“Willie o’ Winsbury” is a traditional English folk ballad about a king who spares his daughter’s lover because said lover is a pretty man. But when Irish composer, sound designer, and performance artist Aoibhín Redmond, aka NIMF, borrowed a bit of the tune for her album Sirenoscape, she took it in a much darker, more nebulous direction.
The centuries-old melody makes a brief appearance as the album opens, played by a calling trumpet amongst howling winds and seafaring atmospherics — but then Redmond slowly but surely breaks apart every preexisting sonic element into stirring ambient layers that fold, morph, crystallize, and shatter across four distinct, extended musical “scenes.” The result is an album that feels almost defined like a narrative story…
Archive for March 24th, 2026
Why it’s volume two from the Rotting Tapes series that’s being given a vinyl reissue, rather than volumes one, three or four is anybody’s guess, but why not? All four tapes contained two tracks each, all were recorded live in Tokyo in the first half of 1982, and all feature the duo Michio Kadotani (1959-1990, vocals/guitar) and Nanjo Asahito (bass), this time joined by an uncredited drummer. The group was well-named; although the music at times seems like impenetrable, formless sludge, there’s often a real beauty and poetry to it, too. When Rotting Telepathies performed together, there was, perhaps fitfully, a unique alchemy, and when it works, it’s glorious, presaging the more fully formed music of noisy, doomy Japanese bands like Gallhammer, but it’s also…
For Footballhead’s Weight of the Truth, a “post-grunge revival” is hard to claim. There have consistently been new bands popping up that play the style, while Nickelback and Three Days Grace have never stopped being discussed. Perhaps “post-grunge reassessment” is a better wording.
What in the 2000s was viewed as a gravel-throated cyst on the carcass of mainstream rock, by 2026 is “real music” with a tongue planted firmly in your cheek. The likes of Pierce the Veil and Cane Hill pushed their sound closer to it during the 2020s, and today, post-Jeris Johnson Generation Z solo artists Violent Vira, Leah Barrientos and Alexis Munroe rule TikTok. At some point this decade, Gen Z did what Gen Z did and made the term “post-grunge” fall out of favour,…
For their sixth album, What We Are Made Of, Shalosh turn their focus inward while extending the scope of their sound. The music reflects the trio’s shared history, shaped by years of collaboration and extensive touring, and draws on the influences and impulses that have gradually formed their collective musical language.
“From the very start of Shalosh, we have always said that we would never commit to any one genre but keep our music as open as possible,” drummer Matan Assayag says. “It’s the best way to bring ourselves fully to each song and the only way to stay truly authentic.” In more than a decade since its founding, the trio has made its signature this freewheeling, energetic and deeply-felt blend of jazz improvisation with…
Saxophonist Ben Wendel has been experimenting with form and technology throughout most of his career. He is an ambitious composer and fluid improviser, so that makes him a “jazz” musician by default. Whether on his own or as a founding member of the band Kneebody, he has played with groove-oriented rhythms, electronics, and unusual instrumentation, as if jazz tradition were secondary to creativity. His new album, BaRcoDe, uniquely does exactly that.
Recorded after this band had a pair of residencies at New York City’s Jazz Gallery, BaRcoDe brings Wendel together with four innovative vibraphonists/percussionists: Patricia Brennan, Simon Moullier, Joel Ross, and Juan Diego Villalobos. That’s the band: tenor saxophone…
William Crighton’s Colonial Drift plays as a slow journey across landscape, memory and time. The album moves in three clear movements, threaded together by fragments of radio chatter, environmental sound and drifting noise, creating the sense of travelling through a country where past and present sit side by side.
Crighton has built a reputation for expansive, story-driven songwriting shaped by landscape and history, particularly across albums such as Water and Dust. Here he works with a close-knit group of collaborators. Luke Davison’s drums and Corey McCormick’s bass provide a steady foundation, while electric guitars from CJ Stranger and Jeff Lang add texture and edge. Subtle synthesiser and environmental sound deepen the atmosphere…
Intensely expressive free-verse vocal laments over sliding violins, hammered santouri, guitar, and oud – the hybrid sounds of the Mediterranean in the early 20th century.
