New releases this week: Post Rock/Experimental

Review: Japanese psychedelic pop singer-songwriter Ai Aso hails from Tokyo and has an almost impossibly wispy thin folky style to her singing that makes her utterly unique. She has been active since 2000 and has worked both solo as well as with the likes of White Heaven members You Ishihara and Michio Kurihara. Her solo album arrived back in 2014 and now a decade on gets a vinyl press via Ideologic Organ. It is beautifully delicate and whimsical, with lullaby-like guitar melodies and her own vaporous vocals drifting gently with a real sense of innocence in the sparse tracks. Lo-fi and intimate, this is a quiet gem.

Review: BIG BRAVE's music epitomises what has been called 'massive minimalism,' with layers of textural distortion and feedback accentuating its weight and frayed edges. Their artistry blends traditional folk techniques with a modern deconstruction of guitar music, all of which is evident in the new album A Chaos Of Flowers, which is a follow-up to their fierce 2023 album Nature Morte. Lyrically, the songs delve into vulnerability, isolation, and co-existence in nature and guitarist and vocalist Robin Wattie drew inspiration from poetry by female-presenting artists, exploring alienation's impact on the psyche. This record is a testament to the band's ability to evoke intense emotions through minimalist yet powerful arrangements.

Review: Los Angeles-based Canadian-American experimentalist Claire Rousay has made a name for herself due to her unique approach to post-rock-inflected ambience built off of primitive DIY field recordings captured on a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder, resulting in a curious form of emo musique concrete or "emo-ambient". Following on from a myriad of collaborations, projects, and singles, Sentiment marks her first full-length to put her usually hidden voice front and centre; utilising auto-tune to craft emotive hyper-folk musings delivered with androgynous hues. Described as a "meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex"; Rousay uses fractured narratives and one-way conversations to deliver painfully relatable, often uncomfortable musings, smothered beneath layers of droning reverb, monotonous acoustic plucking, and everyday sounds almost too familiar to pinpoint. The end result is the musical equivalent to our inner monologue at its lowest ebb, nattering incessantly while the world moves on around us, while sonically, it's the culmination of all Rousay's experimentation thus far, yet simultaneously more fearless and fragile.

Review: Anyone familiar with Tokyo, Japan's predominantly instrumental math-rock prodigies Toe, should already be clued into the fact that the member's prolific nature prevents them from resting on their creative laurels for long, with each full-length they drop bookended by an EP. 2005's debut LP The Book About My Idle Plot On A Vague Anxiety was followed by the 2006 EP New Sentimentality, while after 2009's outstanding For Long Tomorrow came The Future Is Now in 2012. At the time of writing, 2018's aptly titled Our Latest Number currently sits as the group's most recent EP; sandwiched in between 2015's sonically transformative Hear You and 2021's latest output DOKU-EN-KAI. Furthering the experimentation of its preceding full-length, the EP strays from their signature twinkling, mathy noodles and emotive shoegazing, and instead embraces elements of minimalism and trip-hop, whilst expanding their acoustic-driven nu-jazz flourishes, and even sprinkling some ethereal vocals into the mix.

Review: Japanese math/post-rock outfit Toe have become renowned for their virtuosic blend of jazzy, hyper-technical math-rock blended with emo shoegazing and tropical Balearic vibes. Originally released in 2006 as follow up to the band's 2005 debut full-length The Book About My Idle Plot On A Vague Anxiety, and beginning their trend of intersplicing each album cycle with an EP, New Sentimentality offers up four lengthy cuts running the sonic gamut of almost every water they wade within. Trading off noodling twinkles with acoustic pluckings, while abrasive jazz drum-fills clatter over the weaving gentle cacophonies, this is what happens when the emo kids become the new prog nerds.