“If everybody’s looking through me, I don’t exist” sings Vicky Egam, lead vocalist of Torontonian indie rockers Fjord Mustang on Five Years, the impressive opening track on their newest album ‘Solitaire’. With a sound close to compatriots Alvvays, cool guitars, and rimshots-for-hi-hats drums provide a gentle, nineties college radio groove for the beguilingContinue Reading
Delay 45 are a jazz ensemble from Sydney, Australia. Just as that cosmopolitan city is set into its vast red continent, the group set traditional jazz elements; piano, trumpet, bass, and drums, into a vast experimental and improvisational landscape. Their latest work, Flux, explores themes of “notions of flow, movement, and shape.”Continue Reading
Monologues is the most recent album from London-based ambient producer Iván Muela. Released on the Rusted Tone tape label, the album sees the artist develop intense and brooding atmospheres over five tracks. Opener Whisper is a gentle introduction, heavily effected piano tones aimlessly but happily segueing into a tapestry of ambiences and foley. Howl seesContinue Reading
Liverpudlian-cum-Kerry man Laurie Shaw is a hard artist to keep up with. By the time you’ve got around to listening to his new album, another one has been released. Ostensibly his seventeenth solo album (his Breaking Tunes page claims over eighty albums have been created across various projects) The Great Southern finds the writer ‘”Continue Reading
A stunning release from Korean multi-instrumentalist composer Park Jiha, The Gleam ruminates on the essence of light, that ubiquitous electromagnetic radiation that comes and goes as does the day and night. Performed entirely solo, the recordings feature instruments ranging from the glockenspiel to the saenghwang, a traditional Korean wind instrument. TheContinue Reading
An ambitious eighteen-track project recorded “in the field, from the grassroots up’” on various islands across the Pacific and Indian ocean, Small Island Big Song is a beguiling document of some of the world’s most criminally underappreciated musicians. Music producer Tim Cole and project manager BaoBao had a vision to document the mostContinue Reading
Sergiu Celibidache once described time as a ‘condition’ by which ‘the multitude of information contained in sound can be reduced to a unity.’ On Formations by Sunhaus, the tracks seemingly escape from the chains of tempo, smearing notes, and musical voices across a spectrum of electronics and glitches. Formations by Sunhaus IfContinue Reading
Rich Freitas has been behind the drum kit for seventeen years now. For bands like Low-beam and Slander, he has been patient in developing his own musical voice. His debut solo album, using the name Ellery Twinning, was recorded in a log cabin in his native Connecticut. These tracks certainly have a bucolic atmosphere;Continue Reading
Quebecois neoclassical composer Jean-Michel Blais has been releasing his own brand of piano-focused instrumental music since his much-acclaimed debut Il came out in 2016. His third album, aubades, sees the composer rearrange over five hundred separate improvised piano pieces into an eleven-track mission statement on the beauty of spontaneity and the importance of aContinue Reading
Irish muso Henry Earnest has been operating on the outskirts of the Irish music scene for several years now. As part of the Dublin collective knowns as Herzog TV, Earnest (who globetrots between Lisbon and Tokyo) has been gradually maturing from his bowl cut days to a fully fledged artist,Continue Reading