This duo of the classically and modern compositionally inclined Simon James Phillips and The Necks' less formal but equally brilliant Chris Abrahams have created quite an intriguing collection of improvisations. Every piece is a piano duet and the album crosses a wide spread of styles and quality; moving from cold, modernist works to pieces with a bit more swing and heat to them, Pedal are inconsistent in ways that both help and hinder their music. While there are a couple of less than stellar moments on this self-titled album, they are more than counterbalanced by the mesmerising and evocative pieces that make up the bulk of the music.
Hotter than July. This week's episode has plenty of fresh new music by Marie Davidson, Kim Gordon, Mabe Fratti, Guided By Voices, Holy Tongue meets Shackleton, Softcult, Terence Fixmer, Alan Licht, pigbaby, and Eiko Ishibashi, plus some vault goodies from Bombay S Jayashri and Pete Namlook & Richie Hawtin. Solstice moon in West Midlands, UK photo by James. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Matt and Erica Hinton spent seven years making their essential documentary about Sacred Harp hymn singing. This companion set comprises the soundtrack of gloriously raw a cappela music from the film, with a second disc of interpretations by artists such as Doc Watson, The Innocence Mission, Richard Buckner, Woven Hand, and John Paul Jones. It is a win-win situation.
Operating within and between the rather loose conventions that dominate electronic and rock music, Skye Klein continues to map out a musical style capable of putting equal emphasis on every genre it employs.
With this long player, Nigel Ayers has produced the musical equivalent of a sexual fever. Unbidden, while listening I became aroused by its somnambulatory exhortations and caressed by rhythmic undulations that continuosly excite.
Masami Akita sounds his most creative, dynamic, and colorful when he works with other accomplished musicians. Merzbow's collaboration with French pioneer Richard Pinhas features some of his best music and gleefully amplifies the psychedelic tendencies of both composers.
All the best love songs are about heartache and Windy & Carl have seized on that. The latest addition to their canon was recorded at the same time as Windy Weber’s solo album I Hate People (released earlier this year) and unlike the sentiments of Weber’s solo album, this is an album about love. Although this is the idea of love that Lord Tennyson famously wrote: “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
Micah's third studio record seems a big departure from the old-time rag country blues styling of his jaunty debut. This time he has produced a series of dark ballads around the themes of faith, misfortune, trickery and wisdom.
The second release by Peter Christopherson under the Threshold HouseBoys Choir name is a collection of rough soundtrack works. These have been made in anticipation of a new film project he is working on about tattooing. Although the mixing and the mastering of these discs are less than stellar (they sound very much like the works in progress that they are touted as), the music is loaded with that magic that Christopherson always brings to whatever project he is involved in. The direction he is taking his solo music had been hinted on with the posthumous Coil releases and with the first Threshold HouseBoys Choir album yet here it is beginning to form fully.
Brian Foote, Honey Owens, and Paul Dickow's persistent evolution is unstoppable. Infinity Padlock documents another stage in Nudge's unending transformation; this time around the group flirts with rock 'n' roll balladry and noise jams quite unlike anything else in their discography.
All the luxuriant and sensuous curves that went missing on 2005's Geisterfaust have returned for Bohren's newest record. More than that, the band have sharpened their approach to "doom jazz" and solidified the power of their slow, crushing attack in the process.
