Expand your taste in music. Based in Beijing, China.
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 made. Ayala continues to develop his mastery of the guitar and the ambience he brings to his compositions. Another solid release.
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 loaded with a synthetic classical underpinning I like. Perhaps I can say that this is a better-produced dungeon synth. Enjoyable.
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 of the primordial, primitive guitar stylings of Robbie Basho or John Fahey blended with touches of American psychedelic folk as heard by bands such as Texas’ acid-folk legends Charalambides.
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 into tracks 3 and 4 (Hverfa af himni heiðar stjörnur and Hart er með hölðum, respectively, you start hearing elements of techno (!), bleak synthetic choruses sounding like the angels reciting the liturgy over the bowels of Hades (or, in this case, Hel, in order to maintain a proper cosmology). The pulses are warm, it maintains a consistently interesting rhythm, and the percussive effects sound as though soft bombs are continually going off, gently hitting the ears with a sense of force that somehow remains pleasant.
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 Yuki Conjugate. There is a calming aspect to the music that, frankly, I needed to hear after a stressful Valentine’s Day. Well done, as always.
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 a bell. Masayuku Imanishi’s work sounds like a newsroom printing press staffed by Throbbing Gristle and Hélène Sage. USG continue to release the finest in post-Industrial music.
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 different to my ears. There’s a nostalgic sound involved, almost as if he were cutting and splicing these sounds together by hand. I don’t know his compositional or recording technique, of course, but there are warm pops and cracks throughout the recording. It’s truly cinema for the ears.
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 Fujita on guitar/mandolin, Keni Inoue on lead guitar, Hiroki Komazawa on pedal steel guitar, and Kubota himself on guitar. The secret sauce in this album comes from co-producer Haruomi “Harry” Hosono, and this work, mixing American swamp funk, blues, music from the Hawaiian islands and their own local influences from Japan, was just a bit before his transformation to a techno-don of the seminal Yellow Magic Orchestra. Kubota is firmly in command here was mellow, slightly Beatlesque guitar playing and warm vocals befitting such music. Yet another gem. For a more in-depth review, we point you to a review published by The Vinyl Factory.
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 to keep up with this wellspring of talent.
Double Bind defies proper categorization, sitting somewhere between academic musique-concrète, noise-style improvisation and a touch of mysticism in Skeen’s work. Though bleak, there is a feeling of being inside of a warm, pulsating, silvery ocean in these compositions. The one which won me over was the second track, Leveled Ground, Bottomless Pit. These compositions are, in every sense of the word, alive. The listener will feel the sounds go in and out of the ears and tingle the bones a bit.
She has made me a fan, and I look forward to hearing the rest of her catalog. Touch Music and Room40, among other labels, have unleashed a treasure.
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, as well as collaborating with local luminaries like Janusz Muniak, Leszek Możdżer, Vladislav Sendecki, Michał Urbaniak, and Andrzej Trzaskowski. He was 82. You can read his obituaries here and here.
Requiescat in pace.