Nick Quan’s song “Heavensafe,” which runs big feelings through a bigger pedalboard, features a funny declaration: “I’ve turned to slop again.”
This past August, when the extraordinary guitarist released Warbrained, shoegaze might have been saying so, too. By then, its latest — and most puzzling — progeny was “cloud rock,” a budding vanguard that subverted its central extremes: numbness first, and noise, if at all, second. On record, Quan, a digi-rock savant who has toured with Slowdive, sounds groggy yet ridiculously technical, like a sleep-deprived Berklee student on a bender.
When a simplistic song, “life imitates life,” blew up on TikTok in 2023, they responded with a complex album, that year’s Stepdream,…
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…2CD edition include the remastered original album on the first disc and add the unreleased 1979 Troon live performance on the second.
…Originally released in 1979, Stiff Little Fingers were Ireland’s answer to both the Clash and the Sex Pistols. They had the personal and political stance of the former, and the noisy, pissed off, slash-and-burn musical aesthetic as the latter. Fronted by guitarist and songwriter Jake Burns (he collaborated with journalist Gordon Ogilvie), SLF took off with their two singles “Alternative Ulster,” and, for that time, the utterly out of control screaming that was “Suspect Device.” These two singles make the purchase price of the album a priority. They represent barely contained youthful anger at social and political mores as righteous,…
These new ethnographic-oriented albums document recent Pacific projects initiated by Australian-based label Wantok Musik in the two formerly war-torn island nations of Bougainville and Timor-Leste (East Timor). Encouraging connections in both countries between younger up-and-coming musicians and their local community elders, the aim is to ensure the regions’ unique songs, languages and history are properly passed on, while the elders are still able to do so.
Lek Mak celebrates the distinctive Pacific culture of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, which includes Buka and several smaller islands that lie between Papua New Guinea and the northern tip of the Solomon Islands archipelago. Previously considered part of PNG, there have…
Narrated by Suzanne Vega and performed by Belgian orchestra ICTUS and vocal ensemble Collegium Vocale Gent, ‘Einstein on the Beach’ re-imagines Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s influential (and divisive) 1976 opera as a 200-minute “minimalistic sound-bath”.
“We had no idea it was an opera,” explained Glass in 2013 to The Guardian when Einstein on the Beach was revived for a run in Melbourne. “You could call the piece anything you wanted to, but the only place we could perform it was an opera house. People began to talk about it as an opera. It was a discovery for us as it was for everybody else.” The truth is that it was an experiment – a long-form collaboration that attempted to skewer perceptions of narrative, instrumentation…
KontaktAudio presents the first-ever official release of the ultra rare and sought after B-Semi Live 24/5/1984 cassette, a rare and explosive document capturing a crucial moment in Japan’s underground noise and industrial music scene. Recorded at the legendary B-Semi venue in Tokyo, this performance brings together three pioneers – Merzbow, Null (K.K. Null), and Nord – delivering a raw, unfiltered onslaught of early Japanese noise music in its most intense form.
This historic recording showcases the primitive power and experimental spirit that defined the early Japanese noise music scene, sitting alongside the abrasive intensity of Whitehouse, the industrial ritualism of SPK, and the mechanical destruction of Throbbing Gristle.
Blood Cultures have always thrived in the shadows-anonymous figures cloaked in hoods, channeling psychedelic pop through the haze of Bollywood samples, bedroom electronics, and the uneasy glow of 1970s horror cinema. Now, the project is stepping into an entirely new arena: video games. The group’s fourth studio album also serves as the official soundtrack to Skate Story, the long-anticipated PlayStation title from developer Sam Eng.
