Ears For Eyes

‘Exercises in Beauty’ could have been a boastful title from duo 6 & 8 if the album were not exactly that, albeit with a substantial side order of troubling weirdness and disturbing interventions.  Jessica Peace and Rory McCormick have created an album that manages to be at once heavy and light as a feather.The sounds within… Continue reading 6 & 8 – Exercises in Beauty →

To describe an album as funny would, I think, normally be a criticism, especially in improv circles, but there is no other way for me to approach 'Dig a Ditch and Get In'.  Gail Brand and Morgen Guberman have created something special; two great artists in an inspired pairing. It is a work of deranged and hilarious  brilliance.  Gail… Continue reading Gail Brand and Morgan Guberman – Dig A Ditch And Get In →

This debut release from Cram Records, recorded at Shoreditch Church in 2011, is a true ensemble performance, no single artist dominating.  The music ranges from almost empty whistles and sighs to space-filling density and violent turbulence.  The album puts the listener right in the room; a police siren is clearly audible, as are sniffs and coughs that validate… Continue reading Daniel Thompson, Alex Ward, Benedict Taylor – COMPOST (Cram Records) →

'Songs from Badly-Lit Rooms' by Tom Jackson (clarinet) and Benedict Taylor (viola) is a collection of excellent chamber improvisations recorded over two years at various locations.The variety of sounds torn from the instruments is one of the album's main qualities: swooping bird calls, the scrabble of claws, violent atonal scrapes, low curling drones; the two somehow… Continue reading Tom Jackson & Benedict Taylor – Songs from Badly-Lit Rooms (Squib-Box) →

Beginning the evening, Julie Kjaer on alto sax uncoiled obliquely melodic Ayler lines; long soulful laments punctuated with guttural honks.  Steve Noble on drums employed a woodpecker method with rapid drilling rolls while bass player John Edwards droned and rumbled beside him.  The rhythm section hung a corrugated backdrop behind her increasingly violent forays into dissonance.  She mostly dealt… Continue reading Boat-Ting – Temple, London, 4th March 2013 →

Stumbling across April Larson’s Bandcamp page, I found an astonishing collection of music. Her three most recent albums contain a universe of sound:When You Fall Asleep is a wonderful, static-filled, meditation on crumble and decay. Pieces like 'Last Steps', 'In Exile' and 'Cobwebs' place the hugeness of eternal drone music within a dirty shroud of warped and dust-infused… Continue reading April Larson – When You Fall Asleep / Entressis / Small Pieces of Sky (Bandcamp) →

 This evocative and absorbing tape release from the Auditory Field Theory label is an album on which the young label can build further colonies of weirdness.  The whole thing is soaked in horror-film ambience: a house in the woods, eldritch symbols carved into the bricks; it easily conjures disturbing associations. 'Erotic Theology' materialises from a white… Continue reading Keep Sheila on Acid – Erotic Theology (Auditory Field Theory) →

'Extant' by oh/ex/oh sounds transmitted from a bleak future or an alternative present, a post-catastrophe earth or one where the Rapture has occurred, with humans entirely or mostly absent.  It felt to me like a musical companion to Alan Weisman’s ‘The World Without Us’.  The music perfectly mimics this imagined situation.  'Extant' evokes ruin and emptiness: an expanse… Continue reading oh/ex/oh – Extant (The Geography Trip) →

Opening group lll人,consisting of Paul Abbott (drums), Seymour Wright (alto saxophone) and Daichi Yoshikawa (electronics), unleashed a fiercely textural, saw toothed assault on the Café Oto audience.  The performance was full of shrill drilling feedback and sax squeak.  The band created waves of noise punctuated with sudden bursts of silence.  At times they sounded like… Continue reading The Thing + lll人 – Cafe Oto, Saturday 9th February 2013 →