Two Or The Dragon are an electro-acoustic duo from Lebanon. Using percussion and buzuq (which I now know is a long-necked lute from the oud-saz-bouzouki family!) with plenty of effects and processing, Abed Kobeissy and Ali Hout deconstruct their musical heritage and influences, mixing in industrial sounds and dance rhythms. With Beirut as their backdrop,…
This combination of brass, electronics and cloudstorms of feedback is what I’ve been waiting for. Seriously. Since Lund’s 2018 Blow.Amplifier, which explores similar spaces, I’ve been waiting and hoping for more. Waiting over. And it was worth it. But whereas Blow… combined amplified feedback with more recognisable trumpet tones and passages, Ætonal contains no such…
In a way, this is a séance. Illinois composer and visual artist Hali Palombo has drawn on the contents of the UCSB Library Cylinder Audio Archive to create a series of 12 short pieces (none longer than a minute and a half): tiny spells of invocation, using rare and precious ingredients to summon… what, exactly?…
A meeting of forces, minds, equals, aliens, sides, languages… A shared tongue channelling a neo-Muse. Rezaei’s electronic sounds are pure organic/AI communication – a language of the spheres, flesh, and 1s and 0s combined. Goff’s drums build and construct – grabbing the circulatory system and injecting accelerant; the spirit rises as the pressure drops –…
Five brief slices of time. Like walking through a gallery, room to room, each space’s contents a sudden, chaotic-yet-coherent blurt, a demanding but untranslated message, waiting for a key… The brevity works. Short, intense, not a moment wasted – carving your attention into new shapes. Each momentary fraction leaves you grasping for more… even if…
Barcelona bassist Àlex Reviriego is on a roll, right now. Phicus (Astral Spirits) have released one of my favourite albums of 2020. Möhit Trio’s self-titled debut disc brings his sensitivity to the fore (out now on Gusstaff Records). And now, as a lead up to a solo album on tripticks tapes later this year, he’s…
“out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field I’ll meet you there” –Jalaluddin Rumi (from the liner notes) Here we are in the field, all frameworks missing, fossilised rules of engagement cracked and broken on the shard-strewn ground… Three maestr@s, three voices, with neither guidelines nor limits nor sense of ‘right’ nor…
Don’t bother searching for a genre label for J Frisco; they’re more of a ‘not-’ band: not-jazz, not-pop, not-avant-garde…, you get the idea. But they partake of all this and more – shredding, deconstructing, and collaging their influences (including from their other projects, such as the Jemma Freese Trio and Jones’s Beyond Albedo)… it’s a…
