Various Artists – Singles and EPs

Richard Wileman seems to be going through a particularly fertile patch of late, putting out releases somewhat faster than I can write about them (and the day he puts out something I don’t write about will be a long time coming). After the vigorous collaborative chops-fest (I simplify unfairly) of Strange Relations comes this short programmatic piece depicting the eventual collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Wileman predicts a cooler, calmer and altogether more pastoral event than sprang immediately to my thoughts, although the vast and oblique affective compass of his alternately gelid and cosy …

Various Artists – Singles and EPs

The Stringers are a four-piece from Ontario, that plays rock music of the old school – which doesn’t mean that it’s ‘old-fashioned’, but that it’s pop music, god dammit! This is entertainment, with no pretensions to any kind of creative territory beyond that compass; all too often that can imply some kind of highly manufactured, overly polished and self-consciously vapid ‘product’, but this is all about melodies, grooves and the raw sound of musicians making it happen together. Crisp, tight performances are represented in an immediate, close-quarters production, through arrangements that evince a good understanding …

Karda Estra – Strange Relations (avant-rock)

The Karda Estra brand has been built on continued invention and creativity: across the preceding eleven albums composer Richard Wileman has consistently and rigorously poked around at the fault-lines of his practice, finding ways to surprise the listener that nevertheless cleave to an established and instantly recognisable aesthetic. Although Karda Estra’s discography features very high standards of musicianship, and some amazing guest musicians (most notably and repeatedly the wonderfully warped avant-rock guitar savant Kavus Torabi), one pretty consistent feature of the work has been that it is more …

Pannón Melankólikusok – Szerelmedért (chamber rock)

I don’t know if Christina Domene and Robert Hofmann were a performing duo before they conceived their love of the Hungarian language, and began to set that culture’s poetry to music. That is the agenda around which this project revolves, however, and they certainly chose its name, which translates as ‘Pannonian melancholy’ on that basis. Pannonia was a province of the Roman Empire, but the name was applied to several states or provinces in Transdanubia and the Pannonian Basin, including the medieval kingdom of Hungary. Claiming a Pannonian identity for their music (not for themselves …

Karda Estra – Mondo Profondo/ New Worlds (avant-prog)

It’s far from unusual for me to beaten to the scoop on the music I’m sent to review, for various reasons, but not least because I like to spend a good deal of quality listening time trying to get inside the music before I set dactyls to chiclets and start spouting off. Little surprise, then, that Classic Rock Presents: Prog beat me to the punch on the Mondo Profondo review, giving me the opportunity to rip off any pertinent observations they may have shared. ‘Unclassifiable’ isn’t a characterisation with which it’s hard to concur, nor is it news to me (or anyone with a functioning pair of ears) that Richard …