Tag: experimental
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Grindlestone – Tone (ambient)
When music has no lyrical content, its titles become gnomic and mysterious, intentionally or otherwise. ‘Our Floor With All Its Beliefs’ could be taken in so many different ways, but to be honest I think it’s best not to take it at all. Unless there is a very clear relationship…
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Interview: Barren Waste
New Hampshire, USA band Barren Waste first came to my attention when they sent me their debut release for review: Divine Intervention is an EP of six very short tunes in a predominantly grindcore vein, but with a very distinctive and creative approach to texture and dissonance, which immediately struck…
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Barren Waste – NSE (ambient)
Barren Waste are a band of many guises. They first came to my attention as a metal band with a raw and uncompromising attitude to noise, and a willingness to explore harsh frequencies and creative dissonance, rather than slipping easily into the language of sludge or grindcore. They also, as…
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TYLS – Pest-O-Flash (ambient/ noise)
This wetpussyallstars side project release is an experimental album, one which reinvigorates the musically abstract with a sense of the narrative and the representational, simultaneously blurring the distinction between electronic artist and electrician. Sounds that are abstract in a musical sense may at the same time, as here, be sonically…
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Mouse Drawn Cart – Mouse Drawn Cart (experimental rock)
At the instrumental level Mouse Drawn Cart is not massively transgressive. There are some heavy guitars, chainsaw distorted bass, some metal riffing, some industrial-lite beats reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails (‘I’m Not Scared Of You’); there is a very dark and sophisticated approach to texture, and its arrangement into a…
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Paragaté – Stillness In The Mirror (experimental/ ambient)
Stillness In The Mirror is an album that effectively fuses a mechanical, or automatic sonic sensibility with a very organic, human one. That’s an interesting strategy in and of itself, but I don’t get the impression that this conceptual framework is the point of the music: the sounds on this…
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Robb Appleton – The Wood (ambient/ folktronica)
Robb Appleton is a harmonica player, and his diatonic harps are a prominent voice on this album, but The Wood doesn’t sound like a harmonica album. In fact, it sounds more like an album made by someone who decided to get a harp player in because they wanted that sound.…
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Mittimus & Nix Pickler – Devices (free improvisation)
Free improvisers take a lot of different routes to a lot of different destinations, or to put it another way, improvisation can be free in a lot of different ways. When it first burst into the world it was as an avant-garde practice within jazz (although most became aware of…
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Sissters – There’s A Party In My Mouth But You’re Not Invited (post-punk/ noise rock/ art-punk)
The word experimental is over-used in descriptions of avant-garde music, and is not always meaningful: who are we as listeners to judge whether an artist is conducting an experiment, or whether the sounds we hear represent their mature practice? However, experimental or not, There’s A Party In My Mouth And…
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Cockdaughter – Cockdaughter (noise rock)
In 1917 Marcel Duchamp put a pissoir in a gallery: unfortunately, nearly a century later, many people still don’t get it. Those people will have trouble with the presentation of something as deliberately shambolic as Cockdaughter’s eponymous debut as a finished artwork; but it’s precisely to challenge that sense of…
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etokle – The Golden Bear And Other Works LP (drone/ ambient)
Sometimes when you visit my site to read a review you find yourself struggling through some complicated exposition on a rarely considered aspect of experimental music, full of technical terms and pointless intellectual gymnastics. I’m sorry about that. I’m a bit self indulgent sometimes. However, if I suspect that enough…
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Big Block 454 – Bells & Proclamations (folk-funk/ psychedelic rock)
Big Block 454, named for a 1970 Chevrolet engine, are one of the oddest bands I’ve encountered in a while. They are creatively out there, full of weird sounds and transgressive stylistic collisions, and yet they are, to me at least, accessible, pleasing, and decidedly danceable. Apparently they’ve been around…
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Tim Oehlers – Guitarisms (acoustic/ improvisation)
This bold, confidently gestural and slightly glitchy visual design seems to represent in a very appropriate way the sounds it promotes: even the title perfectly evokes the assembly of phrases that the album contains, and with it’s echo of ‘truisms’, its creative intentions, if I read them right.
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Diane Marie Kloba – I Am An Unknown Artist (avant pop)
‘Avant pop’ is a term that has been bandied about at various times, in various contexts, and it is one that Diane Marie Kloba has applied to her own work… It may take some listeners a while to hear past the somewhat challenging surface of this music. Once they do…
Oliver Arditi 