Juno Recommends Experimental: October 2022

Review: FKA Twigs' latest LP 'Caprisongs', widely known as her poptimist opus (contrasting to her earlier experiments) now gets a luminous vinyl pressing via Young. It does well to justify her reinvention after breaking up with a disgraced actor whose name we shan't name: the album is a colossal collaborative affair, and even come with a carnivalesque duet with pop king The Weeknd ('Tears In The Club'). The melodic abandon that follows is just as apt.

Review: "Another Bjork album?!" cry the naysayers. But little do they know they've been duped into thinking the Icelandic legend's last full-length, Utopia, was a recent affair. Actually, it's already been a good five years since the singer's flowery flabbergaster, and collab with experimentalists Arca and Doon Kanda, came to be. Fossora, by contrast, is a much more mournful LP: it's a meditation on generations, and was in part inspired by the death of Bjork's mother. It also contains collaborations with her two children, Sindri and isadora. A homelier affair, revisiting Bjork's upbringing in Iceland, on which she hadn't reflected on record since she was 16.

Review: Cherrystones returns with the second of the "Aged" EPs for Emotional Response. Time propels and so does sound, thus orbiting nuances and motion leads us here, to present whatever maybe or interpreted as. Since the acclaimed Aged Of Bronze EP a symbiotic progress of craft arrives in the aptly titled Aged Of Silver. Again each track is like a coded syntax, unlocking the puzzle to aid a listeners journey and experience, building blocks to a utopian scape in form without form notes and pictures living and residing in the dimensions.

Never pandering to trends, his art based on immediacy and the moment, no disposable sub genres that fade as fast as they emerge, transposing and emitting heard and unheard a way to communicate with himself and those that identify.

A capsule of touched emotions bearing gifts for those in the present and wishing to be present, a key with keys analogue for Silver Tongues and Brass monkeys living in the shadow of a Scorpian's Tail.

Review: The guaranteed quality stamp of Low Company will be much-missed when it's gone, and they present the debut solo album by Yuta Matsumura as one of their final releases before calling time. It's as strikingly original and easy to love as you might hope, centered around piano, bass and flute, and with a warm dub embellishment filling in the gaps. At times you can hear the avant-pop 80s stylings of Talk Talk, The The et al hovering around the edges of these songs, in which Matsumura pointedly moved away from the guitar-oriented work of his bands Low Life, M.O.B and Orion. It's slightly dreamy, but also rather acerbic in its tone, certainly not akin to most of the pop readily associated with Japan. It's intimate and fragile like a bedroom production, but sounds too vivid to be minimal wave, and it might just be one of the best records you hear this year.

Review: Deathprod is Norwegian experimental electronic musician Helge Sten, and for this project, he was granted use of a wealth of custom-made and specialised instruments that were dreamt up and manifested by seminal avant-garde composer Harry Partch. The instruments work in orchestra and are all tuned to just intonation. Where standard intervals are 12, this collective used up to 43 intervals. So, Sow Your Gold in the White Foliated Earth was written specifically to be used on this unusual setup and it sure gives rise to a magnificently one-off album of ambient.

Review: Seoul duo Salamanda are at the top of their game, having remained on the lips of every new music punter, PR person, and label head for a good few years now. A few LPs, all so far on tape and CD, enmeshed them as a DIY favourite; their third official album 'Ashbalkum', though, defies all tapey preconceptions. Intended as a respite from impending apocalypse, their palette weaves and hisses through serpentine electronic sonics, synthetic marimba, dubbily resampled voices and humid hums. The result is a concept album that aims to convey the idea that life is a dream - such is the meaning behind the Korean origin of the word 'ashbalkum'.

Review: Born in the midst of World War II in Providence, Rhode Island, Alvin Curran was blessed to grow up in one of the most fertile periods for electronic composition, and has worked since some of the earliest days of synthesised sound art, through to today's hyper-advanced age. During that time he has, unsurprisingly, put out more albums and pieces than we could possibly hope to count, this being the most recent.

A collection of work constructed between 2018 and 2021, Drumming Up Trouble certainly lives up to the name. Percussion takes centre stage, especially on tracks like 'Bay Area 1', which feels like an abstract bridge between glitch, juke and d&b, and 'Rollings', a tune pretty much entirely built from snare rolls distorted and manipulated. Elsewhere, 'End Zone' marries distant knocks with a bleeped refrain invoking fears of tinnitus, while 'Bay Area 2' is a cut and paste response to its predecessor, ripping vocal samples apart to create something chaotic but groovy.

Review: There is no one quite like Bjork. The idiosyncratic Icelandic singer's tenth studio album Fossora makes that case once more across four sides of experimental sounds written during and after the pandemic lockdowns. The death of the artist's mother also played a part in colouring the mood of the music, not least 'Sorrowful Soil' and 'Ancestress'. Initially, Bjork thought this was going to be a concept album based around the clarinet and then broadened it to be an "'Iceland album" which is about her return to earth following the skyward mood of her last, Utopia. Bjork's two children Sindri and isadora contribute along with bass clarinet sextet Murmuri.