ambient
Album: Kevin Richard Martin - Return to SolarisSaturday, 26 June 2021
It takes a brave musician who thinks that he or she can do a better job than the combined talents of Russian electronica trailblazer Eduard Artemyev and Johann Sebastian Bach. However, Kevin Martin, also known as The Bug and a prime mover for such... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 64: Chet Baker, Lava La Rue, Bob Mould, Krust, The Yardbirds, The Fratellis and moreMonday, 17 May 2021
Things got out of hand at theartsdesk on Vinyl this month and these reviews run to 10,000 words. That's around a fifth of The Great Gatsby. It's because there's so much good music that deserves the words, from jazz to metal to pure electronic... Read more... |
Points of Departure, Brighton Festival 2021 review - Ray Lee's harbour-based sound art impressesFriday, 07 May 2021
They stand in a row, nine of them, in a long, strange corridor between rows of stacked, palleted, planked wood and the red brick wall of an endless warehouse. Nine tripods, each two humans high, with a spinning helicopter head, double-ended by... Read more... |
Album: Hannah Peel - Fir WaveSaturday, 27 March 2021
One has to wonder if Hannah Peel ever had a phase, like so many kids, of listening to music under the bedcovers. She certainly has a facility for making things that come to live in the dark, both in her own music and on her late night Radio 3... Read more... |
Disc of the Day 10th Anniversary: the level playing fieldFriday, 19 February 2021
Theartsdesk is a labour of love. Bloody-mindedly run as a co-operative of journalists from the beginning, our obsession with maintaining a daily-updated platform for good culture writing has caused a good few grey and lost hairs over the years. But... Read more... |
Disc of the Day Celebrates 10 Years of Album ReviewsMonday, 15 February 2021
Ten years ago yesterday, on Monday 14th February 2011, one of theartsdesk’s writers, Joe Muggs, reviewed an album called Paranormale Aktivitat, by an outfit called Zwischenwelt. It was the first ever Disc of the Day, a new slot inserted into... Read more... |
Album: Charles Webster - Decision TimeWednesday, 18 November 2020
Charles Webster is one of those connecting figures who make the idea of “the underground” seem quite convincing. Originally from the Peak District but coming of musical age in Nottingham, he was inspired by Chicago house and Detroit techno music... Read more... |
Album: Rodrigo Leão - O MétodoSaturday, 17 October 2020
Music increasingly escapes categories: labels are of course useful, but they also fail to evoke the richness of practices which are led by musical experiment and imagination rather than obedience to one of the genres or sub-genres that have... Read more... |
Album: bdrmm - BedroomWednesday, 08 July 2020
Shoegaze stable Sonic Cathedral has, in truth, always been a much broader church than its name implies. From the psychedelic, sunshine pop of Gulp, to the blistering art noise of Spectres, it has consistently released music that shares a similar... Read more... |
Album: Polly Scattergood - In This MomentFriday, 03 July 2020
A decade ago, Polly Scattergood was Mute Records’ newest, most-likely-to signing and, while she never crossed over like similar unconventional female artists of the period (Bat For Lashes, St Vincent, Anna Calvi, etc), she has a developed a cult... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 57: Gramme, Terry Edwards, The Orb, The Monochrome Set and much moreSaturday, 16 May 2020
After C19 delays theartsdesk on Vinyl is back. My initial policy, reckoning that new vinyl would dry up under COVID conditions, was to do regular lockdown mini-editions with the material already set aside here, until it ran out. That didn’t work out... Read more... |
Album: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - The Mosaic of TransformationThursday, 14 May 2020
A singer-songwriter of somewhat mystical bent, originally from a forested island in the US Pacific Northwest, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith really came into her own when she discovered vintage synthesizers. In particular, her masterpiece, 2016's EARS,... Read more... |
