Pogus Long-time friend and artistic collaborator Malcolm Goldstein is the man in charge of turning Philip Corner’s scores – notated (in peculiar ways) or less – into violin expressiveness of the unadulterated kind. The five compositions comprised by this disc run a temporal gamut that goes from 1958 to 1985; they’re all comparable to the [...]

Choose It is with deep regret that I announce my most recent disease, the reason behind a definitive decision that should have already been taken quite a while back. Giving a really meaningful account of recordings involving the use of canned exhalations and saliva-related noises resonating in metallic conduits – whatever the source – has [...]

The Helen Scarsdale Agency When all seems lost, and the faith in the sanative attributes of a drone-based album dwindles because of too many broken illusions generated by pathetic imitators, here comes good old Jim Haynes with a double LP to save the day and reset the bar at a much higher height. Divided in [...]

Psi Having just been officially confirmed into the role of maladjusted fault-finding specimen after hearing (and, with rare exceptions, despising) the pillaging of Meredith Monk’s superior vocal skill in the grossly hyped Monk Mix curated by DJ Spooky, I shiver in fear whenever seeing “DJ something” associated to an artist whose work I regard. Luckily, [...]

Al Maslakh The record’s title seems to give an unsolicited answer to a hypothetical question by some kind of illiterate listener: “how do you call this stuff?”. Your reviewer gave up speaking music in depth since decades ago, utterly depressed by the mixture of ignorance and presumptuousness that a typical schmoozer offers to the counterpart. [...]

Flux Expect no less than good-natured surprises and the occasional question mark when you read the name Frank Rothkamm. Reno is an album of flaccidly pushy electronic music composed during the 90s, entirely orchestrated on an Atari ST computer running on Cubase and connected to an array of vintage synthesizers and ancient-sounding drum machines. In [...]

And/OAR It takes just a few words to explicit our impressions in front of Levitation And Breaking Points, re-released by Dale Lloyd’s And/OAR two years after the original triple 3-inch edition. Describing the mere exteroception – as always in corresponding circumstances – is an intention that ultimately results in the typical fatuousness attached to any [...]

Z6 According to Huib Emmer – a Dutch composer I was not acquainted with until yesterday, henchman among others of Lukas Simonis who now publishes this CD on his own label – Green Desert should evoke visions of urban bleakness and sense of forsakenness. Using a miscellany of sources, a laptop and electronics, Emmer does [...]

Faraway Press Timo Van Luijk represents the trait d’union between the disjointed constituents of what once was the Mirror karyon, having ongoing duos both with Christoph Heemann (In Camera) and Andrew Chalk (Elodie). Don’t envisage a Mirror reunion in a three-soul incarnation, for this is asking too much. However, the goods coming from the newer [...]

No Part Of It In an handwritten note, Arvo Zylo (note the relation between his first name and the website’s) advises me that it took six years to complete 333. The many hours that he put in are discernible throughout the three tracks of the CD, radical sharpness subjacent to music mostly born from of [...]

No Business Forgive this spurt of anti-democracy, but… wouldn’t it be possible to pass an international law that prohibits the attending of concerts to people with cold or affected by chronic coughing, either pneumonic or just nervous? Starting from the very first seconds, there are several instances in Journey – an otherwise glorious album by [...]

BEAT CIRCUS – Boy From Black Mountain An outstanding record to begin with, quite dissimilar from the previous disquieting release Dreamland on this same label (another must if you ask me). Here we observe Beat Circus’ penchant for the expansion of moods directly related to earlier eras of the American history, those in which leader [...]

LED BIB – Sensible Shoes Drummer Mark Holub is the compositional deus ex-machina behind Led Bib, whose lineup is also shaped by bassist Liran Donin, keyboardist Toby McLaren and the sax tandem of Pete Grogan and Chris Williams. Sensible Shoes is an album that requires a measure of persistence in order to obtain maximum pleasure [...]

Reviewer’s note: Cuneiform was the first foreign imprint to send promos to a 27-year old enthusiast who had just started writing –  in Italian – on a limited-edition quarterly run by his best friend in the early 90s. Since 1987, Wayside Music – their selling branch – had already stood among the most reliable mail order [...]

Gligg There’s a sense of barbed menace in the six tracks of this superb CD. Rupp – whose temperament on electric guitar is twice as mordacious than his acoustic counterpart – throws up astringent jangles and straightforward messages bathed in vitriolic liquids, blistering resonances emerging from umbrageous spurts. Müller removes the expected stumbling blocks that [...]

Accretions An odd record, released in 2010. Not exactly attractive, homogeneous in terms of acoustic shades and overall dynamics. Still, the idea of a modified 73 Rhodes piano – played in all possible ways with dozens of extensions and objects – is fascinating and, at the end of the day, a way to welcome at [...]

Entr’acte The ascendancy of a record like Scilens on a sympathetic individual’s understanding can’t possibly remain unsung. There are artists that tend to melt away valuable energies across a wide gamut of intuitions, sonic investigations fluctuating in the midst of various levels of efficiency. On the contrary, Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills and Adam Sonderberg [...]

Red Toucan Frank Gratkowski’s reed-based ductility is an identified attendance at this domicile, whereas Danish pianist Jacob Anderskov is a charming new entry in a personal album – by now thick as a phone book – of excellent musicians who, one way or another, had escaped my consideration to date. Ardent Grass results as a [...]

Uceroz Ivan Palacký operates an amplified knitting machine (for the record, a Dopleta 160), thus providing fragments of beat, types of frequencies that occasionally tend to a mild saturation of the membranes, and a slight grubbiness that is necessary to blemish silence when the right time comes. Teammate Peter Graham plays piano in the first track, harmonium [...]

Unit A trio that improvises with gusto in almost total dearth of typecasts, Rosen Für Alle are Christoph Gallio on alto and soprano sax, Jan Roder on double bass and Oliver Steidle on drums. The six tracks propose music that is noncompliant in a somewhat humorous way, not predisposed to resentment, apparently unlinked. The musicians [...]

Emanem Charlotte Hug’s “son-icons” are presently at the basis of countless spurts of inspiration, eight of them commendably rendered in Slipway To Galaxies. Basically, the Swiss violist/vocalist acts in a way that allows the sketches that she draws on translucent paper to influence music created on the spot and vice versa, sometimes to a point [...]

Sourdine A pretty powerful statement by McFall, released on Asher’s imprint in 2010. Seven tracks whose foremost traits are defined by an essential cyclicality, mainly based on looping patterns imbued with an underlying gloominess. This renders any piece perfect as the photograph of a state of mind, particularly when one’s not exactly in a bright-light [...]

Slam Involuntarily bastardizing the breed of purported virtuosos who display tendon-straining exercises to peacock in front of an audience, violinists Pastor and Poutiainen recorded a one-off session lasting approximately four hours on October 8, 2008 in Genoa – their first summit – from which this 40-minute CD was distilled. The musicians had prepared advance drafts [...]