Recordings
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Sarah Peebles. Delicate Paths. The thin, luminous sound of the shô, a Japanese mouth organ, is very particular and very beautiful—presenting a pleasant and impossibly clear glassy tonal surface. Sarah Peebles’ new shô-centred disc Delicate Paths demonstrates a thorough, painterly understanding of[...] Read more
Jaap Blonk Ever since his performances of classic Dada sound poetry in the late ’70s, Dutch performer–composer Jaap Blonk has been a prolific explorer of the limits of oral sound. He has developed an extensive body of work centred around his own vocal invention and innovation, frequently[...] Read more
Adrian Verdejo. Modern Hearts. Recordings of new music for electric guitar are rare. Solo efforts in that field are rarer still. And albums that fully exploit the sonic capabilities of the instrument are practically unheard of, thus making Adrian Verdejo’s Modern Hearts almost a public service—at least for[...] Read more
Jocelyn Morlock. Cobalt. Cobalt, Jocelyn Morlock tells us, is one of the most poisonous elements, but it’s hard to imagine anyone dying of exposure to this Vancouver-based composer’s music—unless it was from a surfeit of beauty. Her strongest pieces can be described in a single word: numinous;[...] Read more
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