is real “desert mirage” music – the soundtrack to trudging across endless sandy plains under an unrelenting sun, wearily succumbing to the hallucinations that form as shimmering washes of colour on the horizon. Sludgy guitars provide the propulsion, swirling in psychedelic loops and gradually mutating into different tonal shapes, while

Review: Richard Chartier - Transparency (Performance)

Transparency (Performance) feels like the most delicately crafted work. There’s a phenomenal sense of tension running through its entire one-hour duration, like the sonic equivalent of precariously assembling a sculpture from brittle glass – each note is perfectly placed and impeccably timed, as if a false move could send the

Review: Infinite Light, Ltd - S/T

A strange one, this. Rather than occupy the musical overlap between its collaborators, Infinite Light, Ltd is in a constant to-and-fro between styles – drifting into giant drone passageways, veering off into folky lo-fi guitar noodling, and stumbling into gentle, piano-lead melancholia. It’s not devoid of an identity exactly; it

Review: Oikos - Ecotono

“An ecotono, or ecotone, is a habitat created by the juxtaposition of distinctly different habitats; an edge habitat; or an ecological zone or boundary where two or more ecosystems meet. It is a transition area between two distinct habitats, where the ranges of the organisms in each bordering habitat overlap,

Interview: Alan Morse Davies

How long did it take to produce Svalbard? Not that long. Maybe three weeks. For me, a bad idea drags you down and requires increasingly large amounts of effort for less reward…a great idea flows fast and relatively effortlessly, generating its own ideas, spurs and sidelines as part of

Review: Psychomanteum - Oneironaut

The expansive dreamworlds of Oneironaut bare relation to those crafted by Robert Rich and Steve Roach, painting infinite horizons that flit between resembling earthly, desolate plains to depicting immersive stretches of outer space. Processed guitar and keyboards lie at the core, veiled somewhere beneath a cavernous reverb that turns their

Review: StrykninY - Shattered Forest

Much of Shattered Forest sounds like the aftermath of something terrible – lingering drones, echoes of demented voices – coming across as the gloomy sonic imprint left by whatever hideous, destructive occurrence dwelled in the soundscape previously. Activity is minimal, and the album’s impact derives from its implication – like the warped

Review: Seth Cluett - Objects Of Memory

The sense of cohesion throughout this release is strong. Despite being comprised of three studio pieces, an installation documentation and a live performance (and utilizing a fresh set of sound sources in the construction of each), all of these works arrive at the same atmospheric landscape: an anxious mix of

Review: A Dancing Beggar - Follow The Dark As If It Were Light

This album sounds engrossed in the very sadness it wishes to escape from. There’s a sense of utopian fantasy about James Simmons’ soundscapes – angelic glimmers of guitar and piano, arriving in the most gradual and caressive of tidal surges – yet they constantly feel on the verge of dissolve, threatened

Review: Alan Morse Davies - Svalbard

Svalbard is a three-hour album inspired by the Archipelago of the same name. It’s separated into three sections – “Land”, “Sky” and “Sea” – with the most noticeable constant being the giddying panorama of each of them. These are incredibly vast soundscapes, stretching off into the horizon and leaving the listener

Review: Gangpol & Mit - The 1000 Softcore Tourist People Club

My first listen to The 1000 Softcore Tourist People Club left me feeling bewildered and nostalgic in equal measure. Bewilderment came as a result of being plunged into a world so far removed from my expectations, and in fact, removed from reality itself – the world Gangpol & Mit occupy is

Review: Kyle Bobby Dunn - Ways of Meaning

There’s something about Ways Of Meaning that feels like a journey inwards. Preceding releases were far from devoid of the intimacy present here – it’s just that, whereas the emotional aspect of the music was previously the colour palette with which to paint luscious imaginary landscapes, this album sounds

Review: Bong - Beyond Ancient Space

It’s refreshing to hear a record so insistent on preserving a raw, collaborative energy in its production. Beyond Ancient Space was recorded with no overdubs and with minimal editing thereafter; any resultant lack of clarity is generously compensated by the life and immediacy retained within the band’s monotonous,

