Category: Recorded music
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The Echelon Effect – Field Recordings (post-rock/ ambient)
The development and inheritance of stylistic traditions is rarely as linear or orderly as is commonly imagined; the evolution of art seems to follow a process of cultural selection analogous to the biological processes identified by Charles Darwin. In art, as in nature, developmental processes diverge, converge, intersect and run…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
Why do I write reviews? Largely so that I can blag free music instead of buying it like everyone else, and so I can kid my conscience that my inane ramblings are an adequate substitute for paying musicians their due. Of course I can (and will, given half a chance)…
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Straw Bear – Black Bank (folk-pop-rock)
Songwriters are faced with a number of choices, regarding the weighting of significance towards the different parts of their practice. Many or most of those that might be described as singer-songwriters signal their emphasis on writing rather than performance, or on non-verbal aspects of composition, by ensuring that the ‘music’…
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There Is No Teenage Love – There Is No Teenage Love (ambient/ drone)
This album is enigmatic from the start, or even earlier in fact. Who is this skinny, elfin featured, uncomfortably hunched girl with smoke in her mouth and a triangle drawn on her sternum? What do they mean by saying ‘there is no teenage love’? As a statement, it is true…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
As far as I know Dialect are no longer an active collective, although its members continue to release razor sharp and uncompromisingly independent hip-hop on their own account; they have released a lot of great music, and are clearly a mainstay of hip-hop in the Northeast, and this is the…
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Mere – Mere (dark-ambient improvisation)
Improvisation is a complex matter, and often a contentious one: some degree of musical freedom is usually identified with it, to the extent that freedom is sometimes regarded as its defining characteristic, its essence, or indeed as the thing itself. Thus some more partisan free improvisers would not really regard…
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Jumble Hole Clough – Three Bags Of Madder (ambient)
Relating music to place can be a tricky business: music, after all, is a non-denotational language, or if it denotes anything, it denotes itself. Of course there are specific associations related to recognisable phrases or sounds, and music often involves verbal elements which can point our aural responses in a…
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Various Artists – Album Roundup
The green, pastoral idyll of the English national myth, the archetype of England that is reputed to ramble gently through the rolling downs and valleys of a harmonious rustic hinterland, is bollocks. The countryside in which it is supposed to be found is not a place with which the majority…
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Melanin 9 – Magna Carta (hip-hop)
It winds me up somewhat, on occasions like National Poetry Day, or in public discussions about poetry among the mandarins of the cultural elite, that the richest, most diverse and thriving field of poetic endeavour is more or less completely ignored. The academy thinks it owns the word ‘music’, and…
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Goya – Demo (stoner metal)
Drugs. Weed, hash, blow, smoke, tea, skunk, green, charas, gear, pollen, bud, sensemilla, kif, oil, dope, black, pot, marijuana, cannabis. I don’t wish to imply that Goya’s music is one-dimensional, but this is very clearly the central inspiration for their creative activities. So much so, that their Bandcamp page is…
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Various Artists – Singles and EPs
If you describe Tamara Parsons-Baker’s practice as a formula, it doesn’t inspire much excitement: simple, mainly diatonic guitar strums; emotive vocals; songs about unsuccessful love affairs; we have heard these elements before. However, the five songs on Lover proceed from a somewhat more warped perspective than this formula might suggest,…
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Isamu McGregor – Live At The Baked Potato (jazz)
Jazz fusion, after the initial excitement attending its arrival, organised itself into two broad sets of practices: one organised musical materials drawn from various forms of popular music, embracing new musical technologies, with the harmonic erudition of jazz, into complex, highly organised arrangements; the other really just carried on doing…
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Thumpermonkey – Sleep Furiously (progressive rock)
Injunctions to sleep in a particular manner crop up from time to time as album titles. Hope & Social’s last album length release was called Sleep Sound, which is perhaps the kind of sleeping to which most of us are accustomed; either that or badly. Furiously is another matter altogether:…
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Marius Noss Gundersen – Visual Music – Retrato Brasileiro (classical/ MPB)
Visual Music is, according to the sleeve notes, a collaboration with the photographer Tomas Moss; the ‘power of combining vision and audio’, we are informed, offers a broader experience than either would alone, and we are directed to the ‘Visual Music’ website to discover more about this idea. The music…
Oliver Arditi 