Ambient
-
James Armstrong’s imaginative use of sustained guitar sounds places him on the near end of an artistic continuum that features Randy Roos, Steve Holland, Tony Levin, Mike Stern and more recently Brian Eno collaborators Michael Brook, Daniel Lanois and The Edge. This is the kind of company most guitarists would be happy to keep. In…
-
To fully appreciate this extraordinary new work from Rutger Zuydervelt (a.k.a. Machinefabriek), it’s important to understand the subject of the documentary that The Red Soul serves as a soundtrack to. Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union, as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1922 to 1952 and as Soviet Premier…
-
Often described as dark ambient, Sann Gusmão’s work deserves a less narrow classification. This new recording is more sophisticated than most everything we’ve heard from that subgenre in recent years. That’s not meant to be a knock on other artists. It’s just that these nine new tracks reach beyond the conventions of any single style…
-
Guitarist Raven Bauer Durham of Phoenix Auto Group has released her debut, a lo-fi beauty that slides back and forth between indie folk, ambient and new classical. Bandmates James Wolf and Stephen Carroll Palke are along for the ride. Wolf contributes violin and a mean singing bowl to “Spring,” “Drawings,” “Emphemeral “and “Without Which, Not.”…
-
Gianluca Piacenza has nothing to hide. At least not on his exquisite new disc The Road to Home. Improvised and then honed for piano – and on one piece a softly recorded string quartet – the Italian pianist and composer has delivered a resonant, expansive collection of works that feel unusually intimate. Piacenza performs on…
-
Lewis Carroll fans will recognize this title from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Watching a croc coax fish into his mouth with a warm smile, Alice recites a poem that begins “How doth the little crocodile; improve his shining tale …” Carroll’s poem within a story was a parody of Isaac Watts’ “Against Idleness and Mischief.”…
The Moderns 