Review: Terra Tenebrosa - The Tunnels

Having never before heard Breach (ex-band of Terra Tenebrosa members), I was somewhat taken aback by the ferocity and obscurity of The Tunnels. While the album ultimately has metal at its core, it’s been merged with nightmarish textures and coated in grimy tar-black, with the end result adopting a

Live: Earth, Beak>, Sabbath Assembly @ London Scala, 12/04/11

This line-up seems to have been arranged so as to ease the audience into the bleak landscape of Earth, and opening act Sabbath Assembly are tonight’s most immediate and energetic offering. Unfortunately, the confidence and dynamism of front woman Jex leaves the rest of the band looking timid and

Review: Aidan Baker + Thisquietarmy - Orange

Initially, this one is difficult to grasp. It forever sounds unsettled, as if tugging itself in umpteen directions at once only to remain static – it’s full of internal activity but with no resultant forward motion, with drones and noises writhing anarchically into thick clouds of sound. It all feels

Review: Stephen Vitiello & Machinefabriek - Birds In A Box

Great concept behind this one. Vitiello and Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek) sent each other a box of “non-musical” objects to play with; the sounds of which have been twisted, processed and arranged into compositions. Central to Birds In A Box is that initial sense of curiosity and discovery – the first glance

Review: Enablers - Blown Realms And Stalled Explosions

There’s a sense of confidence and authority in the way in which Blown Realms… comes across. Enablers are proficient in their craft – the music gushes out of the instruments in mercurial waves, while Simonelli’s vocals drip beautifully over the top and start to slink in between. To say

Review: Mombi - The Wounded Beat

The Wounded Beat slots into its title nicely. Everything about this album feels on the precipice of collapse: vocals threaten to descend into inaudible whispers, melodies tread a fine line between fragility and forgettability, ambient layers look set to advance from their modest swirls around the back of the mix

Review: Current 93 - Honeysuckle Æons

Honeysuckle Æons immediately sets itself apart from Current 93’s recent trilogy of revelatory works (Black Ships Ate The Sky, Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain, Baalstorm; Sing Omega), abandoning the ambitious and heavily collaborative towers of sound and shutting itself away in a quieter, more introspective space. Sonically, the focus of

Review: The Winchester Club - Negative Liberty

The Winchester Club have arrived very late indeed. Negative Liberty pays a visit to the landscape roamed by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions In The Sky and Mono a good decade before – this is very much a “post rock” record, seemingly built around a checklist of the genre’s most

Interview: Federico Ágreda (Triangular Ascension)

Could you explain the concept behind Leviathan Device? Basically, the Leviathan Device is a fictional device that is bound to cleanse the land from all crawling beings with the force of water. It basically represents a way of apocalypse but with a positive point of view – a way to accept

Interview: Kyle Bobby Dunn

How long have you been working on the new record? Not very long. The recording process started last spring/summer. There are some themes on it that are re-workings of things that I was doing years and years ago – perhaps when I was 13 or 14. Is there any reason

Feature: Befriending Sound

In a space barely bigger than your average living room, Robert Curgenven and his audience of twenty sit surrounded by speakers in absolute pitch black. Robert himself is at the front, legs crossed, operating various Walkman CD players by light of a mobile phone, triggering drones and field recordings that

Review: Lento - Icon

Lento have changed in their four years away, and Icon sees them adopt a sharper, more intricate guise than before. The band dip into sludgy territory but don’t wallow in it, swapping frequently for staccato chug guitar or gloomy patches of quiet, with half of the album’s tracks

Preview: The Winchester Club - Negative Liberty

Negative Liberty is to be the second full-length from The Winchester Club – an instrumental outfit from London, whose gradual dynamic ascents and fizzing climaxes bring to mind the likes of Mono and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The album’s out on March 23rd, but here’s the title track for

Review: Aderlating - Spear of Gold and Seraphim Bone Pt 1

Anyone familiar with Gnaw Their Tongues will no doubt have strong expectations of what this may sound like, and it’s no surprise that Aderlating is comprised of the same gruesome, rotting core as Maurice De Jong’s main project. Just imagine his noise/black metal trademark caught within a

