I can’t say I’ve ever had the pleasure of introducing Chihei Hatakeyama to my readers before, but he is a master of elegant sound design. These three compositions are based on his travel to Amami Oshima, north of Okinawa.
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Great news, yet again, has been provided to us by our dear friends at Wewantsounds! From their Bandcamp site: “Wewantsounds is delighted to announce the first international reissue of Ayako Shinozaki’s hard to find LP “Music Now For Harp” released in 1974 by Nippon Columbia. The LP was released on the label’s cult “Master Sonic” series and features Shinozaki’s harp soundscape on works by renowned composer Toru Takemitsu and Katsuhiro Tsubono. The highlight of the album is the spaced-out, ethereal 25-min ambient epic ‘Heterodyne’ featuring cult musician Takehisa Kosugi (Taj Mahal Travellers, Group Ongaku) on electric violin and sound waves.…
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VIRUS2020 are a wonderfully freakish project out of Tunisia which manages to bring together soundtrack music, post-Industrial references and post-rock into a thoroughly weird and engaging stew. This is a fun headphone listen.
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This is a curious release. Abandoned Toys manages to balance ethereal ambient music with symphonic progressive rock. A rather brilliant balance, indeed.
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William Ryan Fritch’s lastest disc is the, “second in a three-part series reflecting on the many calamitous water crises affecting life on this planet.” Cohesion is a bit darker than the previous album, Polarity, but there is a more organic feel to it. From Fritch’s Bandcamp site: “In contrast to ‘Polarity,’ which was largely created by synthesized and electronic signals being transformed into acoustic phenomena. ‘Cohesion’ was constructed solely from acoustic instruments (baritone and alto saxophones, oboe, contrabass clarinet, bassoon, tuba, etc) mic’d and processed live to behave and sound like synthesized and/or sequenced sound sources. Using multiple contact mics,…
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Jeff Gburek’s recent instrumental guitar album is a a wonderfully disjointed trip around his sonic weapon of choice. It’s a truly wild work, but Jeff weaves his vast musical influences together with hints of a broken kind of blues, free jazz, improvisational skronk and psychedelic rock. In Jeff’s words, which you can read in full at Ramble Records‘ Bandcamp site: “In attempting to move into the future of the guitar or the post-guitar (as in the case of Kevin Drumm or Annette Krebs where the guitar became deconstructed and/or displaced into other electro-acoustic processes, if you will), I also discovered aspects…
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Our beloved friends at Russia’s finest indie music magazine, Meticulous Midgets, has released their annual compilation of weird experimental, lo-fi and avant-garde music. Featured artists include Russia’s own Assembly of Honey, the Italian ambient sound sculptor Marco Lucchi and Latvia’s Шумилов Бор (Shumilov Bor) among a host of talent worldwide.
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Folks, we have a very long wait for JOHN 3:16’s next opus (April of 2024), but judging based on how good the samples have been so far, this is going to be the band’s most profound release yet. The tension on the album reminds me of early, more Industrial-era Laibach with elements of the Swans, but with a more cinematic feel to it. Be patient, the whole thing will come to be soon enough.
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I’ll be in-flight over South Korea by the time you’re reading this post, and I thought I’d leave you with an incredibly rich and diverse album by Russian pianist Ivan Grebenschikov and his group. The Endless Winter is his latest work, and it is a seamless combination of art-rock, contemporary classical music and prog, though more discerning ears might even find correlations to artists on the ECM and Enja Records stable. Stunningly good.
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Judging by the sole track available from AKP Recordings artist, the Brooklyn-based Palestinian-American Omar Ahmad, this album should be considered one of those albums you listen to at 3 a.m. in order to relax and be at one with God. The chilled out atmosphere of the track Lapses is shimmering, but not overly so. What won me over to this release was the interesting one-sheet I received with the promo kit: “At times recalling the emotional landscape of Fennesz and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Cendre, Inheritance weaves an auditory narrative that evades genre constraints. Enveloping orchestral ambience gives way to hypnotic Arab…