NEST – Retold The duo of Otto Totland and Huw Roberts, Nest declare of taking “cues from film soundtracks and contemporary classic music”. Add to that a pinch of Roedelius and a little of Tim Story’s melancholy and you’ll get an idea of what Retold contains. The instrumentation mixes acoustic and electronic shades; some of [...]

Matter It took yours truly a long time to find again, after many useless attempts and unfortunate experiences, an album based on austere electronics and computerized treatments of samples (and heaven knows what else) as rewarding as Scytale. To be honest, it was a chance meeting of sorts. The missus was recording a song in [...]

Drip Audio Guitarist Grdina – who also plays a nice oud in “Enshakoota”, a slightly atypical track in an otherwise rather predictable disc – is one of those axemen cooking recipes replete with angular lines (preferably overdriven) and equally raw-boned themes, delivering them with punkish spices and drops of sweat and saliva flying everywhere. The [...]

Staubgold Given that I never listened to the first two volumes of Space Elements, and that my favourite Toral music has always been lying in droning albums like Wave Field and Violence Of Recovery And Calmness Of Acceptance, this record is still quite perplexing. The essential concept is not complicated: self-built instruments producing bizarre sounds [...]

Between The Lines To avoid confusion, Minerva is the name of a trio whereas Carlo Costa – a Roman drummer residing in the US since more than 9 years ago – is its nominal leader, though he prefers referring to himself as a person who “takes charge of the logistic aspects” of what’s considered a [...]

Another Timbre / Cathnor Looper is the trio of Nikos Veliotis, Martin Küchen and Ingar Zach, their respective instruments cello, reeds and percussion (this is not authenticated on the cover, some of the sounds heard in this CD definitely suggesting the presence of electronic emanations). Dying Sun is a superb effort that must be absorbed [...]

Clean Feed While the prologue to bassist/composer Carvalhais’ Nebulosa is delineated by strong rhythmic accents made less explicable by the premeditated displacement of pauses, we’re soon testimonies of the jeopardizing of that slanted solidity, especially caused by keyboardist Gabriel Pinto’s use of synthetic sounds linking the music to the “progressive” regions of the 70s (Keith [...]

Konnex The document of a 2009 studio session in Budapest, Icicles showcases the eagerness of a quartet comprising the Hungarian pair of Mihály Borbély (sax and tarogato) and Balász Bágyi (drums) in addition to the well-known combination of pianist Michael Jefry Stevens and bassist Joe Fonda. This listener never manages to be entirely involved with [...]

Another Timbre Cello and guitar giving life to a relationship based on physically erudite intercourses and tit-for-tat acoustic swaps, like an adult couple having passionate sex in between quarrelling incidents. The proficiency shown by Altenburger (first time with her for this writer) and Russell is explicated through a kind of investigative muscularity ending in repeated [...]

Streamline These recordings come from 1991, when O’Rourke and Heemann were – respectively – 27 and 22. Listening to them now, both men affirmed composers with hundreds of projects in their curricula, is quite amazing. It’s true: the maturity of a person (and, specifically, of a musician) is an inborn gift that can’t be acquired [...]

Emanem I listened to Tetralogy repeatedly these last days, in different circumstances: concentrated, distracted, on the train, with headphones on, in my room as a complement to the sound of hard rain (apparently the sky is still mourning Paul Rutherford’s premature passing in 2007). After all these years, and following the enjoyment of the double [...]

12k – Line In Soft Machine’s Bundles the final piece is called “The Floating World”. Yet if there’s an artist who better than anyone else could bring that suggestion to completion, it must be Stephan Mathieu. His music gives indeed the idea of floating: almost no rhythmic subdivision, blurred clusters and textures – created by [...]

Porter An all-Italian quartet at their debut album in this lineup, Eco D’Alberi (which means “Echo Of Trees”, the name influenced by Henry Dumas’ novel “Echo Tree”) consists of saxophonist Edoardo Marraffa, pianist Alberto Braida, double bassist Alberto Borghini and drummer Fabrizio Spera. Presenting four live tracks – recorded in different festivals in New York, [...]

Col Legno Austrian composer Hannes Loeschel owns a special place in this writer’s heart: he was in fact one of the first artists sending records my way back in 2001, trusting this very website as soon as it started. A diversified musical persona that comes out conspicuously in a work based on the namesake cycle [...]

Homefront Chip Shop Music is the quartet of Erik Carlsson, Martin Küchen, David Lacey and Paul Vogel playing “some combination of reeds, percussion and electronics”, this work following a 2007 debut CD. Three movements are featured, all improvised. The beginning is characterized by a kind of strangled obsessiveness, before a corpulent saturation starts pushing and [...]

Either/OAR The instrumentation includes field recordings, piano, reed organ, oboe, English horn, accordion. Both artists are credited with “editing & mixing”. In the first of four movements, rustling noise is utilized as a complement of an abundance of stratified oboes, mainly in the acute region. At times, the sense of presage elicited by the music [...]

Cuneiform Believe me, it’s never too late to discover how great Birdsongs Of The Mesozoic have always been. This not enough sung group started activities in an era where synth-pop was believed to be the Verb, instantly stirring up the interest of listeners who privilege musicians able to play instruments for real. The latter feature [...]

Root Strata Forty minutes of gorgeous, literally luscious drones, an Indian raga connecting Tony Conrad with Stephen Scott. The ears detect sitars and tambouras but in reality all you hear is a sextet armed with bowed guitars tuned in just intonation. The participants, besides composer Pitre, are Craig Colorusso, Gene Park, Brooke Gillespie, Steve Flato [...]

Thy Still anonymous, still clever enough to avoid bullshit. After my enjoyment of a previous release on Mystery Sea a while ago, Seasons (Pre-Din) comes back with a 130-copy limited edition exploiting the useful nuances deriving from a coincidence of radio ghosts, camouflaged instruments, urban landscapes and various kinds of noise. In some aspects, the [...]

AudioMER I wasn’t excessively struck by this album. Not because it contains bad music; the problem lies in the discrepancy between Frederik Croene’s commitment to his semi-ironic theory (basically, the loss of all certainties experienced by a classically trained pianist when the instrument is dismantled) and the actual impact on the listeners. An exhaustive piece-by-piece [...]

REVENANT – Zeltini Revenant is an open-membership project carried on by a number of specialists of location recording, in this occasion the quintet of Maksims Shentelevs, Eamon Sprod, John Grzinich, Kaspars Kalninsh and Felicity Mangan. The environment inspiring this release is an abandoned Soviet military base in a Latvian forest, comprising large horizontal bunkers where [...]