Roy Montgomery – Roy Montgomery 40th Anniversary 2021 LP Series

I think it’s impossible to overestimate the important place Roy Montgomery has in the annals of New Zealand’s experimental rock scene.  Thanks to his work on labels such as Kranky Records and Drunken Fish, he has quite a high international profile, and it helps that the music he’s produced for Continue Reading

Santiago Fradejas – The Light Through The Springs

The guitar, all by itself, can serve as tool for making a haunting orchestra’s worth of sounds.  My good friend Santiago Fradejas, now resident in Kent, of all places (!) presents a mini-LP’s worth of brooding, swelling, lilting soundscapes.  There is a menacing element tying the album together, as though Continue Reading

Florian Arbenz, Hermon Mehari, Nelson Veras – Conversation #1: Condensed

Swiss drummer and percussionist Florian Arbenz was featured on our previous website, A Miscellany of Tasteful Music, some time in 2020 on a record he did with American saxophonist Greg Osby.  This album is equally as engaging. This slightly unusual line up of guitar, trumpet & drums might, at first Continue Reading

稷廬 / jì lú – 山與客聽 / Mountain, Traveler, Listener

The Sichuan, China-based Jì Lú (稷廬) are a new project that has connections with one of China’s most innovated bands, Raflum.  The instrumentation on this album is sparse, but it makes for good listening, as bamboo flute and guitar seem to blend pleasantly. Some notes regarding the release: When talking about landscapes in the traditional context, it’s mostly about reclusion.  Although true recluses are rare, the mountains and rivers are always there.  Ironically,  the real landscapes are actually “horrible nature” instead of some leisure place.  The traditional landscape paintings are a kind of “tame nature,” which were described as “To observe with meditation, and lie down to experience” and “Sitting in the forest and spring instead of go to banquet” by ancient Chinese poets.  It emerge at North and South Dynasty, then become a game of finding the essence during the Five Dynasties and the Song Dynasty, and finally stuck in the static self-development after the Ming and Qing Dynasties.  The development of landscape paintings are just like how people detach with the nature and entering urban life.  This album is the continuation of this thesis.  In a time when the virtual reality are replacing urban life, we attempt to reinterpret this cliche with improvisation that based on the topic of “landscape.”  We also naming the songs by minutes and seconds instead of the traditional way of titling the songs, which is based on its imagery.  That creates interactive between the “teller” and listener, and reflects the beauties for individuals due to their own aesthetic experiences.  At this time, the distant, outmoded, cumbersome and vague image of landscape might leave a huge space for “starting again.” Instrumental Continue Reading

Samo Salamon & Hasse Poulsen – String Dancers

Musicians never cease to amaze me.  Despite the horrible conditions which have led to worldwide lockdown, artists like Samo Salamon, a guitarist out of Slovenia, and Hasse Poulsen, originally from Denmark, manage to weave together an acoustic guitar-only album of improvisations that don’t sound like what you normally associate with Continue Reading

George Christian – África em mim

Our friend and colleague George Christian Vilela Pereira has released an album that I could only describe as mellow strumming psychedelic noise with elements of Krautrock and instrumental psych that one could have found in Japan in the late 70s and early 80s.  The lo-fi feel of the recording adds Continue Reading