Review: Triangular Ascension - Leviathan Device

One can sense the narrative unfolding here without even reading about it. The album moves in very purposeful and provocative ways – the listener is taken places and left to witness events transpire, with sounds either adopting a forefront role in amongst the developing activity, or splashed across the music’s

Live: Michael Tanner, Delphic Vapors, Bob @ The Blue Boar in Poole, 01/03/11

Whereas the first two Houschka nights utilized rather stark contrasts in their line up, the third in the series felt slightly more fluid and themed. It’s not that the acts were particularly similar, but the night itself progressed very naturally – opening with the abstract guitar improv of Bob, dismantling

Review: Julianna Barwick - The Magic Place

Initial listens to The Magic Place brought to mind Grouper’s Liz Harris, whose vocal adopts a similar phantom ethereality. But while Grouper’s music feels rather murky and aquatic, channeling the haunts of placid night-time lakes, Julianna Barwick’s voice appears to soar between the beams of cathedrals and

Review: Outshine Family - Galeria De La Luz

No doubt Nicholson had grandiose intentions right from the start with this one. If it wasn’t enough to call upon 30 musicians across 12 different countries for previous release The Secret Miracle Fountain, over 80 musicians (including a full orchestra) were used to bring the vast and cinematic compositions

Review: Mari Kimura - The World Below G And Beyond

Many of these pieces showcase Kimura’s use of subharmonics: a bowing technique that can take the violin to a whole octave below its G string. It’s not difficult to tell at which points this is being utilized. The violin cuts into guttural whirrs that sound like some sort

Review: Aidan Baker - Lost In The Rat Maze

Last year’s Liminoid/Lifeforms was a solo record only by name. The music itself makes it the most openly collaborative Aidan Baker release I’ve heard, featuring eight guest musicians and granting them all rather prominent places within the recordings; there’s a sense of interaction and interdependence between

Review: The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble - From The Stairwell

“Stairwells have always been intriguing. They appear to unavoidably lead you to your destination, but they only disclose the path bit by bit. What lies far ahead of you and far beyond you is hidden in the shadows. The stairwell could just as well be infinite. You climb up this

Review: Tim Catlin & Machinefabriek - Patina

For their second collaboration, Tim Catlin and Rutger Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek) stick to the construction process established in their first outing – Catlin prepares recordings for guitar and sitar, and then sends them onto Zuydervelt to be sequenced, added to, processed, completed. It’s a method that tends to achieve very

Review: Gareth Hardwick - Sunday Afternoon

Sunday Afternoon carries all of the traits you might anticipate from a record with such a title – it’s tranquil, undemanding, modestly constructed, minimal in activity, bright and sanguine in mood. There’s a depth to explore here, but it’s not placed out of reach, and doesn’t make

Review: Akron/Family - S/T II: The Cosmic Birth And Journey Of Shinju TNT

For someone who prefers their music to be released by sun-shy, ultra-prolific recluses, Akron/Family is perhaps a bit too brash and playful for my tastes. So naturally I connected more with their music back in the days where they acted as backing band for Michael Gira’s Angels of

Live: Phill Niblock @ Cafe Oto, 17/02/11

Strangely, Phill Niblock wasn’t on stage for any of this performance. The man himself was sat at the back, hunched over his laptop next to the mixing desk, whilst the staff and students of Brunel University took audience focus – violinists, flautists, keyboard players, a vocalist, a cellist, a bassist

Review: Naisian - Mammalian

Whilst the influences behind Sheffield’s Naisian seem quite clear (Neurosis, Pelican, Russian Circles), the music never sounds over-indebted to any of them, and the band’s third release carries the strongest sense of unique identity thus far. Much of Mammalian expands on the ambient tinged post-metal of the self-titled

Review: If, Bwana - Assemble.Age!

