Category: Recorded music
-
Various Artists – Singles and EPs
A thin-sounding electric guitar (maybe a Telecaster), an electric piano, filtered through the glitchy sound of dusty vinyl, and looped in incomplete gestures that sound like a needle jumping. It’s the sound of nostalgia, the sound of distance from a desired space that the imagination is better equipped to apprehend…
-
Sven Kacirek – The Kenya Sessions (world music)
Altin Village & Mine will shortly (at the time of writing) be releasing The Kenya Sessions as a vinyl album, but they will be doing so about a year after its original CD and MP3 release on Pingipung, which gives me a welcome excuse to cover a recording that managed…
-
Dementio 13 – Crash St (electronic post-rock)
Our statements have meanings only inasmuch as they indicate distinctions or differences. Words, and other meaningful gestures, draw lines around pieces of our conceptual universe, and say ‘x means y because it doesn’t mean z’. A piece of music that sounds very similar to another, has a very similar meaning;…
-
Various Artists – Album Roundup
There’s more than a nod to dreampop and shoegaze in this music, but Lisa Masia and Marina Cristofalo are clearly too in love with the raw and ragged sound of a distorted electric guitar to tame it to the extent that might imply. Some of Wish You Were A Pony…
-
Janne Hanhisuanto – Circles In 3D (ambient)
All music has an atmosphere. I’d go so far as to say it’s a central aspect of all musical meaning, although it’s obviously not the only meaningful element in music. Words, melodies, harmonies, rhythms, timbres and so on, all have their particular capacities, but the atmosphere of a piece of…
-
Various Artists – Singles & EPs
The struggle. It’s a recurring theme in conscious hip-hop from the underground (for much the same reason that a lot of mainstream, mass-market hip-hop concerns conspicuous consumption). Life is hard for young people from urban areas, living with no privileges and few prospects; but here’s a form of art whose…
-
trillian – creature teacher (progressive/ post-rock)
Textural rock music, crafted in painstaking sonic detail, utilising intricate and unusual rhythmic structures, has become a ‘thing’ in recent years; but it has generally been a thing in which vocals, while not necessarily altogether absent, take a back seat to the other elements. Not so with trillian: these songs…
-
Creature Breath – I Am Creature Breath (avant-folk)
There’s a simple poetry to this album, an economy of orchestration, of ornament and of lyrical statement. Given that the lyrical themes are of an overtly devotional nature, expressing a sense of rootedness and connection to the ‘Mother’, to the natural world conceived as a person, I find that economy…
-
Various Artists – Singles & EPs
This three track EP seems to be Septic Trauma’s entire recorded output. A shame, as I could happily listen to a few dozen tunes in this vein. Many heavy rock bands lay claim to terms like ‘technical’ and ‘progressive’, but few have any reason to do so. Aside from the…
-
The Ruby Kid & Dan Angell – Maps (rap/ poetry)
Poetry isn’t the same thing as lyrics; lyrics are not poetry; and rap is neither poetry nor song lyrics. All of these things have their own uses, their own conventions and their own needs. You can take a beautiful example of one, you can use it as the other, and…
-
Review Of The Year 2011: 12 Albums
It’s a very hard thing, to pick just a dozen albums from a year in which I have encountered so much fantastic new music (as well as a fair selection of dull, derivative or otherwise uninspiring stuff, naming no names). The number itself is entirely arbitrary, but I feel the…
-
The Inner Road – Visions (progressive rock)
Rock music is such an integral part of our audio culture that it has almost become invisible as a thing in itself: it doesn’t sound like rock music to many ears, in many contexts, but just like music. Furthermore, because of the way in which it is usually experienced, as…
-
Various Artists – Singles & EPs
I’m not sure what Marie Craven is sorry about. Without overcoming my innate laziness and conducting a proper analysis of the lyrics, it’s hard to say whether she’s expressing regret, making an apology, or meditating on the nature of transgression. In fact the title is a little ambiguous itself: does…
-
Dementio13 – The Hobbyist (electronic post-rock)
‘Style’ is frequently contested territory in popular music. Widely circulating ideas of authenticity have it that for a creative musician to think about style is to privilege the superficial surface of their work over the deep substance. Musicians are supposed to just be ‘true to themselves’, and the music that…
Oliver Arditi 