It’s a natural collision. Eng’s surreal skateboarding odyssey-equal parts myth, motion, and melancholy-finds its mirror in Blood Cultures’ kaleidoscopic sound design. Across previous albums (Happy Birthday, Oh Uncertainty! A Universe Despairs, and LUNO), Blood Cultures…
Cover the Mirrors, the seventh album from power pop auteur Ben Kweller, is an expression of crushing grief delivered with unbelievable levels of hope and optimism. These songs are Kweller’s first creations since the tragic sudden loss of his son Dorian Zev, who died in 2023 in a car accident at age 16. This kind of world-rattling pain has often historically served as a catalyst for an artist either disappearing from the public eye, or returning to their art as a place to process overwhelming emotions. Cover the Mirrors, while by no means happy, finds Kweller facing all of the heartache and existential confusion related to the death of his son in songs that are honest, vulnerable, and often far more joyful than they are sad. “Don’t Cave” serves as a fairly direct mission…
Hailing from an altogether different type of Newcastle (down under) are an exciting new Australian outfit called dust. Their visceral brand of cathartic, confrontational guitar music not only picks up on the coattails of post-punk’s resurgence in recent years, but the four-piece also offer an acute lens of self-inquiry through their lyrics, honed by co-vocalists and guitarists Justin Teale and Gabriel Stove. Their live show pedigree speaks volumes having toured with Interpol globally as well as Slowdive and Bloc Party back home. Now after a string of releases, the band have put to record their most full-bodied material yet in the form of their debut album Sky Is Falling.
The essence of dust’s energetic roots is vibrant from the offset of their debut. Opening track…
Kim Wilson maintains two careers. He has been the one constant in the Fabulous Thunderbirds, the quartet that stormed out of Austin in the late ‘70s with Wilson as singer, harmonica player, and main songwriter and Jimmie Vaughan on guitar, and helped bring new energy to the blues.
The T-Birds’ start and their ascent through their “Tuff Enough” commercial apotheosis are chronicled in the excellent new eight-CD box set, The Jimmie Vaughan Years: Complete Studio Recordings 1978-89.
Wilson also keeps up a solo career, and that’s where he really seems to indulge his love of the blues. The new Slow Burn, the follow-up to 2020’s Grammy-nominated Take Me Back: The Bigtone Sessions, displays all the traits…
Courtney Hartman’s previous album, 2021’s Glade, was very much a solitary affair – Hartman recorded the bulk of it alone as she lived in a barn on the property of her childhood Colorado home – but with her new album, the appropriately titled With You, she reached out to those around her and created an album written, funded and recorded with her friends, fans and collaborators. The album documents a huge shift in Hartman’s life, too: becoming a mother for the first time.
Her journey to motherhood and beyond looms large over the album, beginning at the opening track ‘Softening’. “All of the edges now are softening / See the light almost standing still / For you,” Hartman opens, her voice barely more than a whisper, backed by an ethereal…
Following up from the collaboration on Vol.I from 2015, that drew from The Great Irish Songbook, Tony Christie and Ranagri continue the Tradition series where the combo delve into, erm, the Irish traditional library of work. At the time, it might have seemed an unusual collaboration, not so much for Ranagri but more for TC with his legacy of chart bothering hits and anthems known and loved by the masses, that took Cropredy by storm (as did Ranagri’s set) in 2023.
Clearly, the TC&R partnership is proving quite an unexpected success with not only has legs but an obvious mutual appreciation for one another and an affinity with the material. The evidence? Just check the moment in the Whiskey In The Jar video when Tony stands back and simply watches…
Implosion is a purely instrumental, collaborative album of cinematic, dystopian sounds from dubstepper and extreme electronica experimentalist the Bug and his pal Ghost Dubs. However, rather than working on the same tracks together, as could be implied, they have each applied their production know-how to alternate tunes on the two discs that make up this recording.
That isn’t to say that the sounds on Implosion swing from one flavour to another and back again. This is an album with a singular vision that is consistently eerie and sinister and has much in common with early 1990s ambient techno heads Sun Electric and the Sabres of Paradise, as well as Kevin Richard Martin’s (the Bug’s given name) alternative film soundtrack…
…Working, for the first time, under her given name rather than the usual moniker of Ale Hop, Alejandra Cárdenas shapes A Body Like a Home and the book of poetry that accompanies it in the form of a memory palace, fills its rooms with generational wounds, then gives each of them their own voice, reciting poignant verses over a porous fabric of electronic timbres, electric guitar, field recordings, and Mexican musician Gibrana Cervantes’s violin drones.
“What is the point of remembering, let alone recording life?”, Cárdenas ponders on the opener ‘On Memory’. Her voice is soft but laden with weariness as she reflects on histories and the cruelty of those who get to write and erase them. “Somewhere, you and I, we met in…
…remastered from original tapes, and comprises three previously-unreleased tracks, two rare cuts, and live version.
