We had the pleasure of reviewing Mong Tong last year. They have produced yet another surreal post-progressive electronic gem. On this album, there are elements of post-rock, modified traditional Taiwanese music, but also the eerie grooves which would do bands like Goblin proud, as the creepiness is quite subtle. Read their Bandcamp site for a more in-depth account of this latest album.
Our dear friends at Lost Tribe Sound start the year with two powerful releases, though I’ll concentrate on one today (with the other in the next week or so). This one is by Belgian composer ‘t Geruis (a rather unusual name, which, in Dutch, means “The Noise” or “The Murmur“). The album, at least the four rather remarkable tracks available to hear, have a grainy, organic quality to the loops which build and collapse in a still-life manner. The music has more in common with graphic art or experimental film than it does with cold, staid experimental music. Quite an…
I will be airborne most of today as I go from Moscow to Los Angeles to handle some personal business, so In honor of this momentous event, I present you with what was one of the first Russian jazz/improv/Avant-rock albums I ever heard, from two legends: Sergey Kuryokhin & Boris Grebenshchikov
Our dear friend Drem Bruinsma, the BlindººCoyote in question, provides a 20-minute track of ambient loops, eerie rhythms and and enchanting soundscapes. From his Bandcamp site: “Inspired by personal hikes into various shadowless desert arroyos, to meet with silence, coyotes, antelope, dust and rocks, leveling with tumbleweeds and sagebrushes from a different perspective, walking on those eroded, shallow dry riverbeds, meandering arid nature’s hidden trails when you lose track of time and where you encounter hiding parts of your identity. This track simulates the immersive, enveloping experience of slow- changing minimal landscapes observed from a ground-level perspective, the shallow dry…
This album is magnificently weird. Imagine a band out of Thailand with minimal, ghostly musicianship, slightly ghoulish, off key vocal dronings, the plinky-plonking of piano and spoken words that sound like it might have been influenced by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. This sublime mixture comes from the band a world wondered full, and I have to saw that the album is creepy gorgeousness to it. I’m now a convert to their music.
This is a curious release. Cergy-Pontoise are an Italian duo, and their albim starts out with drone-y ambient sounds but then falls into atmospheric progressive-folk at times, sounding like a better recorded lo-fi artist out of New Zealand, perhaps. There are also elements of space rock, prog and psychedelic music in this. It’s a mixed bag in the positive sense of the word.
During the next few weeks, I’ll be catching up on releases I could not get to in 2021. This one is really a gem that I’m surprised I didn’t get to earlier, but thanks to Jeff Gburek reminding me of it, I can happily present this release he did in collaboration with another one of the blog’s dear friends, George Christian. The two tracks which go under the name The Charles Ives Observatory (Parts 1 and 2) bookend the centerpiece of the album, the 28-minute opus Magellanic Clouds. The CIO tracks have the feeling of classic-era electroacoustic music imbued with…
My fellow Californian Ernesto Diaz-Infante provides us with a warm, shimmering work of nine instrumental pieces composed solely for guitar. Each track is warm, not only by experimental music standards, but in terms of pure music listening. My particular favorite was IV, which reminded me of a hybrid between John Fahey and Roy Montgomery playing while immersed in a silvery pool of water well outside this realm. It made for a very pleasant listening experience. For a hard copy of this release, go to Headlights Recordings.
Many years ago, I was enthralled with the music of 4AD artist His Name Is Alive, but lost track of what they were doing. That’s a shame, as Warren Defever has continued to be involved in great music, and this one has to be one of the most interesting I’ve seen in a while, as it’s a paean to Roky Erickson and The Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Defever isn’t the only star on this compilation, however. Also featured are Phew (best known for her work with Can in the West) and Model Home, a band out of Washington, D.C., who left…
As we observe Christmas Eve and the Nativity today and tomorrow based on the Julian Calendar, we share an avant-garde take on “Christmas” music. The French experimental record label Camembert Électrique have released a 94-track comp of some rather interesting takes of some Yuletide classics, as well as a fair number of originals. Some of the artists included include Anastasia Vronski, Sean Derek Cooper Marquart, James Hoehl, and our dear friends, Lezet. It’s not a conventional compilation for the season, but it holds its own rather well.