For Assemble.Age!, both studio and live recordings have been chopped up and carefully reassembled. I can only imagine that the source material took on a more conventional form than the unpredictable sound collages present here; impressively though, Margolis seems to have preserved a sense of communication between the instruments,

Review: Stephan Mathieu - Remain

Whereas an album like Radioland was almost like staring down a kaleidoscope, with the same thematic sets of colours dissolving and re-appearing in different forms and locations, Remain is a composition of softer lights and more gradual transitions in state – the piece never really reaches a stage of blistering full-radiance,

Review: Ex-Easter Island Head - Mallet Guitars One

Recorded in the roof space of a neo-classical church by two performers and three horizontal electric guitars on stands, Mallet Guitars One is a record that explores the interaction of the instruments and the resulting resonance and overtones – rhythm is used as a basis on which to form a dancing,

Review: Belong - Common Era

“Come See” is a brilliant album opener. It’s essentially shoegaze executed exactly how it should be (in my eyes, anyway) – sounds bleeding into eachother, drums thudding as a muffled presence in the bellies of feedback giants, but a definite sense of melody and song structure hanging over the entire

Preview: Phill Niblock @ London Cafe Oto, 17/02/11

If Phill Niblock is ever posed the question of what his music sounds like, his stock response is “minimal microtonal drones”. Listening to his music you realize that technically, this three-word description actually covers it. Niblock’s music is as simplistic and raw as you might expect of a man

Review: Æthenor - En Form For Blå

Previous album Faking Gold and Murder had Æthenor fans split right down the middle, and the presence of prophetic Current 93 frontman David Tibet seems to be the most prominent reason for this. Personally I’m a fan of a lot of his work and found his vocal performance to

Review: Tholen - Neuropol

“Neuropol is the name of a fictional city where bleak scenarios of a post-apocalyptic world are painted. A society divided in two distinct classes populates this contaminated place, a lethargic mass of working slaves on the surface trapped in vast industrial landscapes and the elite underground, who direct their doings

Review: Luciano Maggiore + Francesco fuzz Brasini - Chàsm Achanés

Folk at the Boring Machines label have drawn comparisons with New York minimalist Phill Niblock when describing the sound of Chàsm Achanés. Harmonically you can hear where they’re coming from – low drones are pitched far enough apart to be distinguishable, but close enough together to grate and groan as

Review: Pan American - For Waiting, For Chasing

This was actually first put out on limited release in 2006. Credit to Kranky for picking it up again and pushing it to a wider audience – too much care and attention appears to have gone into the fantastic For Waiting, For Chasing for it to reside as a forgotten rarity.

Review: Martin A. Smith - Salt

Taking its primary inspiration from the striking expanse of the Camargue area in the South of France, Salt gradually pieces together a dynamic and intriguing landscape throughout its 14 compositions – whilst I’ve never visited the Camargue myself, I reach the end of Salt with some very distinctive mental visuals

Feature: Jack's Albums of 2010

Skullflower – Strange Keys To Untune Gods’ Firmament Although Strange Keys… is a brutal endurance test the first time round, subsequent listens are easier – what appears to be a faceless mass of white noise reveals itself to be a complex, tightly knit network of tremolo guitar shards and whistling feedback, alternating

Interview: BJ Nilsen

BJ Nilsen is a staple figure on the Touch Music roster. He has been crafting experimental music for over 20 years, making use of both field recordings and instruments. What are you doing in Iceland at the moment? I’m working on sound design for a new rendition of Shakespeare’

Review: Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972

With Ravedeath, 1972, Tim Hecker applies his “trademark” melodic progressions and heaps of studio tampering to a live recording taken in a church in Reykjavik. Pipe organ is the primary sound source, and whilst it fires an organic breath into his traditionally electronic soundworlds, it also leaves a contemplative funeral

Review: Jesu - Christmas

Ironically, what sounds like a hideous idea on paper has produced the strongest Jesu track since the release of Conqueror back in early 2007, and whilst it’s still a long way from the quality and promise demonstrated during the Self-Titled/Heart Ache golden age, it’s a vast improvement

Interview: Scott Kelly (Neurosis, Shrinebuilder)

Scott Kelly is one of the founding members of heavy music legends Neurosis, one quarter of “supergroup” Shrinebuilder (along with personnel from Sleep, Melvins and St Vitus), and an acoustic solo artist. [audio:/content/images/wordpress/2010/12/Scott-Kelly-Interview.mp3|titles=Scott Kelly Interview]

Review: Earth - Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I

With Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I, Earth venture further into the wilderness forged by the album Hex back in 2005 – images of desert mirages, desolate western ghost towns and vacated saloons – yet there’s a rigidity to the melody at work here that gives the album a sense