A milestone in post-punk experimentation, Desire captures Tuxedomoon at their most cinematic and atmospheric. Its mood of haunted romanticism and its category-defying blend of music have kept it influential among generations of musicians exploring the intersections of rock, electronic music, cabaret, minimal, jazz and classical music.
Desire was written just before the band’s relocation from San Francisco to Europe. It was recorded in the UK and released in 1981 on Ralph Records, The Residents’ own label, before being reissued in 1987 on CramBoy, the imprint created by Crammed Discs to host the band’s output.
Like Arya Stark without the training of an assassin, Julia Kugel is a musician with many faces: She leads The Coathangers, Soft Palms, the all-star squad Julia & the Squeezettes, and her own solo project, Julia, Julia. Her ambition is particularly remarkable given that, when I’ve touched base with her over the course of 2025, humility seemed to be her ostensible calling card. And it is on Sugaring a Strawberry, even if she’s releasing it through the seemingly self-focused moniker. Her second album as Julia, Julia magically resolves the inherent contradiction of the trendy term “mindfulness”: How can a practice intended to integrate one’s self with the outside world be reconciled with the fact that it is by definition a selfish exercise?
Let’s clarify: In a modern-day gathering of…
Sometimes, when you mix several disparate flavors together, you get something that tastes like mud. Occasionally, though, you’ll stumble across something delightful that you never previously knew existed. Regarding music, it’s admittedly easier to lean toward the latter outcome. When you start mixing genres, it’s usually a safe bet that you’ll get something that’s at least listenable. When bands like Khruangbin started getting wider airplay, many labelled them “global party music” because they blended various sounds from different parts of the planet into a good time. This is also what German jazz act Muito Kaballa is doing on their fifth album, Tomorrow a Flower. It’s a sharply more pop-oriented affair than what they’ve previously done. However, by stepping in that…
Commissioned by the Skopje Jazz Festival and premiered at its 42nd edition in 2023, After the Wildfire was performed live in an evening marked by the dim glow of the stage, an orchestra breathing with the electronics, the wealth of sounds conjured by sampler Jan Bang, and Arve Henriksen’s trumpet cutting through the hall like a quiet flame. The premiere offered an immersion into a unique sonic world. Now released as a physical album, the recording feels both familiar and freshly transformed — like the same landscape viewed at a different hour.
The album is built around an eight-movement suite, a careful weaving of live performance and studio work, though it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Nils Frahm shares a new CD of solo piano music, Night & Day. The CD includes all eleven tracks from both last March’s mini-album, ‘Day’, and its companion collection, ‘Night’.
The album follows Frahm’s latest live release, Paris, which came out in December 2024. With this, he also responds to repeated requests from fans for another CD release.
The tracks on ‘Night & Day’ serve as a reminder that, although Frahm has become widely acclaimed for the intricately arranged, multi-instrumental approach of his most commercially successful albums, he first made his name through meditative solo piano works. These earlier pieces include collections such as 2009’s ‘The Bells’, 2011’s ‘Felt’, and 2012’s ‘Screws’.
Radiance Opposition is the tenth album by Julie’s Haircut, one of Italy’s most enduring independent musical outfits: a band that has developed a genuine sonic catalogue through the years and which makes a renewal move with this record, their first full length since 2019.
With a title taking inspiration from the I Ching book of divination, and a six piece lineup introducing new singer and songwriter Anna Bassy joining the consolidated team formed by Nicola Caleffi, Luca Giovanardi, Andrea Rovacchi, Andrea Scarfone and Ulisse Tramalloni, Radiance Opposition collates an eight tracks cycle that generates a consistent yet multifaceted musical journey, combining psychedelia, electronica and polyrhythms – all blended together thanks to a syncretic…
Yes recorded the original version of ‘Fly from Here’ during breaks in touring in 2010 and 2011, during which they enlisted former Yes frontman Trevor Horn as producer. The original received mixed reviews and peaked at No. 30 on the UK Albums Chart and No. 36 on the US Billboard 200.
The alternative version of the album titled Fly from Here – Return Trip features the classic ‘Drama’ era line- up who were reunited in 2018 to create a new version featuring all new vocals from Trevor Horn plus new instrumental parts, alongside a more organic mix highlighting Chris Squire’s unique voice and bass contributions as well as additional parts from Steve Howe and Geoff Downes.
The original album was released on 25 March 2018 during the band’s 50th anniversary tour…
grande! grazie