• Music

    Euphemia Rise – Born a Cow

    September 14, 2021 - By 

    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…

  • Music - Music Documentaries

    Alexei Aigui – 1000 Miles Till The Next Embrace EP

    September 13, 2021 - By 

    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,…

  • Music

    Miša Blam – Sećanja

    September 12, 2021 - By 

    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.

  • Music

    Psycho & Plastic – Soundtrack 2: Pappel

    September 11, 2021 - By 

    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…

  • Music

    Li Yilei – 之 (Of)

    September 9, 2021 - By 

    Li Yilei is a London-based sound artist based whose roots are Chinese.  Li’s latest album, Of (Chinese: 之) reminds me of some of the amazingly good Japanese new age ambient releases of the 1980s which seem to be gaining a lot of attention like Hiroshi Yoshimura and some of Haruomi “Harry” Hosono’s more eclectic albums outside of his work with the Yellow Magic Orchestra. The instrumentation consists of analogue synthesizers, vocal samples, field recordings and string instruments such as the violin and guqin (I was introduced to the instrument while teaching in China back in 2018), and Li is also…

  • Music

    Xerxes The Dark – Soundtrack To The Blind Owl

    September 8, 2021 - By 

    I feel a bit silly admitting this, but for some reason, I thought I had Soundtrack To The Blind Owl previously.  Iran’s foremost dark ambient composer Xerxes The Dark has been active for many years now, and is part of a pretty amazing scene developing in one of the least likely places on Earth.  Then again, with the Internet, I am expecting mind-blowing post-Industrial music to pop out of Togo or Burkina Faso eventually. To the music.  There are six tracks of ominous drone on this album.  This isn’t a typical drone or ambient album, however.  Xerxes expertly mixes in…

  • Music

    Frames – In Via

    September 6, 2021 - By 

    Frames aren’t quite a new name for me, but it seems I missed this post-rock gem.  I was amused to read that a lot of post-rock fans don’t see much good in this album because it doesn’t fit their pre-conceived notions of what music in the genre should sound like, I suppose.  For me, I like that it goes nowhere in particular, a bit like a drive down a highway on a Sunday afternoon with no particular point you’re traveling to.  Musically, this is a solid album, not as metal as other post-rock bands (which for my taste is a…

  • Music

    Jodi – Spherical Distortions

    September 5, 2021 - By 

    Guerssen Records out of Catalonia, Spain is known for putting out some amazingly weird psych and lo-fi music, but this one has to be one of the most charmingly weird ones in their catalog. Two Paraguayan brothers of German origin, Joern and Dirk Wenger, self-released an album in 1971 called Pops de Vanguardia and had a deal with EMI-Argentina for a series of albums which came out and gained them a bit of fame, but Joern was also a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, so you know his weirdo bona fides were going to be solid.  This album does not disappoint at…

  • Music

    Various Artists – Anthology Of Exploratory Music From India

    September 4, 2021 - By 

    India is a country with such an embarrassingly rich musical history that it boggles the mind as to how good it is, and it’s not merely their traditional music.  Jazz, pop, progressive rock, metal and everything else you can imagine seems to flourish there, yet there is only one problem.  There is very little effort exerted to spread their fine music culture outside their borders in the way, say, South Korea or Japan have. As this blog is focusing more on outside music, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay and our friend Raffaele Pezzella have compiled a list of the best experimental musicians from…

  • Music

    Enji – Ursgal

    September 3, 2021 - By 

    Enji Erkhem is a jazz singer who is originally from Mongolia, but who currently calls Munich, Germany, home.  She has quite an interesting personal story, growing up in a yurt to a working-class family, traveling to Germany to study music pedagogy, and getting utterly inspired by jazz singers like Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald and Nancy Wilson, while adding folk elements into this framework. Though vocal jazz fans will find much to enjoy in this album, the track which most piqued my interest was the track Aya, which swings and sways in a way that reminded me of Björk’s jazz album,…