Latest single ‘Mouvement 6’ embodies the sense of peace which emerges through such an ideal. A track “inspired by the joy revealed by the abundant strength of nature,” as Hebborn puts it, “when all life unites in a swirling movement carried by the continuous flow of the river.” Dappled with bright arpeggios and patient in its execution, the song is intercut with field recordings to further anchor its connection to the environment, building through layers of texture and detail as though pushing deeper into the ecosystem it has created. The climax could therefore be construed as having reached the centre of this network. A place of total connection that registers as an all-encompassing peace.

Album cover by Letizia Le Fur, photo by Lara Gasparotto

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Following on from what has been described as the precursor EP, Correspondances, Laurie Torres is preparing to release Après coup, the first full-length album under her own name, via Tonal Union. Taking inspiration from artists like Gia Margaret and ML Buch, the record sees Torres pivot towards an instrumental sound built from piano, drums, synths and field recordings. “I had an urge to use creativity as a sort of resting place, a place where things can unfold slowly and take time to reveal themselves,” she explains of the decision. “In other worlds words, I felt the need to make something slower, more elusive.”

Made in the spirit of improvisation yet finely crafted in its execution, the result is a cohesive album which offers a nuanced, authentic picture of its creator. “Being othered and tokenised as a woman who plays music, as well as a queer and black person, takes a toll, while also positively feeding a strong urge to push and be seen,” Torres continues. Après coup is the product of this urge. Careful enough to explore the tensions and contradictions within the experience, yet sufficiently defiant in its determination to exist on its own terms. The full power of the album is only revealed when experienced in its entirety, but Laurie Torres has released latest single ‘Lisière’ to give listeners a flavour of the release before it comes out next February.

Photo by Sara Lorusso, album art by Maria Zahle

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Since 2017, McMahon has been working on his debut solo album, Odd West. Releasing on Shinkoyo at the end of the month, the record is what McMahon describes as “his first thorough investigation into his own creative voice,” and sees him draw upon his career as an experimental musician to craft beguiling and dream-like folk. There’s a sense of warmth and accessibility too, the result of McMahon’s “searching for something to play for his parents and several wedding ceremonies,” though this is captured without compromising any of the ambition or complexity of his previous work.

Today, Jason McMahon is unveiling the album’s third single, ‘Sunshine For Locksmith’, along with an animated video directed and animated by McMahon and Pixel Mozart (Andrew Strasser). The perfect introduction to the Odd West aesthetic, the track lifts and drops like an early summer breeze, bright guitar pealing behind wordless cooing vocals and swelling strings that knit into an affirmingly dramatic crescendo.

Despite the various supporting instruments, the song could be read as an ode to the acoustic guitar, the centre around which the rest of the track orbits. Indeed, the instrument is the focus of the video too. “My father fell in love with the Girl from Ipanema and moved to Brazil,” explains animator Strasser, “so I’ve had my life to think about beautiful fingerstyle guitar music. Now[…] I have a unique opportunity with this video to illustrate the power and beauty of just a solo guitar.”

However, to view the song as a simple tribute is to underestimate its ambition, and each listen helps unpick further layers of interpretation. Indeed, that there are levels of meaning below the surface is a theme in itself, as the phrase ‘Sunshine For Locksmith’ attests. For the title takes its inspiration from an unlikely source—digital security, namely the fact that a large number of North Americans use the term “sunshine” as a password. “Unlike other common passwords such as ‘123456789’ and ‘pa$$word’, there is no obvious explanation as to the widespread use of such a seemingly random word,” McMahon describes. “There is something dark and beautiful about everyone poorly hiding their own identical sunshine.”

Odd West is out on the 31st January via Shinkoyo Records and you can pre-order it from Bandcamp.

Photo by Kristina Loggia

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“None, Too Many is a collection of songs composed over the last year informed by various personal and public events. Recorded over two days in Anacortes, Washington with help from friends, the hope was to capture a sense of place, time, and those involved.”

Ahead of the release of the album, we’re delighted to share the lead single, ‘Bill’. As described above, the track uses an American primitive skeleton upon which it builds its sound, though the various layers converge into something more classical and almost cinematic, bringing a freshness without sacrificing any of the organic spirit. In a way, the sound is much like the forests of the Pacific Northwest themselves, so old and familiar that they conjure a certain nostalgia even in outsiders, yet still possessing some persistent sense of mystery and intrigue, as though within their ancient midst might lie abounding newness.

