Aboutface: Small Hands & Feet In The Sand Show You The Great Illusion (feat Taro) (7:54)
Aboutface: Coutata Couyata Save Couyata (feat Taro) (13:01)
Aboutface: We Flee Whilst The Wild Smoking Horses Swim Among Us (12:19)
Aboutface: The Water That Glows Like Dancing Glass Cuts Crimson (feat Taro) (11:19)
Review: A master of sonic art, music, photography, sound for images, and conceptual performances, Ben Kelly's Aboutface project has found favour with some serious tastemakers, and if this is your first visit to his vivid, trance-inducing world, it shouldn't be that hard to understand why without going much further into the back catalogue. Not that we don't implore you to do just that.
Opening on 'Small Hands & Feet In the Sand Who You The Great Illusion', the penchant for long titles should already be clear. As such a deft ability to make tunes that are lush, peaceful and packed with meditate qualities. But anyone expecting this to be all tranquility should think again, 'We Flee Whilst the Wild Smoking Horses Swim Among Us' layers spirals of sound and refrains in such a way you feel the energy rippling from its arrangement, while 'The Water That Glows' is a joyous, leftfield downtempo-into-neo-dnb outing. Exceptional.
Review: Sounds of the Sea was one of the first albums from Joanna Brouk, a West Coast sonic explorer who emerged somewhere around the boom in DIY tapes of ambient music in the early 80s. Brouk distanced herself from the platitudes of new age music and instead probed at more mysterious moods in her pieces, best captured in this highlight from the run of cassettes she first released. Numero Group have taken up the mantle and reissued Sounds of the Sea for the first time, bringing the swathes of pads and cascading flute to the attention of a much wider audience, finally.
Review: Philadelphia's cultural significance doesn't quite resonate in the same way on the European side of the Atlantic as it does back in the States. Of course we all know about Philly Cheese Steak, Hall & Oates, and The Roots, but the extent to which the biggest city in Pennsylvania acts as a melting pot for creativity, without really shouting about it, is really quite remarkable once you lift the lid. And we've not even mentioned It's Always Sunny... yet.
Cutting to the chase, far too late, Alex Burkat, is a case in point for the talent at work in said metropolis. A producer and DJ who has graced labels like Mister Saturday Night, Permanent Vacation, 100% Silk and Third Ear Recordings in the past, here he turns his well-tuned ear to ambient work, delivering three accomplished drone outings that do as they should - hypnotic, tunnelling, creeping but commanding.
Review: Ceremonie hail from France and have an '80s-inspired sound that hits differently. Their songwriting reaches new levels and draws on well-chosen, well-designed sounds with a wonderful sense of melancholy and just the right balance of drama and subtlety. After an indie-pop leaning cassette a few years ago they now land on Enfant Terrible with a contemporary take on retro new wave and synth-pop. Three of the tunes are originals, one is a cover of French 1980s new wave band Message and there is a whole new album in the works, apparently. Great stuff.
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: Shoegazers and experimental outfit Cloudland Canyon blend ambient, drone, krautrock, psychedelic, house music into their own unique tapestries. The band, led by Kip Uhlhorn, is now back with this new self-titled album which his another widescreen exploration of the cosmic sonic realm. The band is now more than 20 years into their career and for this one embraced the future by collaborating with AI. This allowed them to generate and create "compositions that sound like they are meant for an alternate realm where both beauty and suffering are both present, but not at odds with one another."
Review: Cologne label Magazine have been releasing some fine leftfield offerings from the likes of Barnt, Drums Off Chaos, Wolfgang Voigt and Naum Gabo over the years. Now they present the debut release from Creme de la Deutz, an enigmatic project from unknown sources dealing in the kind of ambience to stick on while you gaze at the stars. Following exhibitions and performances at noted spots like Salon Des Amateurs, this limited edition pressing is hitting the streets and not likely to stick around for long. If you appreciate rich, synth-driven ambience, this album is for you.
Review: When Depeche Mode teamed up with Anton Corbijn to make some music videos, few could have predicted the end results. If you ever thought there’s an artful consistency to the Mode’s music videos from the late 80s and early 90s, it’s because Corbijn filmed them all on a shoestring budget on his trusty Super 8 camera. The resulting pieces were strung together as vignettes forming a larger cinematic experience which was released in two instalments - Strange and Strange Too. Originally released on VHS and Laserdisc, the films have finally been bundled together, digitally restored and presented in this DVD box set with bonus material.