Review: Young Hunting - Attachment in a Child and the Subsequent Condition

Attachment in a Child and the Subsequent Condition comes accompanied by a written explanation of its concept and narrative. Young Hunting’s debut is revealed to delve into the relationship between mother and boy child, the evolution of this relationship, the progression of mental state as boy embarks on the

Review: Wooden Wand - Death Seat

This is the first Wooden Wand album to be released on the label of Swans’ Michael Gira – Young God records – and is blessed by the presence of the man himself in the producer’s chair. Needless to say, Gira is familiar with the process of expanding sing-songwriter pieces into grand

Interview: George Shilling

Working out of Bank Cottage, a lavishly equipped home studio tucked away in the Cotwolds, George Shilling is a record producer and recording engineer with an extensive list of claims to fame, including work with Primal Scream, Blur, Teenage Fanclub, Marc Almond and Yazz. Have you always wanted to put

Review: Marco Panella - Eastern Landscapes

My first spin of this album came on a sleepy evening journey back home, slumped against a coach window and wearily watching car headlights whizz past through the pitch black. I haven’t found a more appropriate listening environment since. It’s a record of beautiful flow, with guitar finger-picking

Review: 33 - Demo

It hasn’t been a bad start for Welsh hardcore outfit 33. In the past few months, the band have solidified a line-up, recorded eight tracks and confirmed a short touring stint alongside the likes of Black Breath and Gallows. These two demo tracks mark the first opportunity to hear

Review: Deathspell Omega - Paracletus

In several aspects, Paracletus isn’t the album I anticipated. I’m sure I’m amongst many who thought the band might intensify the more chaotic moments of Fas and drag them out into breathless tests of listener endurance, and whilst the album is littered with sections that blur blast-beats

Review: Brian McBride - The Effective Disconnect

The Effective Disconnect was originally intended as a soundtrack for The Vanishing Of The Bees – a documentary about the decline of the honey bee and its staggering implications. However, the album ended up taking a more sorrowful route than was perhaps appropriate, and many of the pieces in this selection

Live: Supersonic Festival 2010 @ Birmingham Custard Factory, 22-24/10/10

FRIDAY Demons (featuring Nate Young of Wolf Eyes) sounded fierce but a little uneasy in their early stages, but managed to themselves into a spitting and crackling beast in time for a formidable second half, with ominous white noise surges bringing round a delightfully violent collapse. Devilman fared much better

Review: The Psychogeographical Commission - Patient Zero

“We set about creating music which blurs the line between the real and imagined landscapes in order to allow individuals to revaluate their own mythologies and provide new ideas to bring them closer to harmony with their urban surroundings.” This is the Psychogeographical Commission. Whilst this may appear to be

Review: Deathspell Omega - Devouring Famine

Where will Deathspell Omega go from here? Upon its release in 2007, Fas blew a lot of people away (not to mention the countless commendable contenders for metal album of the year), but did leave fans with stupendous expectations for the material to come. Anyone familiar with the band’s

Review: Sailors With Wax Wings – S/T

I’m a little confused as to why I’ve only recently heard about this one. Sailors With Wax Wings is the brand new project of Pyramids’ R. Loren, accompanied by a line-up that sounds as though it was crafted for me personally – Ted Parsons (Swans, Godflesh, Jesu), Aidan Baker

Review: Lower Dens - The Twin Hand Movement

The Twin Hand Movement is just the record I needed in my bleary, under-slept state this morning. Each of these eleven tracks glides with a dreamy, seamless momentum, with 4/4 beats in mindless but functional loop, and ghostly guitars wafting in delicate billows of melody. It’s a pop

Review: RST - The Sunset Limited

Guitars ooze out in sweltering mirage haze. A sub-bass hum lingers like an ominous echo of the pre-apocalypse. The Sunset Limited manages to carry a very vivid atmosphere with a deceptively simple set-up – only a mere handful of textures are used to create the album’s barren visuals, with drones

Interview: William Bennett (Cut Hands, Whitehouse)