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One of the strengths of Settlers is its ability to wordlessly conjure images, most often evocations of life on the American landscape. Pinning specific thoughts and scenes to instrumental music is a dangerous game, as like all art it’s obviously open to interpretation, but you can’t help but let your brain wander over what it might mean. To me it sounds unmistakably rural, vast plains viewed through a wide-angled lens. Take for example, ‘Migratory Birds’,which sounds like the sensation of watching the grey sheets of an approaching storm blow across a stubbled prairie, birds buffeted in the eddies of the autumnal breeze as they take to the wing to leave for winter.

This isn’t folk music that makes you feel enclosed in a rickety old barn or smoky barroom, but instead gives the sensation of viewing the landscape from a choice vantage point, a dusty window or quiet hillside. The tracks sound brown and grey and straw-yellow, recalling words like arid and hardscrabble and timeworn, sounding as if they have been around as long as the hills that inspired them. As the label’s blurb put it:

“[The] delicate ecosystem of these songs…feels as organic and nuanced as that of the natural world. Just as a tree’s leaves wither and fall; a fire sparks and expands only to expend its last bit of fuel, extinguished and left for ash. So true are the parallels we find in our own existence, the complex ritual of growing old and returning to dirt. Decay is inevitable for all life, yet through this it becomes the rich soil for all things proceeding”

As well as the surface imagery there is also something else, something shadowy and strange, that pervades the album. The fingerpicked guitar work is downright hypnotic, dancing campfire flames of sound that tumble on hidden rhythms as if by their own volition. There is also a nagging, lingering noise that adds a sense of trouble or weirdness, a reminder that even the most rudimentary communities harbour secrets. ‘Two Worlds’ is probably the best example of this, the usual guitar sitting on top of a sound that sounds immediately bigger, an almost geological shearing sound that eventually drowns out all else.

And, although this is primarily a guitar album, some of the songs are not guitar-based at all, like ‘Whelm’, which swells with an ambient majesty, the end of ‘Whirl’ which sounds caught on a spiralling breeze, and the closing track ‘After a Storm’, which is thick with droning harmonium that brightens as the track’s eight minutes progress, like the sun slowly peeking over the horizon after a night of gales and thunder.

Western Skies Motel has made a great album, one which conjures a land that’s as hard and unforgiving as it is beautiful. This is music that has dust in its cracks, that tastes like dry, sun-baked earth. Settlers is out now on Lost Tribe Sound. As usual with the label, you can order it on beautiful 12″ vinyl which is almost as much an art package as a music medium (but has sadly sold out – badger the label for a second press), on CD, or as a digital download via the Western Skies Motel Bandcamp page.

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“Our debut, full-length LP was written with the notion that narrative, with its specificity of location and atmosphere, is an essential part of all music. As instrumentalists, we understand this to be a narrative without, or rather outside of, words.”

The result is something rather special. If you enjoyed the instrumental goodness we featured last year (e.g. Lejsovka & Freund, Danielle Fricke etc.) then you’re going to love this. ‘Trivial Pursuit’ opens with gentle guitar and the lazy buzz of cello, like a moseying bumble bee on a summer breeze. The song changes pace slightly around the halfway mark, the guitar rushing into quicker strums, little eddies and swirls in the musical current. It really is a lovely start.

‘Old Black, New Black’ has swishy, shaken percussion and undulating licks of cello, topped off with some strummed acoustic guitar, while ‘Every One of Them, Dogs’ has minimal but spiked guitar and barely-there thudding percussion as the cello snakes around, tying itself in knots as it climbs and climbs. Additionally, pedal steel give things a sunbaked, almost mirage-like, western feel. ‘American Mastodon’ has a softly tumbling and cyclical guitar line and gliding cello which skates across the songs bare black background, as well as some harsher blares, sounds I like to imagine are the trump of the titular mastodon as it trudges through a frozen spruce woodland. The impressively-titled ‘When I Die, Bury Me in the Woods So My Husband Will Hunt For Me’ is slow and sad and elegant as a curl of woodsmoke from a lonely chimney.

The second half of the album sees something of a shift as things get a little more electric. ‘The Bell Suite I. Currer’ is a song for Charlotte Brontë, the first in a triptych of songs which the band describe as a “brooding meditation on authorship, which seeks to personify each of the Brontë sisters in stark romantic relief.” ‘II. Ellis’ is the song for Emily, while ‘III. Acton’ evokes Anne, ending in big distortion-smothered electric guitar. ‘Devils Tower’ continues the electric theme but has more of a clanging subdued quality, before closer ‘Ellis (Reprise)’ is slow and somnolent, with gently plodding and plinking percussion and the final elegiac cello line.

