New year, new Youtube channel. We plan on hosting podcasts here eventually, and would love input from you, our friends. May we all have a great 2022 filled with the best of music from around the world, both old and new.
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The Tomáš Kočko Orchestr are one of the great musical treasures of my new home city of Brno. They band mixes true Moravian folk music, including some melodies with pre-Christian roots (so, at least a millennium of music here), world music and even touches of metal to great effect. The concept of their latest album is based on the women of Moravia, whose character and strength preserved the culture despite attempted encroachments from within and without. From the band’s press release: The songs come from the Moravian folk tradition and talk about the experiences of the great-grandmothers of today’s women…
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As we have but one day left in the calendar, we bud you adieu with the legendary French cold wave band Clair Obscur doing Robert Burns proud.
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wahorn · The Wahorn Airport live at the Contemporary Wahorn Club Vol. 1. This is quite a peculiar album made by an old friend. András Wahorn had a storied history as the leader of one of Hungary’s most radical progressive rock bands, A.E. Bizottság, who released three albums of what they called disaster music. He also released works for the now-defunct record label Tone Casualties which tended to drift towards more experimental and improvisational music mixed with electronics. Wahorn isn’t making disastrous music these days. In fact, he’s managed to pull an album together informed by easy listening, lounge…
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Unexplained Sounds Group has had another stellar year releasing ambient, experimental and post-Industrial music from around the world in 2021. We had the pleasure of reviewing their mid-year compilation on July 28, and now that the year is complete, USG end the year by giving us 35 tracks from artists like Gintas K, Aidan Baker, Echoflex and a cast of many.
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Jagath is a field-recorded ritual ambient act from Perm, Russia who use handmade instruments, scraps and metal to make their dark, dank industrial sounds. As quoted from their Bandcamp site, “We do this to share our vision of decaying postindustrial age, to unleash the spirit of deep beyond-world and unveil life in the abyss.”
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I trust you, my friends, had a lovely Gregorian-Calendar Boxing Day. I spent mine listening to a Lebanese experimental band called Alif. At least as the liner notes on their Bandcamp site explain, it looks to be a collaboration between Lebanese and Egyptian musicians, and features the talents of the following musicians: Khyam Allami (Oud) Tamer Abu Ghazaleh (Vocals/Buzuq) Bashar Farran (Bass) Maurice Louca (Keys/Electronics) Khaled Yassine (Drums/Percussion) The music is so rich and complex that I’m having a bit of trouble putting to words how to describe it, but the best crack I can give at the moment is…
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Sufjan Stevens released this album in 2006, and it manages to hold up well. He does a fine job interpreting classic Christmas tunes that are charming, sometimes irreverent and silly, but it makes a fine listen as we prepare for the coming of the Savior of the Universe this snowy evening.
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As we near the close of a challenging 2021, we’re graced with a release by composer Jeff Gburek which features a rebab, a spiked fiddle. It’s an instrument he studied in Indonesia under Pak Suhardi, blended with synthesizers and electronic bloops and bleeps which left me feeling like I was listening to some remarkable sound experiments out of the old BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Jeff mentions below that there is no tradition of rebab-playing in Western electronic music, so he should be congratulated on consistently breaking new ground in this release. From his Bandcamp site: There aren’t many traditional compositions (if…
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The York Waits are a group out of York, England (no surprise there, right?), who specialize in Renaissance music from the 14th Century. This album is a reissue of a 1996 album where they paired with vocalist Deborah Catterall, who, 25 years after the release of this disc, served as Choral Director at Higham Hall, Cumbria and Voice Teacher at the Royal Northern College of Music before embarking on a private career. The music is not badly recorded – perhaps a bit compressed for choral music, and not as bright as it could be, but otherwise, the tunes are well-played…