Could you explain the concept behind Cut Hands and Afro Noise? It’s been obvious for a over a decade and a half my fascination with African (and Haitian for that matter), especially in terms of the music, language, and art – the inspiration has been utterly invaluable, and my plan

Preview: Supersonic Festival 2010

I purchased my weekend ticket for this year’s festival following the announcement of the first act confirmed. To be honest, I was happy enough paying £75 for the pleasure of seeing the re-ignited Swans in action anyway, but imagine my delight when a ton of my favourite bands started

Review: Hildur Guðnadóttir - Mount A

This is actually the first solo work by Hildur Guðnadóttir, re-mastered and re-released on Touch Music. And it really is a solo work – Hildur has said that she has tried to avoid the involvement of other people as much as possible, which is probably part of the reason Mount A

Review: James Blackshaw - All Is Falling

I have to confess that All Is Falling is the first James Blackshaw release I’ve listened to. I was aware that his name appears on the stellar roster over at Young God Records, and that he contributed guitar work to Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain and Baalstorm, Sing Omega by

Review: Pale Sketcher - Pale Sketches Demixed

Is it me who’s losing connection with Justin Broadrick’s recent music, or is it a case of Broadrick himself losing touch? I feel as though his big mistake was allowing synthesised textures to seep under the skin of his Jesu project – his music began to feel increasingly vacuous

Review: Kyle Bobby Dunn - Rural Route No. 2

After being impressed no end by the double-disc collection of A Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn, I was intrigued to see how his music would work within a 20-minute EP. Thankfully, it doesn’t feel restricted or cut short by its duration, and somehow manages to sink

Review: Gareth Hardwick - Of the Sea and Shore

Of the Sea and Shore is summed up nicely by the dreary, dilapidated boat that sits stranded and neglected on the album cover. Directly influenced by the to-and-fro of the tides at various points on the UK coast, this third album from Nottingham-based Gareth Hardwick is a solid display of

Interview: Michael Gira (Swans)

I wanted to start by saying that the new album is fantastic. I get the impression these songs are more “jammed out” and left to evolve on their own accord. Was that deliberate? Indeed. Well I wrote the songs over the course of the last two or three years. I

Review: Steve Roach - Sigh of Ages

Sigh of Ages often conjures a sound that I tend to attribute to Roach’s earlier efforts – in particular, the first two tracks are more straight-forward and dissectible than a large bulk of his recent material. It’s the bare sound of synthesisers, with each layer working in unison and

Review: Matt Stevens - Ghost

Matt Stevens not only stands as an accomplished guitarist and composer, but also a cracking example for anyone looking to bring an admirable listenership to their own DIY projects. Alongside his frequent live performances across the UK, Matt has promoted his work via blogs, websites and podcasts – not to mention

Interview: Simon Lomax

So your “Council of Nine” label is back up again. It is indeed, yeah – after what feels like a very long break actually. Would you take me through what’s been happening in this break? Where to start! I’m one of the co-developers of a specialized music teaching system

Review: Swans – My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky

ARTWORK BY BEATRICE PEDICONI It is with a severe level of excitement that I present my review of the new Swans LP – My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. Incredibly, it’s been 14 years since the release of the last full-length. Soundtracks for the Blind

Review: Boduf Songs - This Alone Above All Else in Spite of Everything

This Alone Above All Else in Spite of Everything is the fourth album by Matthew Sweet’s Boduf Songs project. Although this is my first exposure to his music, I get the impression that it’s a solo project in the truest sense – a sonic reflection of its creator and

Interview: Matthew Cooper (Eluvium)

First of all – how are you? Very well thank you. Enjoying the Cascadia summer. How did you find the US/Canada tour? Being my first headlining full tour, it was really wonderful to see so many people coming out specifically for Eluvium. It was a great success, though admittedly very

Interview: Magnus Birgersson (Solar Fields)

First of all – how are you? I’m very good, just back home in Sweden after a trip to France. Been in the alps to play at the Hadra Festival. Also went to Lyon to finalizing the mastering of my new album [ Altered ] – Second Movements. What are you working on

