Recital US Vinyl & CDs

Review: Allan Gilbert Balon's debut full-length album, The Magnesia Suite, released by Recital, is a mesmerising and enigmatic work that fuses avant-garde jazz, experimental sound collage and intimate vocal experiments. A Guadeloupe-born composer and visual artist, Balon brings a deeply personal and cryptic narrative to this album, weaving together disparate sonic elements into a beguiling and surreal journey. Opening with 'Stella Maris', the album immediately wrongfoots the listener, blending organ drones and twisted chorals that evoke a subversive take on sacred music. Tracks like 'Lustras' introduce grotty tape recordings, shortwave transmissions, and Balon's slow-motion piano playing, creating a bizarre yet haunting sense of prayer. This patchwork approach, full of field recordings and mysterious sounds, captures a feeling of coastal tranquility and exploratory reverence. The standout track, 'Pleuro Delez Waltz', which initially caught Recital's attention, blends Balon's idiosyncratic piano style with disorienting wails and unconventional percussion. The album concludes with 'Ogadia', where ragtime-influenced piano meets distant saxophone, resolving the outsider-jazz soundscape. The Magnesia Suite is an album of surprising juxtapositions and textures.

Review: Vittoria Totale is a genuinely unique creative: a self-styled 'independent curator, language researcher and writer' who divides her time between stints in London, Berlin and Rome. Solo Voice, her debut album, is a similarly unusual proposition - a collection of written and improvised 'sound poetry' that alternates between impactfully recited poems, layered vocal experiments (see 'Sometimes', where Totale cuts and pastes phrases, the effects-laden poetic collage that is 'The Messenger Messes With The Masses', the vocalisations and spoken phrases of 'Text Me Next', and the Steve Reich-esque 'Bitte'). With Totale variously musing on sexuality, fantasy, life in the city and much more, it's an intriguing and ultimately fascinating listen.