Matana Roberts. Coin Coin Chapter Three: River Run Thee. The third instalment of Matana Roberts’ Coin Coin presents an utterly overwhelming listening experience—a densely netted mass of images, information, and deeply visceral sensations, so profusely intelligible that it becomes opaque with stimuli.   Where the[...] Read more

Recordings Nick Storring Issue 121

Howlround. Torridon Gate. The title of Howlround’s third and reassuringly unheimlich album takes its name from a gate that really exists. It’s on a road in Hither Green, a suburb that was laid out for an expanding London at the end of the nineteenth century as an ideal home for hard-working commuters who[...] Read more

Recordings Louise Gray Issue 121

DJ Sniff. Incredulous Cuts—Reinterpretations of the Doubtmusic Catalogue. On Incredulous Cuts, DJ Sniff finds the hidden connections between the chirrup of the hip-hop needle-scratch and the squawk of the free-jazz horn blast. Also known as Takuro Mizuta Lippit, the Japanese-born, Hong Kong-based former artistic director of STEIM in Amsterdam (from 2007 to 2012),[...] Read more

Recordings Jonathan Bunce Issue 121

Xavier Charles. 12 Clarinets in a Fridge. This music is less rarified and warmer sounding than the CD title indicates, as French clarinettist Xavier Charles mixes mutated reed timbres and aleatoric slabs of musique concrète to craft five highly distinctive improvisations. Despite what it might seem like, Charles—who is[...] Read more

Recordings Ken Waxman Issue 121

Send + Receive: A Festival of Sound, 16. Send + Receive (s+r), a sound-art showcase held annually in Winnipeg, is curated around a different theme each year. Its acknowledged aims are to highlight the contributions of women to sound art, to develop an audience for emerging local artists, and to utilize different venues from one[...] Read more

Concerts and Events Daniel Emberg Issue 121

Plumes Ensemble. Folk Songs and Future Loves. Being both a guitar-based indie-pop band and a modern chamber ensemble, Plumes Ensemble (or Plumes) is a group with a split personality. Based in Montreal and Paris, the ensemble makes a mighty effort to reconcile these seeming opposites with its latest recording, Folk Songs and Future Loves[...] Read more

Recordings Jonathan Bunce

Nick Storring. Gardens. We think of gardens as something we make. You start a garden and tend to it. It is yours. But the garden has most likely been there for a very long time. You just mould it to your own purposes. If you ask a rosebush how long it has been there, it won’t know what you’re talking[...] Read more

Recordings Kurt Gottschalk

Chris Strickland. Animal Expert. Animal Expert unfolds through an elegantly opaque, almost inscrutable logic—one which gradually overpowers, rather than satisfies, one’s desire for an audible syntax. Distinct, indelible impressions begin to form: the odours and dimensions of a particular space, the feeling of[...] Read more

Recordings Nick Storring

Bob Gilmore. Claude Vivier: A Composer’s Life. Both the music and the life of Canadian composer Claude Vivier, who was murdered in Paris in 1983, are fraught with mystery.   Mystery surrounds his birth and death. He never knew his biological parents, and was raised in a foster family. After his violent death, a score was[...] Read more

Books René van Peer Issue 120

Ian William Craig. A Turn Of Breath. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, there was a palpable enthusiasm for experimentation among various musicians who had been lumped together under banners like gothic or ethereal. In addition to austere post-punk and maudlin glam-posturing, this multifarious category also encompassed[...] Read more

Recordings Nick Storring Issue 120

Avec Le Soleil Sortant De Sa Bouche. Zubberdust! Zubberdust! blasts off with whimsical punk-rock exuberance into a patchwork quilt of insistent interlocking grooves, fluorescent panels of synthesizer, and various could’ve-been aural hallucinations. Both hypnotic and jagged, the music of Avec Le Soleil Sortant De Sa Bouche transfixes[...] Read more

Review Spotlight Nick Storring