Quarterly is a great record, more than just a change of pace to put on when you’re reading a book or concentrating on something else. It packs twice as much narrative content as most non-instrumental albums, it just takes a little more work on the listener’s part to find (and in some cases engineer) them. As the band say:

“These songs are lyrical vignettes that, seeded with associations, are meant to grow in each listener.”

You can buy Quarterly now from the Quarterly Bandcamp page.

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The accompanying painting for this song is by San Francisco-based artist Lindsay Stripling, who manages to match the simple, warm message of the song and myth. Sometimes things can withstand the passage of time. You can find her work on her website, buy it from her shop and follow her on Tumblr and Instagram.

You can pre-order Quiet, Constant Friends now the Wake The Deaf Bandcamp page. All tapes come with super-limited edition postcard art prints, and all profits will go to Worldreader.

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Here are a few examples: ‘Cycle Frenzy’ brings to mind Vampire Weekend, ‘House Torn Down’ the Dirty Projectors, and ‘Stimulation’ is like an amalgamation of the two. ‘Caricature’ channels the cheesy rock of Queen to become something akin to Fang Island with the speed turned down, while ‘Procreator’ has the smallest hint of Father John Misty’s style of first-person narration. ‘Common Sense Revolution’ takes a jazzy approach, preaching the importance of common sense amongst the pretentious and self-righteous members of the intelligentsia, sauntering toward the final refrain:

“Teachers need more common sense,
doctors need more common sense,
lawyers need more common sense,
authors (?) need more common sense,
physicists need more common sense,
biologists need more common sense,
sociologists need more common sense,
climatologists need more common sense”

This, in essence, captures the message of the whole album. Estan are raging against the pompous nature of professionals and academics, the title highlighting just how ridiculous we are to think we can assign logic to a universe of chaos far too big for our tiny heads. But rather than taking the nihilist approach and essentially giving up, Beedell celebrates this fact, taking great joy in the unpredictable, irrational and thoroughly interesting accumulation of phenomena that is a humankind. So rather than spending time sorting things into clearly-designated boxes (and sorting the boxes into bigger boxes, etc.), why not strap in and open your eyes to the magical and unknowable world around you?

You can buy The Vanity of Reason now via the Estan Bandcamp page, and it is out on vinyl via Famous Last Records.

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The purpose of this sort of music usually falls into one of two categories: to soundtrack (and enhance the power of) a reel of images or to conjure images from thin air, allow the listener to transcend their surroundings. On Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, Bing & Ruth do both. If you are watching the world go by from a train window then the album seems to mould to your surroundings, amplifying small details into imagery, transforming your commute into a slice of cinema. If you are lying in bed with your headphones on or strapped to your ergonomic chair in an office cubicle, TWTGA does the reverse, erasing all details and starting afresh, using the ethereal instrumentation to weave delicate but intricate soundscapes. The lack of percussion adds to the beauty, the tracks taking your by the hand and leading you through worlds that are rich and wide and limited only by your imagination.

The thing is, words like ethereal and celestial and transcendental struggle to describe what makes this record so lovely. These grand words are hyperbole and their use chokes the album in a thicket of cliches, the ‘review’ falling flat in the way of a second-hand dream. If you want to know what makes this Bing and Ruth record so lovely, you are going to have to listen.

You can buy the album from the Happy Talk Recordings Bandcamp page.

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Well it’s not yet September and the duo are back, this time with an album that was written and recorded in a far more intimate setting. Drone and Hum represents a landmark for Old Amica as it is in fact the very first record they have made while spatially and temporally together. After completing Fabula in the springtime, the pair decided to meet and play some music together. So they gathered all of the instruments they could find, set up a microphone in the middle of the room and began creating. A few days later, this lovely EP was finished.

The band then sent the new songs to Swedish filmmaker Jonas Börjesson, who wasted no time in creating the beautiful video for ‘Joni’ which you can see in the player below:

Old Amica – Joni from Jonas Börjesson on Vimeo.

We were lucky enough to get a sneak peek at the rest of the EP, and I’m pleased to say that the other songs are just as good. I was unsure when the band said that the record would be largely instrumental, but this is a worthy companion to their previous releases. In fact, it is the second amazingly beautiful instrumental album I have featured this week (see also Lejsovka & Freund’s Mold On Canvas)

Drone and Hum is due for release on a pay-what-you-want basis on the 5th of September. Check back at their Bandcamp page on release day.

P.S. If you’re not familiar with Old Amica’s previous releases, then do yourself a favour and remedy that fact. Start with The Burning Dot Part I, then The Burning Dot Part II and finally Fabula.

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