When not leading the Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra or fulfilling her duties as concertmaster of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra (ISO), violinist Una Sveinbjarnardóttir (b. 1975) performs and records with artists such as Björk, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Sigur Rós, Ben Frost, and Víkingur Ólafsson. She’s also a founding member of Siggi String Quartet, partners with Arngerður María Árnadóttir in the violin/organ-duo Translations, and is a composer too, with string quartets and film and theatre pieces among the works she’s created.
But as her latest Sono Luminus release, Ea Fantasia, shows, Sveinbjarnardóttir is as comfortable playing alone and in this case presenting ten favourite solo violin pieces, mostly written by Icelandic composers and the titular one by her.
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Like the best arrangers and orchestrators, John Hollenbeck works best with constraints. His own bands, The Claudia Quintet and GEORGE, offer him unusual small-group instrumentations and unique performers to write for. The jazz orchestra is an entirely different animal, but you can still hear him working the same way: both testing and respecting the forces at his disposal.
Hollenbeck’s latest, Peace and Justice мир і справедливість PAZ E JUSTIÇA, is a bit of a paradox. Its source material is particularly far-flung. Part of the project originated as a commission for scores to be performed in Ukraine, and two traditional Ukrainian melodies appear in the final product. The album leads with an arrangement of a Turkish folk tune, and…
Nothing is quite what it seems on Zawsze coś. Ben Bekele is not, in fact, a single musician but the collective identity adopted by Hubert Zemler, Kamil Piotrowicz and Igor Wiśniewski. Nor is Bekele a surname in the Western sense. In Ethiopia, where hereditary family names are not traditionally used, Bekele — meaning “he has grown” or “he has flourished” — is simply a personal name, one that immediately unsettles assumptions about identity. Zemler has long enjoyed these conceptual sleights of hand. “The Life and Death of Ben Bekele,” released on the Portrety compilation (2019) by U Know Me Records, first introduced this fictional figure, while Gostak & Doshes (2014) borrowed its title from the famous linguistic phrase “the gostak distims the doshes.” The album’s…
Visions of Sodal Ye, is eerie and disorientating – the sound of ecological dread – and named for the prophet character in Brian Aldiss’ 1962 novel Hothouse, who realises that life on a far-future Earth is doomed. The record was released by a vanity publishing label who never said ‘non’ as long as they received a fee and a tape. While this should be inconsequential it reveals much about the French counterculture at the end of the ’70s.
Claude Cuvelier and Jean Skowron, the two provincial northern French music nerds who created Mar-Vista, wanted to reach a big audience but suffered countless knockbacks from ‘real’ French labels. The pair came to the conclusion that “the recording industry in France wasn’t interested in our kind of music” and could…
Grief is a universal experience that no one can truly be prepared for, and one that each of us inhabits differently, in ways we are unable to control or predict. Written for Paula Ďurinová’s film Lapilli, Petra Hermanova‘s soundtrack follows an exploration of death through stones, caves and volcanic landscapes, asking how the physical world absorbs and preserves traces of loss. The title refers to the fragments of rock ejected during a volcanic eruption — small stones suspended between destruction and renewal — and Hermanová’s music inhabits that same uncertain territory, poised between fragility and endurance.
The opening suite, “Five Stages”, moves at a measured pace, every gesture carrying its full weight without ever tipping into emotional…
Six years between albums, Nashville’s Elizabeth Cook returns with her latest LP, continuing her streak of writing pretension-free outsider country/Americana music populated by society’s outcasts and the overlooked.
Produced by Shooter Jennings and recorded with Cook’s live band, Great Television mines both her personal experiences and a cast of colorful characters to create an album that is both introspective and a reflection of society.
The album takes its title from a line in the somber opening track, “Sunset Promenade” (“Turns out hurricanes are great television/Turns out all the things in my head are a prison”). The song, complete with a swell of strings, serves as the ideal prelude to what’s to follow,…
After releasing six albums of varying heft under his Melaina Kol alias between 2016 and 2022, Nashville’s Logan Hornyak has taken longer over this one, time spent adding strings to a sometimes literal bow. Up to now, his output’s been decidedly loose and unbuffed indie pop, like an even lower-fi Sufjan Stevens combining a fragile voice, acoustic guitar and cheap electronics, all held together with paper glue. For Okay that’s a great idea because if I do that then, he’s learned cello and harp, remembered some ancient piano lessons and found inventive ways of making solid song-like shapes out of them. The results are still small and delicate, but the focus is new.
