Coppice

As the lockdown continues here in the UK, i hope all of you are keeping safe and well. This week in my ongoing series of Isolation Mixtapes exploring some of the best music from the last 10 years, i’m focusing on composers and artists starting with the letter C. The…

Happy New Year everyone! Many thanks to all of you who have read, followed, commented, shared, promoted and otherwise supported the blog during the previous year, most especially to my beloved band of Patrons. i’m starting 2019 in the usual way, with a new mixtape featuring something from each of the…

i said yesterday how 2018 had been a very good year – just how good is encapsulated in these, the best of the best of the year’s albums, each one of which will do sublimely wonderful things to your ears.

For many years now i’ve been following the output of Joseph Kramer and Noé Cuéllar’s experimental duo Coppice. Their music is not only difficult to categorise, utilising a vast array of appropriated, re-purposed, handmade and/or otherwise kludged bits of elaborate mechanical paraphernalia, but also impossible to predict. ‘Frictional’ is a word…

A very HAPPY NEW YEAR to you all! In keeping with 5:4 tradition, here’s the new year Mixtape showcasing music from each of my Best Albums of 2015. Three hours that demonstrate something of the sonic wonders that materialised last year. Enjoy! — and there are links to buy each…

* Please note this list has how been superseded by the one on the Best Albums of the Years page * Pausing only to reiterate once again how fundamentally definitive and provisional are all lists, here we go with my countdown of 2015’s best albums, starting with numbers 40 to…

i want to flag up a few more new releases that have recently been tickling my jukeboxical fancy. To begin with, music that’s not remotely contemporary, but which in its own way marks an important contribution to the development of a particular musical strand that began early in the 20th…

Not many new releases have made much of an impact on me during the last month. Among the few that have, though, is a new box set from Wergo bringing together all ten of Hans Werner Henze‘s symphonies, performed by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin conducted by Marek Janowski. Henze’s symphonies were an…