News & Events
Buzz Bin
The enigmatic Amara Touré from Guinée Conakry finally getting a well deserved compilation showcasing all of the 10 songs ever released between 1973 and 1980. Cuban-influenced music of a different kind featuring amazing spaced-out guitar works!!
If Touré's intention was to create the most sensual music ever recorded in Africa, he might very well have reached this goal. The musicians on the recording sound like they are playing in a smokey, poorly lit juke joint, where dark rum was sipped ever so slowly, and the pulse of the music took up a life of its own. How many couples have danced, swayed, and melted together to the distinct sound of Amara Touré? Nobody can say for sure...
It took only ten songs for Amara Touré to become a legend. These ten treasures, representing Touré ́s complete discography, have been carefully re-mastered from original session tapes and vinyl records, and will be released by Analog Africa on 22 June 2015.
After the release of his LP in 1980, Touré seems to have disappeared. Apparently he was last seen in Cameroon but it is unknown if he is still alive today. His music though is definitely alive.
More information can be found here.
- Parent Category: News & Events
- Category: Buzz Bin
- Hits: 4332
Hermetically sealed and reveling in tumult, All Tense Now Lax is the most significant and developed work yet forged by Liberez. Based in main orchestrator John Hannon's remote studio No Recordings in Rayleigh, England, Liberez have expanded their palette from previous outings on Alter to produce a perfectly engineered machine that consumes the beholder.
A tense, gut-wrenching listen wrought with carefully considered space, the range of techniques and the depth of atmosphere is staggering. All Tense Now Lax never settles on a simple depiction of dread, foreboding or anxiety but layers textures upon rhythms to produce towering minarets of conflicting emotion. _Захвална породица (translated "Grateful Family") is a case in point: Hannon's wailing violin is torn across collaborator Nina Bosnic's lyric, while a loping beat is crushed with distortion. Indeed, a more pronounced focus on rhythm and movement on Liberez' 3rd album is perhaps what sets it apart from previous work. Centerpiece "Grease The Axles" showcases Hannon's technique of detourning from other cultures to dramatically altered effect. A lopsided rhythm and scraped violin are torn to breaking point: what starts off as a Moondog-esque tap at a train station ends with the train in flames. Liberez' brutality is not as literal as this all the time: on "How Much For Your Brother" an aggressively over-driven vocal loop is hammered into the stereo field by primitive percussion courtesy of drummer Pete Wilkins, but the overall effect is one of movement and hypnosis. A Rebetika melting into night- terror. The title track, meanwhile, presents a premature eulogy, coming halfway through what is an all-consuming album of frightening power.
John Hannon's breadth of technical mastery on All Tense Now Lax is never fully revealed in an ostentatious way. Instead the album is allowed to breathe and evolve, with field recordings, industrial patterns and alienated instrumentation woven together seamlessly. A tumultuous experience which transports rather than grounds the participant.
Out July 24 on LP and CD.
More information can be found here.
- Parent Category: News & Events
- Category: Buzz Bin
- Hits: 4278
Flying Saucer Attack release Instrumentals 2015, their first album in 15 years on Friday the 17th of July 2015. Comprised of 15 fresh David Pearce solo performances recorded in characteristically lo-fi manner at home, using guitars only on tape and CD-R, Instrumentals 2015 is an album that will appeal both to FSA diehards and those wholly unfamiliar with the outfit's recorded output.
The 15 tracks on Instrumentals 2015 present an impressionistic narrative which transports the listener through the excoriating dronescapes and rueful introspection of the album's early pieces to the more redemptive cadences of its closing half. Given its sense of momentum, maintained through Pearce's thoughtful sequencing, this is an album that should be experienced in its entirety, the better to appreciate its deliberate emotional arc.
More information can be found here.
