Review: Lo-fi, droning ambience from Turkish producer Ekin Uzeltuzenci aka. Ekin Fil here. 'Rosewood Untitled' is themed after the resistance of nature, drawing a hard line between concepts of the manmade and natural - by sonically presenting the latter as pure, slowly restless, and laden in a deep, almost unrecoverable texture. For Ekin, the inspiration behind the album came after witnessing huge forest fires in Turkey, which occurred at the same time as the COVID pandemic. What follows is a mournful reminiscence on fatal natural processes, through looping sonic envelopes and distant melodies.
Review: Hauntologic '80s nostalgia-propagandizers Ghost Box return once again with a new one from Eric Zann, 'Ouroborindra'. Ghostly vocals mesh with a wide range of acoustic and electronic instrumentation here to produce an inspired album that draws on early 20th century cosmic horror fiction, resulting in some dastardly thematic combination of Lovecraft, BBC Christmas Horror stories, and Scarfolk. Radio-static noise and cavernous intakes of breath on tracks like 'Threshold' and 'Dols' blend with long ambient progressions and string sequences, recalling mock-'80s film influences such as the latest haunter 'Enys Men'. As ever with Ghost Box, a patented corecore sound is captured.
Review: Renowned composer Simon Fisher Turner's new album Instability of the Signal comes on limited edition black vinyl with extensive sleeve notes. It was produced with Francine Perry and across 13 tracks it delves into sound exploration inspired by Breda Beban, Hrvoje Horvatic, and poet Harold Pinter, whose works appear on the record. The artist integrates four elements: slivers, sounds, strings, and Singing where 'slivers" are brief audio snippets from Salford Electronics reimagined into track foundations. The album also features string arrangements by the Elysian Collective and overall the record reflects Fisher Turner's rich career as it blends experience with introspective soundscapes and personal expression.
Review: Back in 2005 we might not have predicted what a phenomenon Ghost Box would become. In the years since, the label has become a beacon for the hauntological exploration of Britain's inherent oddness creeping just below the surface. Julian House's graphic design is a huge part of the label's artistic merit, and it figures his music as The Focus Group follows a similarly aesthetically rigorous direction. There's a pastoral collage quality to Hey Let Loose Your Love which takes you right back to the 70s, with beautiful musical passages offset by surrealist samples and unexpected diversions into the recent history of these wyrd isles.
Review: Unheard Of Hope - one prominent tine of the holy trinity / label supergroup known as TAR/MM/UOH - specialises is that all-too-rare subsection of music, the avant-garde. Theirs is a seedier aesthetic, preferring the more traditional, yet grimmer and demurer ends of this hotly contestable musical "approach", and perhaps emblematic of this is the latest record by Guatemalan cellist and vocalist, Mabe Fratti. Out on every format - tape, CD, vinyl - Sentir que no sabes ("feel like you don't know") hears Fratti's crystalline vocals glint like life-giving liquids, and sound too to effuse from the same fruitful source as its watershed cello lows and occasional blossomy arp-pop structures (ballad 'Pantalla azul' is by far the poppiest moment). The evident confidence brought to the record lends it an element of surprise, too, when we discover that it is entirely thematically rooted in doubt. In the words of the artist, this is a record born of the "moment when you feel you don't know anything and you are soft like jello and any fork can go through you." When one finds strength in permeability, one embraces what is normally registered as a pure antagonism, and all seemingly rigid particulars are changed for ever.
Review: Lee Gamble is an artist who excels in delivering post-modern music with a strong sense of sentiment and history. Just look at his breakthrough Diversions 1994-1996, in which the ambient threads in first wave jungle were blown out into grandiose chasms of sound. On this latest album, he's taking a similar approach to source material, but this time the focus is on pop earworms in which all kinds of emotive, catchy sonics get dissolved and reformed into vast, unpredictable shapes. Vitally, the emotional dimension is maintained no matter how unrecognisable the original samples are, as Gamble continues his fascinating path forwards and backwards through time.
Review: Two years ago, long-term musical collaborators Jules Maxwell and Lisa Gerrard, who first worked together during the latter's time with 4AD signed musical mavericks Dead Can Dance, joined forces with James Chapman to create Burn, a critically acclaimed exploration of "euphoric and inventive" sounds that blurred the boundaries between neo-classical, world music and ambient electronica. One Night in Porto captures the pair's performance - ably assisted by Chapman and a small pool of supplementary musicians - of the album's widescreen tracks at Casa Da Musica in Porto last November. With Gerrard utilising her voice to the full - one minute, soaring and operatic, the next singing more sweetly and soulfully in an entirely different language - and Maxwell playing a grand piano and synthesisers, it's a stunningly atmospheric, uplifting and entertaining affair.
Review: "What causes a man who has everything to jeopardise his comfort, career and relationship?" High brow movie streaming service MUBI has a habit of asking difficult questions of its audience, although the answer in this case is actually very simple - 5 Hectares of land in Limoges, France. Emilie Deleuze's delightfully quirky - and therefore thoroughly human and honest - comedy is about just that; one guy's dream of owning a plot in stunning serenity, and what he's willing to lose for it. Bobby Gillespie might be something of an outsider choice to score the flick, if it didn't make perfect sense to draft one of indie rock & roll's true eccentric enigmas. Best known as the voice and front face of the mighty Primal Scream, what's here isn't really that, but it's just as broad, varied and forward thinking. From loopy jazzy beats to strange chants, whispered balladry and compressed lo-fi hip hop.
Review: Further Selections from the Electric Harpsichord is a profound rediscovery of Catherine Christer Hennix's early masterwork, offering a mesmerising, never-before-heard recording of her 1976 opus. This long-lost piece, originally debuted at Stockholm's Moderna Museet, further solidifies Hennix's unique contributions to minimalism, combining precise just intonation with electronic experimentation. Like her contemporaries La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath, Hennix's work transcends traditional boundaries, using carefully retuned synthesisers and feedback loops to create a hallucinogenic soundscape that manipulates time, space and perception. Released shortly before her passing in 2023, this recording stands as the most comprehensive version of The Electric Harpsichord to date. Extending the previously released 26-minute fragment, this new edition spans 47 minutes, immersing listeners in sustained, shimmering waves of sound. Henry Flynt, who championed Hennix's work in the 1970s, described the music as "hallucinogenic/ecstatic sound environments" and this recording lives up to that description. The spellbinding oscillations and drones, accompanied by Hans Isgren's sheng, evoke a deeply meditative and otherworldly experience. Hennix's polymathic background in mathematics, poetry and philosophy enriches the composition, making it as intellectually rigorous as it is emotionally transformative. A landmark of minimalist music that will excite new audiences, reaffirming Hennix's lasting influence on experimental sound and the transcendent potential of her artistry.
Review: Aussie composer Cat Tyson Hughes is an experimental artist whose new album Crossing Water on Past Inside The Present marks her debut long player. It comes after she's been involved with several other projects and offers a fragile and delicate mix of subtle instrumentation and rich voice textures imbued with an array of lovely field recordings. These are superbly patient and slow-burn tracks that really have a cathartic effect as nature and natural sounds permeate each composition. The melodies take your mind away as the freely structured, minimal arrangements really make you take note.
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