First, the fibs: Hornyak claims to have moved away from guitar and electronics for this, but…
When you run a record label, no matter how big or small it is, and you are an artist yourself, you have the possibility to spread your wings as wide as you can, no matter how good (or not) it is.
Philadelphia’s Douglas Dulgarian has such capabilities. He runs an up-and-coming indie label (Julia’s War), plays in tagabow and They Are Gutting a Body of Water, but also spreads his ideas, along with Scott Turner (hooky) and Sam Silbert (hooky, circle of fire) in a project that goes by the name of god of war, which just released its second album molly picture.
When you have the freedom to abandon any restrictions it can often lead you to excess, but this trio of musicians seems to have found quite a good balance between…
Comparatively speaking, Rotherham appears in the news more than most British towns of an equivalent size. And much of that news is not good. Much of it is representative of poverty, social disenfranchisement, and the ugly face of flag-waving Britain. But self-released, 2020s grass roots indie rockers The Reytons offer a reminder of working class community power, a band who hark back to the days when the only way out of big city estates was through football and pop.
Their last couple of albums (of four, including this one), made it to No.1 and No.2 in the UK album charts, respectively. This quartet aren’t some music-journo-acclaimed-for-five-minutes flash-in-the-pan. In 2024 they put on a 20,000-capacity concert in Rotherham’s Clifton Park,…
Since 2007, whether alongside the MJC Trio, the El Arranque Orchestra or leading his own sextet, bandoneonist Pablo Jaurena has been developing an outstanding musical career. His latest work – his second as a soloist – is one of the high points of that journey. Here, the composer has brought together 31 bandoneon players to pay homage to the defining instrument of tango.
The album contains four amazing historical rescues. These are meticulous recreations or reinterpretations of emblematic works made with some of the musicians who originally recorded them, such as ‘Canaro en París’, which features Víctor Lavallén, Osvaldo Pugliese’s bandoneon player. Five compositions were written especially for the record, among them,…
A Supreme Blue is a collaboration between New Orleans trumpeter and composer Nicholas Payton and 21st century Virginia jazz-funk ensemble Butcher Brown. In celebration of the centennial birthdays of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, this 70-minute set offers complete performances of Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme. These aren’t straight renderings or re-creations; the album reflects the original recordings as guideposts for reinterpetation using a canny hybrid of jazz, hip-hop, dub, funk, house rhythms, electronics, layered production, and modern grooves.
On opener “So What,” the unmistakable call-and-response structure is replaced by a syncopated, soul-funk groove introduced by a heavily reverbed dubwise vamp from R4ND4ZZO’s…
Chicago-based bassist Christopher Dammann has a very limited discography as a leader, but that shouldn’t discourage you from checking out his latest work, Dead Words. On this album, five spiritual contrafacts are reimagined by Dammann’s cohesive and highly synergistic quintet, featuring the incomparable talents of saxophonist Jon Irabagon, trumpeter James Davis, keyboardist Jim Baker, and drummer Mike Reed.
With stately grandeur, “Montrose B” is an assertive opener, a pure post-bop piece that dazzles and invigorates. Following a magnetic bass introduction, the attractive theme is brought to the fore by the horn players, who exchange ideas freely under the spell of the swinging vibrancy coursing beneath them.
…Waylon Payne released his first album, The Drifter, in 2004, yet it took 16 years for the second one, Blue Eyes, The Harlot, The Queer, The Pusher & Me to appear. Now 6 years on, we have, in Payne’s own words, “the third instalment”. As Payne offered in a recent interview with Americana UK, “That’s what I’ve been joking about. I kind of loosely call it Volume Three in a ‘Life Well Lived’ series”. He likes to tell stories, and it’s clear that the album provides a continuation of the stories told in his previous records.
Payne is very much from the country ‘outlaw’ tradition. His mother was GRAMMY® Award-winning country singer Sammi Smith, and his father was a longtime member of Willie Nelson’s band, guitarist Jody Payne. He was named…
Alternate Routes is Reckless Kelly’s reclamation project: re-recordings of fan favorites they no longer owned, inspired by artists like Taylor Swift and John Fogerty who fought similar battles over their masters.
