Kawabata Makoto is the leader of Acid Mother’s Temple, Japan’s greatest modern psychedelic rock group. He’s also a wildly experimental composer, with this album being influenced by musique concrète and drone as well as the usual psych one expects from him.
Pogus Records has released a treasure from Belgian electroacoustic composer Leo Kupper, who is finally being recognized as a master of his field.
In honor of returning to lovely Belgrade, I salute the occasion with Serbian electrostatic composer Manja Ristić, now based in Croatia.
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…
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.
Soundtrack composers don’t seem to need films to cue inspiring, haunting scores anymore. Take, for example, the new double album by Californian composer William Ryan Fritch. The story that goes along with this fabulous artifact is as impressive as the music is. We let the label, Lost Tribe Sounds, tell the story below, courtesy of their Bandcamp site: ‘Built Upon a Fearful Void‘ was an album seemingly fated to never be completed. For the last 8 years the album had been recorded and either lost or discarded three times; a leak that water logged and ruined most of the half…
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…
I’ve had the pleasure of reading about Farren Fages‘ work for at least 20 years now, but I never had a chance to fully explore his work. I’m happy to say that I regret not diving into his catalogue earlier. It’s impressive, to say the least. This particular album, Llum Moll, is a 41-minute audio sculpture which was originally released in 2012. According to his notes on the Bandcamp page hosting this release, “The composition was made in two parts. The first was to record and then select fragments with different lengths, pitches and textures. The second was to re-adjust…
Valerio Orlandini is a sound designer and composer from Firenze, Italy whose work reminds me of that of artists like French electroacoustic music composers like François Bayle or Michel Chion. It is, of course, dark, nearly claustrophobic, music. Yet it has a nice cinematic feel to it. He’ll be worth watching and listening to as the years pass.
First, a debt of thanks goes to Dimitris Tsironis who took the time to send me this compilation for review. His label, 1tracktape, is doing a great service exposing Greek experimental and avant-garde music to the world, and the quality of this compilation is superb. What’s more, the label is unique in that it releases albums every New Moon and (most of) Full Moon dates. I can’t say I’ve heard of any other labels maintaining such a specific schedule, so each moon that pops up will be an opportunity to check out what new releases Mr. Tsironis has in store for…