Live: Oren Ambarchi, Philip Jeck, Elite Barbarian @ Corsica Studios, 01/07/10

The two-man outfit of Elite Barbarian combined bass guitar, synths and electronic beats to good effect to kick off the night at Corsica Studios. Their first piece was undoubtedly the strongest, with the bass processed into some sort of erratic wavering buzz saw that lurched over three simple chords, gathering

Review: Autechre – Move of Ten

Yep, another Autechre release already – with listeners still in the process of digesting March’s Oversteps, Move of Ten arrives as a surprise companion EP with ten fresh tracks. Personally I’ve struggled to tap into their soundworld on the recent batch of releases; although the restless, jittering electronics of

Review: Godflesh - Streetcleaner (Re-mastered)

This is far from a lazy cash-in from Justin Broadrick, even if it does tie in neatly with his decision to re-ignite Godflesh after eight years. Streetcleaner never got the production it really deserved. Whilst not necessarily the finest Godflesh release (in my opinion, anyway), it’s arguably the one

Interview: All Time Low Productions

The pairing of Oren Ambarchi and Philip Jeck at Corsica studios is bound to be a special one. Both artists share an intense interest in crafting and manipulating timbre and sound sources, yet contrast drastically in their means and end result; Ambarchi working within the purity of resonant bass tones

Review: Male – German For Shark

German For Shark passed as a big beautiful blur on first listen. Discounting the selection of remixes at the end it’s actually quite a brief release, with big blocks of sound surging forth and fading into one another without too much pause for breath between each piece. The result

Live: Quadratura Interpret "The Monotone Symphony" by Yves Klein @ GV Art, 01/03/2010

“This symphony…consisted of one unique continuous “sound,” drawn out and deprived of its beginning and of its end, creating a feeling of vertigo and of aspiration outside of time. Thus, even in its presence, this symphony does not exist. It exists outside of the phenomenology of time because it

Retrospective: Isis (1997 - 2010)

CELESTIAL (2000) I can only imagine how exciting Celestial must be for those oblivious to Isis’ existence. It’s a ferocious record. Even for someone such as myself, who was already familiar with a fair amount of the band’s material prior to hearing it, the first listen was a

Review: Current 93 - Baalstorm, Sing Omega

Despite only one year lying between Baalstorm, Sing Omega and its predecessor Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain, there’s a drastic difference in the sound of both albums. Aleph… was an angry record, centred on harsh guitar stabs and razorblade leads – a very deliberate texture overload accompanied by an appropriately aggressive

Review: Christopher Hipgrave - Slow, with Pages of Fluttering Interference

Slow, with Pages of Fluttering Interference is a release based around subtlety – everything from the casual drift of the music to the vagueness of the track-titles (with the tracks themselves slipping into one another with a soft fluidity). This latest release from Christopher Hipgrave doesn’t exist as a statement

Review: Ufomammut - Eve

Ufomammut are at their best when they’re really rocking out – when riffs, spoken word passages and grinding noise all erupt at once, guided by the effortless manner of a band now with ten years behind them. There’s a hefty amount of build-up on this record (with eight-minute stretches

Review: Yellow Swans - Going Places

The announcement came in 2008 that Yellow Swans were to break up after their next release. Despite the fact that both members are to continue to produce new material under different projects, it must have been strange for the Portland-based noise act to compose Going Places in the knowledge that

Review: Skullflower/White Medal - Split

The Skullflower contribution to this split won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Matthew Bower’s recent output. “Great Hunter” is streams upon streams of noise, shouting down a crackling melody that just barely scrapes the surface of audibility – kind of like someone taking a dirty, bludgeoning

Review: Baby Dee - A Book Of Songs For Anne Marie

A Book of Songs for Anne Marie isn’t technically a new album – the more avid of Dee fans may have even owned a copy of this from as early as 2004 when it was first issued on David Tibet’s Durtro label. However, this initial release was limited to

Review: Gultskra Artikler - Galaktika

I think the fact that I knew so little about Gultskra Artikler prior to hearing this release contributed heavily to my enjoyment of it. Galaktika seems to work best when free from any prior knowledge of its conception or its creator, turning the whole experience into an intrepid exploration without