- Parent Category: News & Events
- Category: Buzz Bin
- Hits: 4142
The trajectory of Alex Cobb's music over the course of the last decade could be viewed as a distillation of tone and atmosphere to arrive at Chantepleure, his most optimistic and sanguine musical statement to date. The album, however, was created at a time of heartache, isolation and emotional upheaval and acts as a balm of tender tones where abstract guitar lines circle and suspend in a kind of refined elegance. Noise, once a hallmark of Cobb’s music, has not been entirely removed, but manifests here in a different form.
A delicate dissonance shades the edges of the these four tracks, providing textural color and gorgeously offsetting the lush nature of the music. Even in short spans, this approach yields substantial results. At three and a half minutes, “Disporting with a Shadow” pulls back the curtain just enough to let flecks of natural guitar notes and traces of alluring melody seep into the mix. The album closes with the side-long “Path of Appearance,” a cathartic composition that is best described as a poem of overtones which, like the rest of the album, is sourced from electric guitar and minimal effects but feels more akin to the sun stretching to fill all corners of a darkened room. A testament to sonic refinement, a way of coping, an exciting step forward for an established artist—the minimalist Chantepleure is all of these things.
More information can be found here.
- Parent Category: News & Events
- Category: Buzz Bin
- Hits: 4207
"I traced
the convolutions of
turf, laid out by men,
& made new windings with the mole
through undisturbed
barrows."
(Ronald Johnson, "The Book of the Green Man")
Belated Movements for an Unsanctioned Exhumation August 1st 1984 is Richard Skelton's second album as The Inward Circles, following 2014's Nimrod is Lost in Orion and Osyris in the Doggestarre. If his previous offering hovered "between the empyreal and the subterranean," Belated Movements is resolutely earthbound, beginning at ground level and slowly moving ever downward. The title is a reference to "Lindow Man," one of many bog bodies discovered in northern Europe in the twentieth century, and continues an archaeological theme which first surfaced in his 2013 *AR collaboration with Autumn Richardson, entitled Succession. In particular, it is the last composition from that album, Relics, which can now be seen as starting point for much of Skelton's future work as The Inward Circles. But whereas Relics dealt with the pollen remnants submerged beneath tarns in the remote Cumbrian uplands, Buried Movements evokes a distinctly funerary landscape.
The first piece, "Petition for Reinterment" begins in familiar terrain - a slow, solemn string elegy - but it gently begins to disintegrate, to distend and rot, as if the music itself is being subsumed in soil and subjected to the natural cycles of decay and renewal. It is interesting to note that, whilst the skin of bog-bodies is often very well preserved, the bones undergo a process of decalcification - they literally dissolve from within. But exhumations such as "Lindow Man" are now artificially preserved behind museum glass, removed from time, from earthly contact and the inexorable progress of nature itself.
By contrast, the music of Belated Movements continues its inner transformation, and "To Your Fox-Skin Chorus" divulges more of its innards, revealing hitherto unheard melodic, rhythmic and textural material. The reference to fox-skin, borrowed from Edmund Gosse, alludes to the fox-fur arm-covering found on "Lindow Man," and, more obliquely, to the fox as a psychopomp - a soul guide - which formed a central theme in Skelton's recent Feræ Naturæ book and exhibition.
The album concludes with a further downward delving to the bones of animals long made extinct in England by humans: the wolf, lynx and bear - animals that haunt the popular imagination. Here the music is at its most restless and forbidding, as it ends with an urgent call - Canis, Lynx, Ursus: Awake, Arise, Reclaim. There is a palpable sense, with its almost unbearable crescendo, of a rising up, a return to the surface, and a threatening quiet.
BELATED MOVEMENTS FOR AN UNSANCTIONED EXHUMATION AUGUST 1ST 1984
by The Inward Circles
1. Petition for Reinterment
2. To Your Fox-Skin Chorus
3. Canis, Lynx, Ursus: Awake, Arise, Reclaim
Total Running Time : 60mins
More information can be found here.
- Parent Category: News & Events
- Category: Buzz Bin
- Hits: 4402