“These songs are your memories, your years on the road, your life’s work,” says Cody Braun. Rather than recreate the originals, the band captured how the songs have naturally evolved through decades of live performance — tracked in just three days at Arlyn Studios in Austin.
…With one exception, all the songs here come from Under the Table and Above the Sun (2003), Wicked Twisted Road (2005), and Bulletproof (2008), with a heavy emphasis on the latter two. (The one exception is their song…
Over the last few years Kurt Wagner has increasingly used Lambchop as a vehicle for musical exploration, with albums like This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You), Showtunes and The Bible reimagining the sound traditionally associated with the name. Much of the experimentation in sound was centred around his vocals, which were often processed through software and devices such as vocoders and autotune.
On Punching the Clown there’s still an on ongoing preoccupation with the human voice but the approach is different, primarily being focused on how voices complement each other rather than how they can be manipulated into different shapes. Alongside the human voice another key sound on the album comes from the banjo,…
…CD edition features the Bob Dylan cover “In the Summertime”.
Margaret Glaspy’s latest album, I Am Both, is a low-key masterwork of observational wisdom, lilting melodies, and sharp wit. She delivers her stinging lines with a conversational ease, wielding the authority of hard-won experience over ringing guitar licks that echo the guilelessness of her storytelling. Her intimacy compels us to immediately identify with the singer, even when she is singing about people other than herself.
…On songs such as the dreamy “Common Ground” and the more somber “Petty”, the singer bites off lyrics about mutual disappointments. She keeps the lyrics simple to show how basic and trivial spitefulness can be, and at the same…
A running theory: The youth yearn for breakbeats. The frenetic electronics of Nineties dance music have rumbled beneath the surface of indie rock and pop for some time now. The current wave of new acts — think Fcukers, Underscores, and of course, PinkPantheress — wield the sound with an uncanny magnetism, as if communicating from a post-digital future. Ear, the London- and New York-based duo comprised of Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan, who met while students at Bard College, have become the type of buzzing indie band you used to hear about in the mid-2000s, fitting as the renaissance of that era’s sounds points to a more spiritual than aesthetic concern.
Following the release of their debut single, “Nerves,” in 2024, the pair have built…
Incorporating field recordings and other organic sounds into a keyboard-heavy atmosphere is nothing new. Still, Ben Dexter Cooley is a master of this genre, and Forager shows him doing it with grace and eloquence. St. Silva is Cooley’s electro-acoustic project, described on his Bandcamp page as a “musician, researcher, and creative technologist”. Forager is a composite of material recorded months before its recontextualization. “Time creates distance,” explains Cooley, “sometimes a healthy distance, between the art and the artist,” shares St. Silva. “This is a document, a marker of where I was during a moment of time and the sounds that inspired me.”
An overwhelming sense of calm envelops the listener immediately, as “And the Catbird Sings”…
This album presents Jakub Hrůša and the Bamberger Symphoniker in the complete cycle of Bohuslav Martinů‘s six symphonies, recorded at the Bamberg Concert Hall. All six works date from the composer’s American exile and represent his mature compositional voice, and the cycle marks the first complete Martinů symphony set in Deutsche Grammophon’s catalogue, as well as a significant continuation of Hrůša’s long-standing advocacy for the composer both in the concert hall and on record.
The First Symphony establishes the cycle’s interpretive character immediately. The Scherzo is taken at a brisk tempo, but it is the sharpness of articulation and the transparency of the orchestral texture that make the movement…
Martin Newell has been releasing wonderful, distinctly British psych-pop as The Cleaners from Venus since the early ’80s. He’s kind of like the UK’s Robert Pollard or R. Stevie Moore, with a seemingly endless well of earworms, all recorded at home on whatever equipment is at hand. (He’s actually written a book on home recording.)
Beryl & Ruff Go Shopping is the umpteenth Cleaners from Venus album, made on an 8-track Portastudio, and it’s pretty hi-fi as far as their records go.
At this point, Newell’s got a signature sound — jazzy, orchestral pop influenced by The Kinks, The Beatles, and other sunshine psychedelia — and a vocal delivery that leans into the Britishness of it all and is as distinctive as his melodies.