On this third release, On Dog’s compositional approach is salted with improvisation and the sound palette adds synthesizers and electronic textures to create eleven tracks of utter individuality – one second pure ebullience, the next complex sorrow, the next bobbing for past references to turn inside out… On Stray Dogs I, Bon’s flute saunters, whimsically…
Masayuki Takayanagi New Directions Unit Axis/Another Revolvable Thing Blank Forms Editions 2xCD, LPs This is the second of Blank Forms’ rather wonderful Masayuki Takayanagi reissues, following on from their release of the epochal ‘April Is the Cruellest Month’. Available on both CD and vinyl, the CD version of the album assembles, for the first time…
It starts with a cry, a gentle howl… a void, as all the air pours out of the universe. Unfurling like an alien flower emerging from an egg, an elegant and unknown bloom, a couple of minutes in and the opener Mae Lougon could introduce Kubrick’s 2001. Peering into that abyss, what you see is…
OEM are putting out some great live recordings, recently. Put this one in the same bracket as the trio of Arch One performances released at the end of April. Like those, this set from the Hundred Years Gallery is concise (half an hour is enough time for shape and statement to emerge, but still succinct),…
How best to approach a review of a new album by Abdul-Hakim Bilal? For any other reviewer facing this conundrum of how best to tackle a musician and composer with as many guises and musical shapeshifting aliases as Bilal could be intimidating. For this reviewer, someone who knows Bilal and has bled, cried, toured and…
The recipe appears simple: write or find some straightforward guitar-led tunes then smother them in fuzz, distortion and feedback as if it were chocolate. The results are heavenly and for some reason, I cannot stop listening. This has been the gnarled and perverted sonic wallpaper to my working week… I haven’t been very productive. It’s…
This album is a unique trip. oAxAcA’s influences are obviously wide, varied, and only partially identifiable… the result is an elegantly balanced cocktail of solid rhythms, bent blues, grandiose riffs, and subversive composition. From the off, Trittico thumps and pulsates its way into your cerebral patterns while strangled, decomposing guitar lines spill across the rhythm…
A kind of ‘brief image’ approach to a solo reeds album. Though clearly present, technique is not front and centre (thankfully). Nor is this a dense skronkfest; though worry not, harsh textures are included. More an elegant dreamlike consciousness of air and space… Feels like it’s coming from a jazz place. Delving well beyond that…