“Aman Aman” cry the singers on these recordings, their voices preserved on 78rpm discs cut between 1911-1935. The phrase roughly translates to “mercy,” a call of despair, but also one of joy and admiration. On many of these sides, that full range of emotion is transmitted at once.
Some of these artists are legends, others lost to time. Nearly half are female vocalists, a big part of the Cafe Aman tradition but not as well represented on contemporary releases. All were affected by conflicts leading up to the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1923, and the forced…
The second act of The Julies has been one of the most surprising and unlikely comebacks in recent memory, but then “surprising and unlikely” is kind of the group’s whole M.O.
Hailing from the storied rock ‘n’ roll town of…Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and with a sound heavily indebted to Britpop, the Julies’ most beloved work is an EP that was released in 1996 after they’d broken up, and which steadily amassed a cult following. It was a reissue of that EP, called Lovelife, in 2020 by the label Lost in Ohio that spurred the group back into action. And if their 2023 album Always & Always sounded, to these ears, tentative in some places — the sound of a band cranking the gears back up to see what they could do — Cherisher is big, loud, and…
Witch Post are magically split down the middle. The duo — Dylan Fraser and Alaska Reid — sing together in every song, latticing their contrasting vocals to create rough yet engaging texture. They also bring their own spirit to the project: Fraser, who hails from Scotland, carves a ramshackle rock energy to each track, letting the songs build out into needling guitar solos, booming drums, and a cracking voice on the verge of a breakdown. Reid, on the other hand, flickers with alt country flair, bringing the sparse, cold atmosphere of her home state of Montana to the recording studio. Together, they pieced together Butterfly, their sophomore EP that’s a satisfactory blend of momentous alt rock and meditative gothic folk.
The Butterfly EP is both solid and pretty, even…
As this fourth release from electronic ambient-rock collaborators Craig Padilla and Marvin Allen plays, connections to two electronic legends suggest themselves. When Allen’s blistering guitar roars against his partner’s pulsating synthesizer-generated backdrops, those moments where Edgard Froese took up guitar to wail alongside his Tangerine Dream cohorts come to mind, and though the music Padilla and Allen create in no way resembles Kraftwerk’s, one can’t help think that the band’s “power plant” name applies when the two generate an epic force-field of electronic sound. But to be clear, the sonic identity fashioned by Padilla and Allen shares little with the personae associated with their precursors; as Unfolding Skies once again argues, the two…
…Jakob Ullmann was born in July 1958, in Freiberg, Saxony, East Germany, the son of theologian and politician Wolfgang Ullmann. After Jakob refused to serve military service in East Germany, he worked as a groundskeeper, boilerman and house painter in Dresden from 1978 to 1982. From 1979 to 1982, he studied church music in Saxony. He was denied official enrolment in Berlin’s Academy of Fine Arts and so he studied composition privately with Friedrich Goldmann until 1984. Since the early eighties, Ullmann has been working as a freelance composer and author of self-published writings, also teaching classes at different universities on New Music, mediaeval music, history of Byzantine music as well as music philosophy. His works have ben performed at festivals of…
Sacred Lodge is the side project of Paris-based producer/sound artist Matthieu Ruben N’Dongo. Rooted in his ethnomusicological research, which explores the role of music in ritual contexts and his own Equatoguinean heritage, the results are unsettling but compelling, characterised by heady percussion and swarming electronics.
But while his 2019 debut Hijos Del Sol was made up of murky downtempo instrumentals, N’Dongo’s follow-up amps up the intensity almost beyond recognition, with a collection of sludgy, abrasive tracks.
One of the starkest differences is the use of vocals, which have previously only featured as echoey background textures. On Ambam, N’Dongo makes full use of his voice. Inspired by…