rescuing musical virtue in distress.
I'm in a corridor in an experimental situationist arts centre somewhere in Northern Europe and Blurt are playing in a room to my left and Gong are playing in a room to my right. What should I do? Easy. Stay right where I am and listen to Paar Linien. This is the happiest I've ever... Continue Reading →
Inspiration comes from many diverse places and this is certainly never truer than when it comes to making music. The starting point for a song can range from a simple pang of love or a sunny day to the deepest personal reflections or secret wisdom found in ancient teachings. It is to the latter, the... Continue Reading →
Both as a solo composer and as frontman of the gloriously experimental The Academy of Sun, Nick Hudson has been responsible for some gorgeous and creative, not to mention gorgeously creative, music. Some of it has pushed the boundaries of what alternative rock can be, at other times it has taken more graceful and ornate... Continue Reading →
I'm always intrigued when you read a list of artist's influences and inspirations and not one of them lies within what you would call the mainstream for modern music. Whilst so many artists are looking to tried and tested templates from Oasis to Taylor Swift to Drake to emulate, Fredo Viola follows more in the... Continue Reading →
And there was I thinking that it was only Grasslands that combined a love of making exploratory and innovative music with a real-life career in ecology and the environment. You have to admit that it is a pretty small cross-over point on any Venn Diagram that you care to create. But Gilles Poizat lives a... Continue Reading →
If you are one of those people who thinks that classical music lives only in the past, that world music is found primarily in the far-flung corners of the world, that electronic music is the bastion of the dance music set, then you need a bit of Alex Stolze in your life. But creating music... Continue Reading →
Life is at its most fulfilling when it is challenging. It needs to be full of the unexpected and the new. Of wonder and possibility. It needs to take us to new places and allow us to see the world in different ways. And the same is true of music, music that matters at least.... Continue Reading →
Never rely on genres. They always let you down. I should imagine that ten different journalists writing about Arhkota's strange and beguiling new single would label it with ten completely different generic soundbites. And even then, none of those would accurately capture the broken, classical grace, the oriental vibe, the blending of ambience with abrasion,... Continue Reading →
If you think of the bass guitar being used as a lead instrument, then the chances are that your mind conjures the sound of over the top solos and bombastic grooves. Essentially, most people who have fallen into such a category in the past have always tried to force four strings through a six-string prism... Continue Reading →
Sometimes it is the simplest and the oddest things which are the difference between giving an album a spin and leaving it unexplored, especially given the majestic and dangerously unstable stack of CDs found on my desk. But as soon as I saw the phrase "Italy's ayatollah-core trio," I knew that I needed to check it out.... Continue Reading →
I’m not saying that he makes a conscious effort to do so but Simon McCorry’s music does raise the question of where the border lies between music and what lies beyond. Of course, there is no real answer to that and Nature in Nature is as musical and relevant…perhaps even more so, than the pop... Continue Reading →
Woah! This is certainly a track which gets right down to business. No softening up, no gentle easing in, just a sonic salvo powerful enough to knock you across the room. Still, if you are going to make a fast, first impression, why not just come out swinging? And that is exactly what happens on... Continue Reading →
You know when you are searching out music on the internet, you open a few too many windows and you end up with two tracks playing at the same time due to some automated bot triggering a tune. The Internal Conflict sounds a bit like that at times. But rather than making for a series... Continue Reading →
If you are one of those people who like your music neatly boxed and labelled with appropriate names and sonic demarkations, to fit neatly into existing genres or sound like what has gone before, then you should avoid this two-track offering (what we used to call a single, kids) from Unspeakable Vehicle. In fact, stop... Continue Reading →
With a lot of artists, it is easy to set the scene before heading off into a the rabbit hole of writing a review. So many seem to have a definite direction of travel or a style or sound which is easy to sum up in a few short soundbites. But where do you start... Continue Reading →
When you write about music for a living, you tend to be able to get a handle on most things. You have either heard something like it before, or can see some of the joins between this genre and that style, perhaps you can even hazard a guess at what might be in the artists... Continue Reading →
Titles can tell you a lot about music. Not so much what that music might sound like but it does suggest something about the way the artist behind it thinks. Anyone who capitalises their title and introduces unnecessary spacing, writes track names in lowercasewithnospacing, removes vowels from a ttl or uses one title to reference... Continue Reading →
Get Your Shit Together is like little that you have heard before. Well, it’s like little I have heard before and I basically listen to music for a living. I guess the clues where there to see in the track titles. What does Observation of Obfuscation really mean? Is it actually possible to have a... Continue Reading →
A few months ago I reviewed an album by STANLÆY called The Human Project, it was more of an art piece in that it took in performance art, videography and the ‘album’ was merely the soundtrack to this piece. It was strange, unnerving and unlike anything I had heard before, so with eager ears I was... Continue Reading →
Rules are made to be broken. We all know that. To some that is a worn-out cliche, to others it is a way of life. Rule breaking for the sake of it is fine if you want to head off down some belligerent, non-conformist, punky-rant route, but rule breaking with a purpose is where it... Continue Reading →
If the idea of a post-genre world is one that is now widely embraced by modern music makers, some artists, Cellista certainly being one of them, have gone much further, even bluring the lines between the various artistic disciplines themselves. And if the recent Transfigurations album painted this idea across a wide canvass, current single,... Continue Reading →
No Regrets is an exercise in atmosphere and anticipation. There is an art to the slow burn and the pay off, that long smouldering musical journey which at any moment feels like it is about to burst into life, break the tension, deliver the goods. This takes that one stage further slowly building in... Continue Reading →
It’s a brave choice to turn your back on the traditional structure we find in most albums, the well-trodden path of verse, verse, chorus, verse is tried and tested but what Oxford-based musician Sebastian Reynolds has done on his follow up to his 2017 release (sensibly titled Solo Collective part one) is present the listener... Continue Reading →
When you think of albums based around one instrument, you might immediately think of a guitar or piano, both of these instruments have a full range of notes at their disposal, tonal differences between bass and treble and with the added technology you can simply plug in, in the form of synthesizers and a library... Continue Reading →
The good thing about being introduced to independent artists is that the music you hear is, more often than not, is the music they want to play, before producers add commercially-friendly touches and long before managers talk of shifting units, the music is written and played without the worry of losing fans or losing recording deals.... Continue Reading →
Music as an art form has been slowly diminishing in favour of the search for the next global hit, especially one that equates into massive download numbers. Songs aimed at the teenage market have always dominated the music scene, it’s the bread and butter for the marketing men and producers and goes a long way... Continue Reading →
It seems that everything about this album is designed to confuse and confound expectations. The duo’s chosen name suggests that it should perhaps be found in the rock or metal section of the music shop, the cover is wilfully non-committal but sort of leans towards the anti-cool stance of 90’s alternative bands. But the fact... Continue Reading →
When music is stripped down to its raw ingredients, you tend to end up with the word sound. Once you have a sound you can add pitch, rhythm and tempo and you have something that can be called music. If you’re feeling even braver you can bring in structure, maybe a melody and you’ve got... Continue Reading →
Pas Musique seem to revel in confusion, in a good way of course. Even within their chosen electro-industrial sphere they seem more mercurial, more wilfully tricksy, more difficult to grasp than their contemporaries and you have to look back to the early art-attacks of the likes of Throbbing Gristle to find their parallel. The Phoenix... Continue Reading →
Well, that’s just plain silly. Or perhaps it is a stroke of genius. After all the two are often the same thing and shift from one to the other only depending on how you look at them. It’s probably something to do with Heisenberg’s Uncertainly Principle…well, it all feels a bit quantum to me anyhow.... Continue Reading →