Foxy Digitalis
As the sun breaks over empty fields and sullen fog, “Dead Creek Drawl,” the opening track on Old Saw’s Country Tropics rises. This is the music of ancient soil; sonic wanderings imbued with the dirt of countless generations, saturated with the blood of our ancestral homes that, try as we might haunt us like anchored ghosts. […]
Simple rhythms are a cradle for synthesizer sequence earworms and clanking guitar leads. On Southern Indiana castaway, Roadhouse’s debut, Aladdin Sales, the tire treads are worn smooth and there’s no way the car is making it to the border, but he’s relentless. “Coulda Been a Penny” bops with purpose, metallic chimes rusted out but still singing […]
Out today via the legendary BlueSanct is a gorgeous live document from Chicago’s Pillars and Tongues shows the band at their peak. Recorded in 2009 after a lengthy tour with Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “Great / Most Secret” is a music with a primordial spirit as if these songs emerged from an ancient energy source beneath […]
Stretching through the haze of daybreak, the new collaborative album from Jeremiah M. Carter and Chelsea Bridge, The Way It Pours Into Itself, breathes in the dissonance only to find beauty in exhalation. Album closer, “Of Babel,” is a winding tapestry of spectral drones and spiraling string incantations, illuminated like the final moments of a dream. […]
Ashes, the new album from Field of Fear, takes a heavy concept and transforms it into something dark and beautiful with an overwhelming power at its core. The pieces on Ashes were composed by processing pixel data from photographs taken of the aftermath of the CZU Lightning Complex fires in California last year. That data was then […]
In the opening moments of “Watch on the Orient,” the first track of Mephisto Halabi’s incredible The Arabic Room, it feels like traveling through time and space through the radio dial. Traditional music trips into a woman’s voice speaking Arabic before giving away to acid-soaked riffage. As soon as the sharp, distorted tones hit, the […]
Starlight Assembly is the new duo of Dominic Appleton of Breathless and This Mortal Coil and Italian composer Matteo Uggeri. It’s an unexpected combination, but their debut album, Starlight and Still Air, shows the symbiotic nature of their approach and ideas. Rich compositions dotted with layered character and countless textures create a future where the last […]
Returning for their second album in as many years on Hands in the Dark, Razen holds back on Blue Rot. This is music that sounds unmoored by the concept of time, existing simultaneously in ancient ruins restored to their former glory and in the dark recesses of a post-apocalyptic future. “Blue Rot (5th)” moves slowly, contemplating […]
There’s something that’s simultaneously emotionally satisfying and completely draining about “Julius Eastman/NY Metro Xylophone Player,” the newest single from the impossibly-named —__–___ (aka more eaze and Seth Graham). Visceral tugs radiate with a sinuous attachment from more eaze’s wistful violin notes as they grow and shrink back into the darkened corners. Graham and more eaze […]