Month: September 2021

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F.P. & The Doubling Riders – Doublings & Silences Vol. I

The Doubling Riders were one of those bands that came out of 1980s Italy who were criminally neglected. It’s great to see this published digitally.  This reissue came out today, and it was considered a big score in my collection when I had the vinyl version.  From the Bandcamp site:

The Doubling Riders were born in the middle of the ’80s from the ashes of the great experimental / minimal wave project A.T.R.O.X. around the trio of Francesco Paladino, Pier Luigi Andreoni, and Riccardo Sinigaglia (Professor of Electronic composition at Milan’s Conservatory).

Starting from an electronic music approach and working freely with ethno, folk and wave elements, the sound of the Doubling Riders was extremely original and hard to classify.

Mostly quiet, meditative stuff, with folk, experimental electronic influences and some unusual vocalizations, some sang in a strange Italian dialect.

Even if often compared to the more intellectual electronic experimental bands like Tuxedomoon, Coil or Vox Populi, Doubling Riders can be easily considered a unique project within the Italian new music scene.

 

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Maryam Sirvan – Feast On My Body

We have to wait eight more days to hear the complete work, but given the two tracks Maryam Sirvan has made available, this will be worth the wait.  There were two artists which came to mind while listening to the tracks over and over – Tim Buckley at his most experimental, and ‘Dogs Blood Rising‘-era Current 93.  This should be seen as an electroacoustic album, and would compare very favorably to those artists like Bernard Parmegiani who could depict a hellish landscape in what some wrongly think is an academic medium.  This album is truly that weird, and it sounds magnificent for it.

It’s not my normal Sunday morning post-liturgy music, but there is a gloriously horrendous feel to it, marking in some way, a societal collapse we all seem to be witnessing worldwide.

Should we survive the apocalypse, we have solid albums like this to remind us of the feelings of those dark times we lived in.

 

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Southeast of Rain (东南有雨) – 42 Days (四十二天)

Sophia Shen and Lemon Guo work together as Southeast of Rain (东南有雨), an electroacoustic/field recording project based in the United States, with one living in New York and the other living in the San Francisco Bay area.

The album is the result of 42 days of mixing avant-garde experimental music, natural sounds, traditional Chinese instruments and improvisational techniques and sublime vocal work into a gentle, though very experimental album.

I request this of everyone, but specifically of my former students in Beijing – take the time to listen to this.  It is a stunningly beautiful piece of work.

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High Pulp – Motel Money (feat. Takuya Kuroda)

High Pulp hail from Seattle, Washington and are currently being published by Anti- Records, best known for releasing albums by Tom Waits, Neko Case and Antibalas.  This sounds like none of them, and it caught my attention in a most pleasant way.

Motel Money is a single track, and it’s a burner.  This is an instrumental track, and it mixes in everything from avant-garde jazz to beat-driven R&B to psychedelic synthesizer-heavy electronica, as their release page indicates.  Add to this the stellar trumpet playing by Takuya Kuroda, and you have something that can equal any of the nu jazz bands coming out of New York or London these days.

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Euphemia Rise – Born a Cow

Euphemia Rise is a rather remarkable project run by Wim Lankriet.  Born a Cow is Wim’s debut album, and it’s quite a fine work, combining an acidic psychedelic music which reminds me of Syd Barrett in parts while maintaining a 1980’s-1990’s gothic feel.

Lyrically, it is a heavy album covering such topics as. “being (sexually) different and facing people’s judgments – but also venture into darker subjects such as drug prostitution, sadomasochism, rape…”

Wim notes, and I would strongly agree, that the tone is never negative.  I’m not sure this music put a smile on my face, but it left me intrigued.  A solid debut.

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Alexei Aigui – 1000 Miles Till The Next Embrace EP

Our friend and noted composer Alexeï Aïgui was just featured here recently for his releases, Palimpsest and Alcohol, at the end of July, and it seems that he’s kept himself quite busy as of late, so we’re pleased to announce this EP, a soundtrack to the film 1000 Miles Till The Next Embrace, a documentary on tango directed by Irina Rubia.

Alexeï has proven himself to be among the best of this generation of soundtrack composers, but there is one track which utterly stands out for me, the fifth track, titled Freeze.  It has a feeling of a post-rock composition, rather gentle but stirring with power.  The EP is quite a fine piece of work, which should come as no surprise to those who enjoy Alexeï’s work.

If you wish to hear the album in high quality, or if you want to purchase it as a FLAC file, consider going to Qobuz, one of two streaming services I truly appreciate.  They simply to a better job than Spotify does, and a purchase is a great way to support the artist.

 

 

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Miša Blam – Sećanja

This is one of the coolest archival recordings I’ve come across in some time!  Serbian bassist Miša Blam (Serbian bio only) is a name known to jazz aficionados because of his work with legends like Chet Baker and Sal Nistico, but this album is a minor disco classic.  A lot of jazz-funk was popular throughout Yugoslavia (think of musicians like Igor Savin, Josipa Lisac and the legendary Janko Nilović), but this album was limited to 1,000 copies.

Everland Music has preserved a classic of the genre, and are owed a debt of thanks for this re-release.

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Psycho & Plastic – Soundtrack 2: Pappel

I seem to be running into a lot of Berlin-school style musicians recently, but this is the first one I’ve run into who is actually from the Berlin area.  From Psycho & Plastic‘s Bandcamp site:

Award-winning German author Dalibor Markovi​​ć commissioned Psycho & Plastic to create an original soundtrack for his debut novel ‘Pappel. Die Geschichte eines Herumtreibers’ on the heels of their 2020 ambient masterpiece ‘Placid House’ and ‘Soundtrack 1: Schwelen’. Scheduled for a simultaneous release, book and album are deeply intertwined in form and content.

‘Soundtrack 2: Pappel‘ follows the novel’s tree-turned-human protagonist Konrad Pappel on his tour de force through 150 years of German history, equating each of the novel’s seven chapters with a track of the same title. The instrumental music mindfully mirrors the inner worlds and real life adventures of this unlikely character. Consequently, the album closely traces the book’s arc of suspense, its emotions and atmospheres. It is Psycho & Plastic’s most cinematic work to date, with orchestral timbres and arrangements directly referencing film scores. However, the Berlin-based duo does not stop there. From ambient serenity to claustrophobic dread, from organic explorations of freedom to gritty electronic rigidity, Psycho & Plastic weave their compositions across microscopic planes and cosmic expanses alike.

The music has a strong appeal both as an accompaniment to Marković’s work and as stand-alone music you can enjoy on its own merits.  This will appeal greatly to the Kosmische music, electronic music and prog fans who visit these pages.