Expand your taste in music. Based in Beijing, China.
I can’t say where L’Aventure des Plantes are for sure, but their record label, Kotorosl Records, is from Barcelona, Spain. The music is highly influenced by Berlin School electronics, experimental music and ambient music, and they do honor to the genres.
Greek experimental composer Savvas Metaxas has scored music for a choreography project that sounds more like a very relaxed version of electroacoustic music. It’s sumptuous headphone listening, I have to say. From his record label Noise Below’s Bandcamp site:
With a cover photo from Sofia Tolika’s amazing ‘mundus’ photobook, that toys with stasis/motion, and artwork by meteoros.
it could be nothing but the soundtrack for the return of the octopus to its hometown after a 12-year odyssey.”
N.R. Safi is the leader of the band psychedelic rock/drone band The Myrrors, yet this side project goes off on into a rather personal trajectory for him. This particular release combines the drone and rock he’s mastered, but it’s also layered with tapes from Afghanistan, where his roots are. Imagine Throbbing Gristle and Amon Düül II jamming in the outskirts of Kabul with local musicians, and maybe you’d get close to the vibe this album is giving.
I have a proud history with Slovenian composer and guitarist Borut Kržišnik. Many years ago, I ran a small record label of note called Falçata-Galia, and I launched the label with his album Stories From Magatrea. He has continued to make amazing music since then, and is currently exploring the point where contemporary classical music and soundtracks collide. This release is from 2013. I wish him continued success.
I had the pleasure of watching Otomo Yoshihide perform live about 30 years ago in Los Angeles, and his turntable wizardry made me a lifelong fan. It pleases me to see that labels are still carefully releasing his body of work, and this album is among my favorites. The album is full of short snippets, records mixed together, sound samples layer one on top of the other, blended, stirred and shaken to make one of the best experimental music albums of the late 1990s. A must for turntablists.
Douglas Tewksbury is an ambient musician out of, I believe, Canada. I am quite impressed with the spacious and elegant nature of his music. From his record label, HushHush’s Bandcamp site:
“‘Brutes‘ serves as a follow-up Tewksbury’s debut album ‘Paths.’ Released by the boutique Dutch label Geertruida Records in June 2021, Paths signaled Tewksbury’s initial intersection of music with his full-time work as a professor and researcher. Currently teaching at Niagara University in Lewiston, New York with a specialization in the media’s role in interpreting and affecting the debate on climate change, Tewksbury’s academic work has taken him on travels to cold-weather climates and ice-covered landscapes in places such as Norway, Sweden, Newfoundland, Alaska, and in Canada. These eye-opening experiences forced him to confront and ultimately commemorate the singular feeling of both unbearable beauty and unbearable loss in the slowly dissolving erasure of these ice-covered lands. In discussing the meaning and motivation behind ‘Paths,’ Doug says, “I wanted to try to make moments of stillness and transcendence in the face of looming disaster. It’s not easy to look at where we are with climate change and environmental destruction and be hopeful—and I’m pretty pessimistic about our odds—but I guess I just wanted to make something beautiful for listeners. I don’t really know if art can save us, but it seems especially important right now.”“
It seems like Donny Vegas has been listening to all the right post-punk records for my taste. One can hear influences of early Cabaret Voltaire, Suicide, a touch of Throbbing Gristle, and yet, by some odd miracle, it sounds both fresh and lo-fi. A quirky release, but I like this.
Thanks to Filip of Z Tapes for the magnificent suggestion.
I suppose we can coin a new term for this magnificent music out of Breton dark ambient composer Eric Latteux (who composed under the name Internal Fusion): Kosmische dark ambient. I seem to be finding a fair amount of music like this these days, and our dear friends at Mahorka have released another gem.
Cuneiform Records offered this album as a half-price release this weekend, and though I already had the album, I thought it would be good to note what an amazing album this was back in its prime.
Birdsongs of the Mesozoic are a band from Boston, Massachussets who have been active for well over 40 years now, and are perhaps America’s best representative of avant-progressive rock, having no difficulty straddling the lines of aggressive prog rock with classical music, much like their European contemporaries Art Zoyd and Univers Zero, among others.
It boggles the mind that our friends at Unexplained Sounds Group continue to scour the earth for the best ambient music around.
From the label’s website:
Liang YiYuan was born in Wuhan (China, 1977), and now living in Lijiang, Yunnan Province. He painted in his early years, and later turned to make music. So far, he has published more than twenty albums, frequently using instruments such as guitar, yangqin, violin, guqin, bawu, and showing a natural attitude to unconventional playing techniques and original timbre. He also creates music for films, plays, modern dances, architectural and environmental scenes, and exhibitions.
“Those That Die In A Dream” is a retrospective of his latest 20 years music creations, an eclectic kaleidoscope of compositions and improvisations spreading from the abstract electronic and dark ambient suggestions to the unconventional revisitation of Chinese music tradition. Among the most fascinating and aesthetically complete expressions of the contemporary “new music”, not only from China, but worldwide.