• Music

    Savvas Metaxas – Music for Dance Performance

    July 10, 2022 - By 

    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: “Savvas Metaxas’s music for the choreography/action ‘who knows where time goes – potential destination #1’, slightly modified for this release without losing the sense of experiencing its first steps and its ongoing development, making the listener feel like they are participating in the action. With a cover photo from Sofia Tolika’s amazing ‘mundus’ photobook, that toys with stasis/motion, and artwork by…

  • Music

    Liang YiYuan (梁奕源) – Those That Die In A Dream. A twenty years retrospective

    July 2, 2022 - By 

    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…

  • Music

    Roger Doyle – Oizzo No

    March 17, 2022 - By 

    Roger Doyle, like his equally talented countryman (and friend) Daniel Figgis, doesn’t get his fair shake inside of his home country of Ireland, yet is better regarded in the U.K. and the European continent as a master of electroacoustic music.  This version of Oizzo No is a reworking of the original album (which you can hear here) and it has a rather fascinating back story: “Originally part-recorded and subsequently aborted when the would-be label vanished without trace overnight, Oizzo No was shelved indefinitely until a scholarship at the prestigious Institute Of Sonology at the University Of Utrecht in Holland afforded…

  • Music

    Benjamin Aït-Ali – FIN

    February 12, 2022 - By 

    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.

  • Music

    Geneva Skeen – Double Bind

    February 10, 2022 - By 

    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…

  • Music

    Bérangère Maximin – Land Of Waves

    December 12, 2021 - By 

    Land Of Waves, the 6th album by French electroacoustic composer Bérangère Maximin, came out in June of 2020, and when I first heard it, was was left utterly impressed, but I have not had a chance to review it until today.  Maximin has an incredible talent to blend together nature, minerals, plant life, animal life, city life, and make it speak in one warmly organized opus.  I will have to check if she has released something since then, but, as this is the latest work I can find from her, I can say with some measure of confidence that she’s…

  • Music

    Luneta Freedom Jazz Collective – Slaves and Masters

    November 29, 2021 - By 

    Quite an impressive band out of the Philippines, courtesy of Mahorka Records out of Bulgaria.  Some info from their Bandcamp site: Luneta Freedom Jazz Collective is an experimental jazz group from Manila, Philippines. Their first studio album “Ethos”, was recorded and released in April 2015. The group would go on to be featured at 2015’s To Be Continued on Stazione di Topolò/Global Health Incubator. Their second album, “Inland Empire” was released in 2017. In 2021 their third album, “Slaves and Masters”, comes out on Mahorka, the dialectic as a narrative that examines the exploitation of labour and social stratification, with…

  • Music

    Jelena Glazova – Bardo Thodol (Eliane Radigue Tribute)

    November 8, 2021 - By 

    I came to the work of Latvian noise musician and composer Jelena Glazova originally through her collaborations with the legendary Russian noise maestro Alexei Borisov. This four-track album is a paean to the work of French soundscape artist and composer Élaine Radigue, perhaps the foremost sound composer operating today.   Glazova used processed voice, her laptop and controllers to sculpt these works.  They were recorded and mastered in Riga between 2016 – 2019.  The drones wash over the ears magnificently.