This is the second guitar-based album we’ve had the pleasure of reviewing this week. This one comes from Mexican-French guitarist Hector (H.J.) Ayala who works out of Strasbourg, France. The album is a gentle, twangy, pleasantly meandering collection of tones which belong to a film which has not yet been…
This is one of those unsolicited posts that make blogging a pleasure. now|here are a dark ambient/post-Industrial music project out of Italy whose work reminds me, in a very positive way, of acts which used to appear on Sweden’s Cold Meat Industry imprint. The sounds here are cleaner, doomier, and…
Our friend and one of our perennial favorites at this blog, Jeff Gburek, comes to us with a mini-LP’s worth of meditative guitar music supplemented with an electro-acoustic bass berimbau, pine cones, and field recordings. There is an element of twangy, echoey, lo-fi music in these recordings which reminded me…
FRKTL is the nom de plume of British-Egyptian composer Sarah Badr, and her work straddles so many genres that it’s quite hard to describe accurately (a wonderful thing, as it means her work is incredibly fresh-sounding). There are, of course, long, drone-y elements to the music, but once you go…
Assembly Of Honey are a magnificent Russian ambient drone project related to the magazine Meticulous Midgets, friends of our blog. Their latest album has several tracks which would appeal to meditative musicians like Steve Roach, but also to New Age artists like Kitaro and even experimental bands like Britain’s O…
One of the most remarkable things about the series of compilations released by our friends at Unexplained Sounds Group is the great number of new artists they come into contact with, and serve as a launching board for. Of all the artists on this compilation, only Ryo Murakami’s work rings…
This acousmatic gem by French composer Benjamin Aït-Ali was released at the end of 2020, and it’s as engaging as anything I’ve heard this year. There are many electroacoustic and acousmatic composers active today, including in my old hometown, who are of stunning quality, but Benjamin offers something a bit…
We Want Sounds! is on a roll! They started off the year with a stunning collection of funk which I had the absolute joy of reviewing a coupe of weeks ago, and now this! Dixie Fever is a collaborative effort from guitarist Makoto Kubota, along with Takashi Onzo on bass, Yosuke…
Perhaps I’ll need to renew my subscription to The Wire or spend more time on other blogs, as I can’t believe I missed the work of Los Angelina Geneva Skeen. My hometown is producing so many fine artists working within ambient and electroacoustic music that it has become (happily) difficult…
Polish jazz legend Zbigniew Namysłowski has departed the world. He played alto saxophone, flute, cello, trombone and piano, and was equally at home playing straight-ahead jazz or acidy funk. He also played on what is considered to be the holy grail of Polish jazz albums, Krzysztof Komeda’s classic LP Astigmatic,…