CD/Digital releases

i’m bringing my annual January exploration of free music to a close with an album that, as happens every year, should have appeared in my Best Albums of 2022 but i ended up listening to it just too late. That being said, when i first spent time with Encircle, by…

Today’s piece of freely-available music comes via Yugen Art, an online repository of sound art that in some respects resembles a netlabel but is more aloof, publishing things online with an absolute minimum of fuss or extraneous (or even pertinent) information. i’ve written about works from the Yugen Art archive…

Seaming To is an English singer and musician whose work seems to be the product of, to date, three distinct periods of activity. She was a guest vocalist on some singles in the early 2000s, followed by her own first EP, Soda Slow, in 2006. Then things went quiet until…

The next music i’m featuring in my series exploring interesting free music is another soundtrack, again very short, this time from television. It’s something of an oddity, partly because it was never a ‘release’ in the usual sense of the word (and isn’t really available any longer), partly because it’s…

i’ve written about the music of Danielle Johnson – aka Danz CM (previously aka Computer Magic) – on a number of occasions. Her usual output is analogue synth-laden bedroom pop – growing increasingly sophisticated over the years, featuring in my Best Albums of the Year in 2018 and 2021 –…

One of the musical acts i’m always hoping might get back together at some point is Ektoise, an Australian group who from 2010 to 2013 put out a series of albums and EPs that forged an experimental synthesis of rock, ambient, doomjazz and shoegaze without once missing a step. While…

To begin my usual January focus on interesting free music, i’m returning to the ephemeral world of netlabels. Rural Colours appeared in 2010 as a tangential off-shoot from parent label Hibernate, which had begun the previous year. What distinguished them both from other netlabels was the fact that their releases…

In 2018, when exploring the music of Rebecca Saunders in that year’s Lent Series, i made the following remark regarding recordings of her music: The fact that i’ve explored Rebecca Saunders’ recorded output over four articles suggests that she’s well represented by recordings of her work. But almost half of…

Nearly 40 years have passed since Spanish sound artist Francisco López‘s earliest releases. Whatever else has changed throughout those four decades of creativity, one thing has remained consistent: his use of the word ‘Untitled’ for his output. Not always, of course, but aside from a few exceptions, López’s output has…

Twentieth century music is at an interesting point in its history from the perspective of recordings. Contemporary music, for obvious reasons, is always the most under-represented, whereas works from the last hundred years are beginning to reach the stage where’s there’s a more meaningful range of recordings available. In the…

Concerts of contemporary music have a tendency to be obsessed with presenting premières, yet it’s all too common for those performances to be dazzling one-offs that are all too soon lost to oblivion. So there’s some serious kudos due to NMC for saving two such performances, both electroacoustic, both showcasing…

Over the last few years i’ve been more and more deeply impressed by the music of Icelandic composer and performer Bára Gísladóttir. First contact was at the Dark Music Days in 2020, when i saw her in action with Skúli Sverrisson, forming a complex double bass / electric bass soundworld…

The last time i wrote about Australian composer Brett Dean was exploring his response to the music of J. S. Bach, as part of The Brandenburg Project. This time it’s Beethoven’s music that Dean is responding to, in his orchestral work Testament, which has recently been released in a performance…

Is there a collective noun for drones? It wasn’t until i was about halfway through Twenty Twenty, the debut release from Congregation of Drones, that the question occurred to me. On the strength of this remarkable album, though, ‘congregation’ seems entirely appropriate. Congregation of Drones is a duo comprising violinist…

One of my unexpected highlights of 2017 was the album Contemporary Jewish Music by Polish composer Stefan Węgłowski, a mesmerising sequence of electroacoustic responses to a variety of Jewish sources, utterly transforming them while retaining tangible links to their origins. His latest release, PHASE_1_4, makes that album sound like an…

It’s a good sign when, despite being a passionate believer in the maxim “less is more” in terms of a composer’s output, i still find myself feeling frustrated and impatient waiting for certain artists to create something new. That’s been the case very strongly with Vietnamese-Australian musician Carolyn Schofield, aka…

While the answer to the question, “What is it good for?” continues to be “Absolutely nothing!” where war is concerned, there’s a tiny sliver of comfort to be gained from the fact that the ongoing outrage perpetrated by the Russian regime has thrown a spotlight onto aspects of Ukrainian culture…

There’s something rather depressing about the fact that, despite nearly a century separating the publication of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando in 1928, and the première of Olga Neuwirth‘s opera Orlando in 2019, the topic of gender identity and fluidity continues to be regarded as such a hot, controversial topic in…

Flow is the title of a new album featuring Belgian clarinettist Annelien Van Wauwe wielding the less common basset clarinet. Invented in the 1770s by Theodor Lotz (who had previously created the basset horn), the purpose of the instrument was in part to extend the lower range of the clarinet.…

Chamber music implies a particular kind of intimacy, and that’s overwhelmingly the case on a new album of music by Russian-born composer Lera Auerbach. Part of its intensity comes from the fact that the performers are Avita Duo, comprising pianist Ksenia Nosikova and her violinist daughter Katya Moeller. This in…