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…
Well, this is quite beguiling… As much as I tend to love the dark and noisy, this is sunlight cast into hidden corners. A cleanly interlocking, organic piano architecture through which soprano-vines curl and insinuate; unhurried sculptures, all curves and sinuosity, occasionally bursting into finely detailed bloom. Journeys without purpose, content to take joy in…
Bluegrass through the avant-garde blender. One of the weirdest ideas I’ve heard this year: a self-described, “intersection of free improvisation, effects-heavy noise music, and American roots music,” that seems bizarrely natural and unforced. The sweet spot on the dial between two neighbouring radio stations, miscegenating sweet bluegrass mandolin and violin-led tunes with contorted electronic drone…
Two new releases featuring saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi… The sax and drums duo is one of the most exacting and potentially most exciting line-ups to be found in jazz, although not for the faint of heart – there is little place to hide. Saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi and percussionist Dylan Fujioka have worked together various times over…
