New music
Lisa-Marie Ferla
To consider the third album from experimental composer Holly Herndon solely as a piece of music is to miss the point. PROTO is part artwork, part research project, on which Herndon teams up with collaborators both human and inhuman to discover whether artificial intelligence can be trained to produce art. The results aren’t always beautiful but that, perhaps, is what makes them human.As track listings go, PROTO’s is perhaps a little too on-the-nose. The 13-track album opens with “Birth”; a minute-long, alien-sounding composition whose jarring sounds and guttural, inhuman vocals seem to pass Read more ...
Owen Richards
For a time, it looked like Catfish and the Bottlemen might finally be the next-gen guitar band with crossover appeal. Though that never quite came to pass, their new show promoting latest album The Balance proves why the indie faithful value them as Britain’s guiding light. Despite the band being Welsh, it’s hardly a hometown gig - Llandudno is nearer to Liverpool - but Cardiff greeted them like prodigal sons. Opener and recent single “Leftovers” led straight into breakout hit “Kathleen”, and the crowd were immediately part of the band, giving every chorus their all. With a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Nature of Why is not so much a concert as a multi-discipline happening. To assess it is to relate a human experience rather than just an aesthetic appreciation of the new orchestral work by Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory which is at its heart. On the surface, it’s an hour-long piece in nine short movements, interspersed with old BBC recordings of the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Richard Feynman explaining how magnetism is unexplainable in layman’s terms. As a participant, however, there’s much more to it than that.The event takes place at the Brighton Dome’s main concert hall and the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The last time Sergio Mendes, the Brazilian bossa nova legend, played at the Royal Festival Hall was in 1980 when he opened for Frank Sinatra. He shakes his head in wonder at the memory, though it’s not so long ago in the scheme of things – his career started in the late 1950s.The audience is an age-spanning mix: aficionados of his Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 LPs from the Sixties and Seventies as well as fans of the recent Timeless and Encanto albums, on which he’s reinterpreted his songs with musicians like the Black Eyed Peas, Erykah Badu, India.Arie, Fergie and John Legend. Mendes has Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The last thing many were expecting from Rokia Traoré’s opening appearance at this year’s Brighton Festival was an Afro-psychedelic head-fry, yet she and her four-piece band prove thoroughly capable of swirling our minds right off out of it. When she returns at the end of the concert and announces she’s going to play one last song. A voice shouts out, “Make it a long one!” Happily, it is. The final number, “Köté Don”, is a culmination of the evening’s ethos, dragging listeners away once more into precisely estimated - yet elastic - patterns of rockin’, revolving minimalism.Dating back 16 Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In an alternate timeline, Olly Murs - runner-up on a TV talent show a full decade ago - would have faded into obscurity by now. This, as the relentlessly charming performer on stage delights in reminding us, is not that timeline. Some internet commenter remarked, on the release of his first single “Please Don’t Let Me Go”, that it was what Murs would be telling his record company after they dropped him. “Well,” he says, with a gesture a little too rude for the kids in the audience, “I’m still here!”That’s Murs all over: a little lewd, very cheeky, perhaps the personification of the "Lord, Read more ...
Asya Draganova
Singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding originally released 12 Little Spells last year as a dozen separate tracks, each with its own video. This new expanded edition is available on physical formats and download, with four new tracks as bonus extras.The Grammy-winning artist wrote the first batch of material while on a writing retreat at a castle in Italy, and the music is an embodiment of harmony and the healing powers of art. Both grown-up and youthful, smooth yet fun, it's an ultimate feelgood experience for those who enjoy a beautifully-crafted fusion of jazz, soul, and R’n’B.Spalding is no Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Bill Evans Trio played London’s Ronnie Scott’s from 1 to 27 December 1969 as a co-billing with Blossom Dearie. The season would have remained less than a footnote if it were not for a French fan identified only as ”Jo” in Evans in England’s booklet. He took an Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder into the club and placed it under the stage-side table he and a friend occupied. It sat on his knees and was hidden under the tablecloth. A Beyerdynamic microphone was hooked up to the Uher.This was no mean feat. The Uher model mostly in use at the time was the Report 4000 (pictured below left). Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Before we get to the music, there’s the title of Clinic’s first album in seven years to deal with. It comes from the title of a 1970s Granada TV series, The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, a northern entertainment revue presented by, among others, Bernard Manning. The surviving episodes of the show, with the blue dialed down for a wider audience, offer a veneered view of working men’s clubs that gently steers anything too unsavoury into the wings. As a symbol of Britain’s relationship with its past, it’s damn near perfect. Musically, the post-punk troupe’s return has a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Restitute, from its music down to its title, is much about its own back story. Three years ago Eliza Carthy, a key figure in British folk music, made a well-liked album called Big Machine with her group, The Wayward Band. They lost their funding halfway through and were then rescued by 80 year old folk institution Topic Records. The album fared OK but, due to machinations no fault of the label, no-one was paid. Restitution was originally conceived by Carthy, then, to raise funds for those who lost out.Eliza Carthy, the child of a folk dynasty (her father is Martin Carthy and her mother Norma Read more ...
Sam Lee
Every spring for the last five years, we have gathered around a camp fire in hidden locations in a wood in Sussex, to join the nightingales and to “re-wild” ancient folk ballads. We walk in silence through the forest at night, with no torches, reawakening our aural senses. These meditative pilgrimages give people permission to be in a state of communion with nature, to be silent to hear the birds. Singing with the birds is powerfully life-affirming: every year, someone writes to me afterwards to say how they are going to change their life, get divorced, or move jobs…Nightingales show Read more ...
peter.quinn
Hosted by Jazz FM presenters Chris Philips and Jez Nelson, and taking place in the historic surroundings of Shoreditch Town Hall, this sixth edition of the Jazz FM Awards celebrated the dynamism, passion and vitality of the UK’s young jazz scene, with SEED Ensemble leader Cassie Kinoshi picking up Breakthrough Act of the Year, rising jazz singer Cherise Adams-Burnett receiving Vocalist of the Year, and the similarly youthful Poppy Ajudha proving a popular choice as Soul Artist of the Year.Adams-Burnett’s touching duet with Blues Artist of the Year winner, US singer-songwriter Eric Bibb, Read more ...