Review: Eyes of the Amaryllis is a collective that announced its arrival with a debut self-titled album back in 2021 on cassette tape. A year later they landed on Horn of Plenty with a second album which came on vinyl, and now they offer up a first 45rpm in the form of 'Lunchtime On Earth' on Swedish label I Dischi Del Barone. All four tracks are decidedly short and to the point and sit somewhere between post-rock and experimental with elements of lo-fi, folk and world & country. It's the title track that stands out with its doleful guitars, plenty of echo and drifting, wordless vocal sounds making for a beautifully melancholic vibe.
Review: Burnt Friedman and Joao Pais Filipe's collaborative efforts began back in 2018. The former using synthesis and electronics to paint subtly but incredibly specific aural pictures, the latter focusing on the drum and rhythmic end of things. At times their music feels entirely designed for the dancefloors of underground electronic clubs, in other moments it's something very different indeed.
This latest EP lives up to those broad brushstrokes. '21-30' is a lush, almost tropical sounding workout that offers a complex percussive pattern, and combines these with gentle shades of melody, harmony, hook and distorted note. '22-105' brings elements of glitchiness and robotics into the mix. Meanwhile, '18-140' would work well as a brooding building tool (or section) of a 'proper techno' mix, with '23-130' bridging gaps between the lot.
Review: Heads On Platters is the third instalment in a trilogy of vinyl records that delves into the intersectionality of queer pleasure and the pandemic. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the series, titled Undetectable: Queer Pleasure and Pandemic, amplifies voices on queer sexualities, chemsex practices, and emerging cultural responses amidst rising global LGBTQ+ challenges. Through exploring themes of public sex and evolving queer cultural expressions, the project confronts pervasive homophobia, transphobia, and violence. It celebrates resistance, acknowledging that true defiance often arises amidst revelry, challenging societal norms and amplifying marginalised voices in a powerful cacophony of sound and expression.
Review: Southern California-based composer and improviser David Rosenboom is a figure who can't quite be aligned to one particular school, his work slipping intriguingly through the cracks. A collaboration with vocalist Jacqueline Humbert, Daytime Viewing is an extraordinary narrative poem set over a song cycle consisting of six pieces. Quietly released privately in 1983, Unseen Worlds has brought this seminal work back into view along with a full remastering. Exploring ideas of absurdist theatricality, TV soap operas, commercialism, and family, Humbert's voice and Rosenboom's production merge to create a landscape that is at once lush yet also dystopian. An entirely unique release that invites endless study.
Review: Thermal Shadow is a first-ever long player from Intertoto, and it is one that has very much not been rushed. This record comes after the artist has spent more than 10 years lost in sonic experiments and now they are all distilled into the eight tunes presented here on a limited edition cassette on the artist's own label. It's a mix of sounds that embrace mistakes, that keep the perfections in and layers up dust, texture, absorbing ambient and barely-there hints of rhythm. They are full of suggestive energy akin to that you might feel when queuing up outside the club and the highs and bass are bleeding out. It's an enticing collection for sure.
Review: UK producer Inigo Kennedy - also known as Seducer, Tomito Satori and Helki Torsnum - comes up with a pair of techno tracks that positively glisten with luxuriant melody and a beautiful musicality that's rare to ape in this - or indeed any - scene. 'RackSpace 2' and 'Dewdrops' both glide with serene ease, the melodies weaving away in the back seat of the track but never threatening to overwhlelm the atmosphere. The latter is definitely operating in a spacier sphere, with the reverbs and delays working overtime, but both are nicely restrained takes on techno that nevertheless paint vivid sonic pictures.
Review: .Celebrated Polish composer Andrzej Korzynski defined prolific. The musician was behind some of his homeland's biggest musical hits of the post-World War II communist era, through to the late-1990s, while his work on soundtracks helped create some truly iconic movies from those decades, including Andrzej Wada's The Birch Wood and Man of Marble, and Andrzej Zulawski's The Devil and Possession. Tajemnica Enigmy, or Secret Enigma, represents all the other bits - work that had been presumed lost behind the Iron Curtain and socio-economic and cultural overhaul that took place following the collapse of the USSR. Recorded in studios from Warsaw to Paris, it's psychedelic rock, sublime pop, noise, avant garde, electronica and so much more, not least strange, otherworldly suspenseful stuff and funk-driven party rock 'n' roll. Quite the deep dive.
Review: When Nostalchic was first released in 2013, Lapalux was already well established as a central figure in the booming LA beat scene orbiting around Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder label. Given how entrenched in the 2010s that whole movement was, the music itself has matured beautifully over the past decade to become a heartfelt benchmark in a sub-genre that thrived on innovation and unexpected swerves. It helps that there are some choice detuned synth lines which fold time across the ages on the likes of 'Guuurl', proving Lapalux was always about the feels more than the shock and awe of the beats. Having only a modest run the first time around, now the album has been repressed for the first time as a limited edition on clear vinyl.
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