Review: Deftones - Diamond Eyes

On several occasions I have heard Deftones speak of how the speed in which Diamond Eyes came together is core to its strength – an epiphanous stream of creativity much akin to the way in which their Around the Fur album was produced, which was written and recorded in a mere

Review: Disappears - Lux

It’s the steady tom drum plod of “Little Ghost” that really stuck out for me on first listen. The one-chord verse nudged along by a rattling tremolo, the brilliant vocal baritone murmuring over the top…each element is in a gorgeously triumphant locomotive march, a steady and formidable rhythm

Review: Spartak - Verona

Recorded in just two days, Verona is the music of impulse – of sporadic ideas without the relentless tweaking and perfecting of retrospect, unleashed and recorded and left relatively untouched. That considered it’s surprising how cohesive and well structured this album is, clearly existing as a celebration of putting faith

Review: Aidan Baker - Liminoid/Lifeforms

I’m beginning to think that Aidan Baker’s solo material is where his most expressive and compelling work lies. His Nadja project is tied to a trademark sound (that distinctive planetarium of fuzz and carefully woven ambient layering), whilst his music under “Aidan Baker” provides a canvas for anything

Review: Kyle Bobby Dunn - A Young Person's Guide To...

A Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn seems to channel noise and reverberations that have always existed. So natural is the way in which these sounds throb and mutate that it’s hard to imagine any human thought lying behind the composition. It’s a double disc which,

Interview: Gavin Bryars

Gavin Bryars is a composer living in Leicestershire, England and British Columbia in Canada. [audio:/content/images/wordpress/2010/02/gavin-bryars.mp3|titles=gavin bryars]

Interview: Keith Kenniff

First of all. How are you? I’m quite well, thank you. Yourself? Fine thanks. I’ve been listening repeatedly to your new song, “Inherit The Wind”. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Was the song inspired by the accompanying video, or vice versa? Thank you! I had done the video a

Review: Ken Camden - Lethargy & Repercussion

Central to the appeal of Ken Camden’s debut album is the fact that, with the exception of the last track, it was recorded without overdubs. This real-time aspect of Lethargy & Repercussion gives the record a sense of vibrancy and intimacy – you can visualize the recording process, how elements

Review: Skullflower - Strange Keys To Untune Gods' Firmament

Place this release alongside earlier Skullflower works such as “Last Shot at Heaven” (put out seventeen years before) and it really puts it in perspective how the project has developed. Certain elements have remained – the discordant whistle of guitar drones, the bleak, black atmosphere – but somewhere along the line the

Review: Michael Gira - I Am Not Insane

“SWANS ARE NOT DEAD”. This is what was displayed on the Swans’ official myspace page last month. What an exciting little announcement it was. Better still was the further news that a new album was in the works, and that frontman Michael Gira was to release I Am Not Insane

Review: BJ Nilsen - The Invisible City

The Invisible City feels like a dynamic, fully-functioning landscape. It’s only at the end of the album that you finally comprehend the city as a whole – the vibe of its various caverns and open spaces, the mechanized industrial routine that dominates its day-to-day. It’s a place with an

Live: Sunn O))) + Om @ London Koko, 14/12/09

Although I’ve never previously been let down by live performances by either Sunn O))) or Om, I knew that this gig presented a bit of a challenge for both. With their respective latest albums featuring an ambitious array of instruments and slight shift in compositional direction, how would each

Interview: David Tibet

David Tibet has been creating music under Current 93 for over 25 years. His music is overwhelmingly diverse and unpredictable, with his compelling lyrical imagery and vocal delivery the only real constant between each release. I spoke to David about his ideology, compositional approach and Current’s recent showing at

Review: Pyramids With Nadja - S/T

For the first 15-minutes or so, “Pyramids with Nadja” – a collaboration between two mammoth names in the whole “heavy shoegaze” movement – sounds as you might expect it to. It’s the infinitely expansive sound of the universe being swallowed whole. The melodies crackle out of Nadja’s trademark distortion as

Review: KK Null - Oxygen Flash

It’s the first listen of Oxygen Flash that stays with you. That first sense of dizziness and disorientation as whirrs and pulses ping back and forth and back again, the genuine unease over what sonic environment you’ll be plunged into next, and the overwhelming awe over how the

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