“Cloud Parade” is another absolutely stunning composition and video by the Toronto based Michael Peter Olsen. Featuring choreography from Mateo Galindo Torres and directed by Adrienne McLaren, “Cloud Parade” is described as, “a meditation on the interior self and the constructs we use to navigate the modern emotional life, “Cloud Parade” explores the pure feeling one can evoke with …
“Love Part II” and “Elevate Your Hi-Fi” from the Minneapolis post-rock outfit First Dates is a multi-instrumental, multi-modal first impression that went better than any first date you’ve probably had. “Elevate Your Hi-Fi” is a piano led track that effortless blends in double-time, martial percussion, stirring strings and an aching lap-steel that reaches a sell-all …
FIRST DATES – “LOVE. PART II / ELEVATE YOUR HI-FI” Read More »
The new album from the New Jersey-based composer/musician/educators – like all his music – a highly ambitious work and may be his magnum opus. Until the next one. It’s impossible to write about Chris Opperman – composer, pianist, trumpet player, music professor – without mentioning Frank Zappa. An avid fan of the late musician, Opperman …
CHRIS OPPERMAN – CHAMBER MUSIC FROM HELL (Purple Cow, 2020) Read More »
In this composition for double bass, the Denmark based artist Tomas Raae combines virtuosic improvised performance with deep processing to pull out natural timbres and overtones to create a lush and wide-open soundbed. Tonal shifts, drones and processed double bass that sounds the furthest from the deep, hollow sound it produces adorn “Elijah” and seep …
The latest album from the New York City-based guitarist, composer and improviser is full of stark vocals and fractured, atonal guitar wizardry, resulting in a fascinating and adventurous listening experience. I’m sure the world is almost as sick of “2020 is a shitshow” analogies in arts reviews as they are of 2020 itself, but bear …
ANDREW SMILEY – LOOMING AS LIGHT TORN (SELF-RELEASED, 2020) Read More »
Living in the “fractured seams of electronic music” “Kan” by Berlin based producer Safejas provides a warm, textural approximation of club-based electronic music filtered through a busted ear drum and bus ride home at 3am. It’s full bleary ambient passages, fractured hi-hats, deep-chest rattling kicks al wrapped in a heavy gauze of warm reverb and …
Everything Emily A. Sprague has put out under their own name is extremely intimate. Intimate in the sense that through all of the glistening synth tones, the microtonal flourishes, gates switching on and off, we are hearing a human brain making decisions, reacting to sounds and purposefully making something beautiful – all (while I imagine) …
Operating under the name Cubbi and as one half of Best Picture, Chris Cubbison’s new moniker CGI Dog explores washed out tones, shoegaze production and a floating, atmospheric take on 2-step percussive patterns that provide an undeniable forward momentum that pushes “Where We Were Before” into some truly thrilling places. Heavily compressed symphonic melodies and …
Taken from the album Sedative Songs on Wormhole Records by the Cardiff, UK based artist Goodparley, “End i” delves deep into hypnagogic drone, hazy psych lines and an overriding noisy, dark ambient approach to sound sculpting. Everything just a bit into the red, “End i” weaves serpantine lines around one another, finding their way into …
Ah, the sweet chaos of algorithmic composition. “Skorpma IV – Lofið eintal” is the Icelandic composer Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson‘s experimentation with multiple plucked strings and flutes in just intonation along with electronics. The result is a deeply affecting, supremely unsettling sea bed of electronic rumblings, mallets pounding and flutes whistling in a time signature outside …
Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson – “Skorpma IV – Lofið eintal” Read More »