Tag: jazz
-
Sons of Kemet – Burn (avant-jazz)
I often start my reviews by talking in general terms about the schtick of the artist or release; creative practice, methodology, how I theorise the music, what my critical approach will be and so forth. However, there’s equally often not that much to say. A lot of good music comes…
-
Review Of The Year 2013: 12 Albums
This is the fourth consecutive time I’ve written a review of the year’s albums, which is slightly scary, as I’m under the impression that writing about music is something that I’ve only just started doing. Still, as senility begins to work its erosional magic on the brain, the years do…
-
Various Artists – Album Roundup
You’ll hear a lot of familiar echoes in The Executioner’s Lover, but I can more or less promise that you haven’t heard anything quite like it. It opens with a song, ‘Half Life’, that is mainly arranged for ‘orchestral instruments’, but which also incorporates a rock rhythm section, which comes…
-
Alessandro ‘Saseko’ Motojima – Sendo Senshi: One Blade To Kill Them All (soundtrack)
Sendo Senshi is the title of an unreleased 1970s ‘whitexploitation’ movie, both directed and scored by Japanese-Italian Alessandro ‘Saseko’ Motojima. You can watch a trailer for it by clicking the link above; it promises violence, crime, gore, tits, shouting, sartorial intensity and all the garish, cartoonish traits of 1970s grindhouse…
-
Various Artists – Album Roundup
Opening with an extended skit inspired by John Carpenter’s Darkstar, it’s obvious from the start that this Strange Gibberish mixtape is going to be heavy on the humour. It’s also heavy on the creativity and experimentation, with some of the beats straying well into avant-garde territory. It’s far too diverse…
-
Jez Carr, Simon Little & Mike Haughton – Foreground Music, Vol. I (jazz)
All that Simon Little, who seems to be the member of this trio with principal responsibility for promoting Foreground Music, Vol. I, has to say about this music on his Bandcamp page is that ‘[i]n November 2012, three musicians came together to play freely improvised music and recorded everything.’ Freedom,…
-
Review Of The Year 2012, Part 1: 12 Albums
It’s that time of year again, the nights drawing in, the pointless over-consumption going into overdrive, and the music bloggers arranging releases into spurious hierarchies of how hip they think they make them look. Well, let me issue the same caveats I always do: I don’t claim that these are…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Sven Kacirek – Scarlet Pitch Dreams (tuned percussion)
This is a record that sounds good. It is serious, experimental, creatively rigorous; it is the audible trace of a man in pursuit of an uncompromising artistic agenda, that makes no concession to the market. And yet, it is an unaffected expression of sheer pleasure in sound, easily as much…
-
Various Artists – Singles & EPs
Marley Butler makes music of remarkable clarity: his soundscapes are usually clean, open affairs, in which the boundaries between sonic elements are clearly defined; his rhythms are regular, precise and simple; ideas have room in which to breathe, and although he does not overuse spatialising effects such as reverb and…
-
Heavy Ethics – Rhubarb (jazz/ fusion/ prog)
It says prog up there at the top, and that’s both a nod to the band’s self-identifications, and because this music is decidedly progressive, although, to be honest, if you’re looking for something that sounds like archetypal prog-rock this will probably sound like jazz to you. It has dissonances aplenty,…
-
Future Gibbon – Begin Tofu Rub (jazz/ fusion)
The entire fusion/ jazz dichotomy has always been a bit of a spurious one. Sure, there are acts that are very clearly fusion, such as Weather Report, or Tribal Tech, and those that are very obviously acoustic jazz, such as, well, any of the huge variety of famous and unknown,…
-
Steve Lawson – 11 Reasons Why 3 Is Greater Than Everything (ambient)
The pieces on this album are indeed highly atmospheric, but don’t let this lead you to believe that ambience is all, or even principally, what the music is about. The principal quality of these tunes, their defining feature, and the central locus of Lawson’s creative effort, is melody.
Oliver Arditi 