New music
Thomas H. Green
In a galaxy all too near, amid tattered old copies of Future Music magazine, tangles of cables and a couple of broken sequencers, a trio of electronica nerds huddle around a glowing console plotting a recipe for the perfect album. “It should,” says one, “have all the bleak urban dystopianism of Detroit techno at its most sci-fi, a sense of glacial blank robot cool, but with a dirty analogue edge, like Drexciya having it off with Cabaret Voltaire.”“But also let it be pastoral,” adds another, contrarily, “let it have mesmerising, somniferous, trance-inducing qualities, a groove and a sense of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The on-stage collaboration between north-Norwegian ambient maestro Biosphere and his similarly inclined but sonically darker countryman Deathprod was a one off. At Oslo’s Tape to Zero festival, Biosphere and Deathprod bought the you-had-to-be-there moment. The pair had collaborated for a remix project of composer Arne Nordheim in 1998, but this was about new music.The two days weren’t just about this unique partnership. Tape to Zero united Susanna Wallumrød (who performs as Susanna and was formerly half of Susanna & the Magical Orchestra) and off-kilter Dutch singer-songwriter Jessica Read more ...
peter.quinn
There's something about the way in which the musical surfaces of album opener “Urban Control” glitter and sparkle that immediately announces you're listening to a Phronesis recording. By the time Danish bassist Jasper Høiby reaches the end of his first, elegantly constructed, descending phrase, you already sense the impending explosion of motifs and rhythmic energy that it will detonate. And, sure enough, once British pianist Ivo Neame and Swedish drummer Anton Eger are brought into play, the trio's characteristically rich counterpoint takes on an unstoppable momentum.Recorded over Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In the 1960s and early 70s drummer Jack DeJohnette, now 71, was learning his craft with nearly everyone who was anyone, including Coltrane, Monk, Keith Jarrett and Miles Davis. Last night at the Barbican, he was the presiding spirit (if not, technically, leader) in a new multi-generational “supergroup”, the Spring Quartet, alongside Blue Note’s star saxophonist Joe Lovano (61), and two thirtysomethings, pianist Leo Genovese, and the winner of the 2011 best new artist Grammy Esperanza Spalding. It was like watching spring in slow motion: the new shoots are vigorous, but there’s still plenty of Read more ...
theartsdesk
Hauschka is a musician and composer from Düsseldorf, performing in what has been dubbed a "post-classical" vein, although he also has many fans in the electronica scene. His new album Abandoned City, written and performed almost entirely on a treated piano, was inspired by the idea of cities that are no longer, or never were, inhabited. It is full of approriately elegiac beauty. Here he introduces the different cities with a paragraph about each.Elizabeth BayA mining town in southern Namibia. It was formerly considered a ghost town. Elizabeth Bay in on the coast of Namibia, 25 km south of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Erika M Anderson’s dystopian follow-up to 2011’s critically acclaimed Past Life Martyred Saints was always going to be prescient, but in the end even she was taken by surprise. “Facebook just bought the company that makes … the VR headset I am wearing on the cover of The Future’s Void,” she wrote on her blog a week or so back, by way of introduction to “3Jane”, the single that is the album’s "lyrical centrepiece". “People ask me about themes of paranoia on the record but obviously I am not the only one with dystopian dreams of our plugged-in future.”If it seems hardly any time at all since we Read more ...
Matthew Wright
John Coltrane’s extravagant, trance-like saxophone-playing is often considered the pinnacle of jazz technique, but for Evan Parker, who celebrated his 70th birthday with a concert at Kings Place last night, it was only the starting point. In an immensely distinguished international career, Parker has taken Coltrane’s hard-scrabbling virtuosity into the realms of abstraction, experimenting with split notes and circular breathing, and leaving behind even the barest bones of traditional key changes and melodic variation to create a brave new world of spontaneously improvised sound.If this sounds Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Three years ago Karol Conka was a receptionist. Since then she had made a living from her music and, with the launch of her first international album Batukfreak, (“Beat-freak”, more or less) is making waves internationally. But that doesn’t tell you the punch her music has or her style (when I meet her, she’s wearing cute Japanese shoes, dyed short blonde hair, super-colourful jacket). Our rendezvous is in Concrete, a small basement club in Shoreditch where she is due to perform her London debut the same night as the opener for London’s always impressive La Linea Festival. She duly raises the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Art, real art, is a denial of the status quo. A tradition that values the role of the individual.” Speaking in Estonia’s capital for the opening of Tallinn Music Week, the Baltic country’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves is referring to what’s just over his shoulder. Freedom is on his mind.Estonia shares a border with Russia, and Tallinn is just 1000km from Ukraine’s capital Kiev. Taken together, Estonia, Latvia and Belarus share an unbroken border with their former Soviet master. On the Black Sea, Ukraine is on the southern seaboard of that border, and on the Baltic, Estonia is on the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Gram Parsons: The Early Years Vol 1 & 2Without Gram Parsons, The Rolling Stones could not have transformed themselves into what they became in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The bond between the South Carolina-born walking encyclopaedia of the music of America’s south and Keith Richards changed the Stones. Without Parsons there would have been no Eagles. They emerged from what he developed with The Flying Burrito Brothers and turned it into platinum. Without Parsons, Emmylou Harris would not have had the opportunity to soar. Parsons died in 1973 and did not rejoice in the Read more ...
Aimee Cliff
It’s kind of a shame that for whatever reason (presumably SEO), Vienna-based producer and singer SOHN (formerly known as S O H N) had to drop the spaces in between the letters of his name. As well as a self-conscious aesthetic flourish, it was after all a neat tie-in with the artist’s overall approach: patience, space, cool restraint.Emerging in 2012 with the future pop jam “Oscillate” and grabbing the internet buzz machine by the ears with the irrepressibly catchy “The Wheel”, SOHN has always had a focus on movement, his tracks talking about life’s unpredictable twists and his production Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Jon Lord may have tickled his last ivory in 2012, but last night his spirit lived defiantly on. The great and the good from both heavy and contemporary music gathered in his memory. It was for a serious purpose - to raise funds for pancreatic cancer care. But, boy, what a time we had doing it. A revolving door of stars brought us wild solos, screaming vocals and thundering rhythms. But before all the classic rock, culminating in a set from Deep Purple, came something a little more classical.The first hour was devoted to Lord’s orchestral compositions. Our host was “whispering” Bob Harris, who Read more ...