Category Archives: Blog

Tanya Tagaq releases ‘Teeth Agape’ video, new album Tongues out later this month

13 January 2022

We’ve been eagerly looking forward to the release of Tanya Tagaq‘s new album, Tongues, since its announcement last September. The good news is that we won’t have to wait much longer as the release date has been brought forward to the end of January. The incredibly talented Inuit throat singer and composer is now giving us another preview of Tongues with the release of new powerful song ‘Teeth Agape’. The track is offered with an accompanying video animated by David Seitz. Watch it below and grab the album when it arrives on January 21st through Six Shooter Records.

Binker and Moses announce new album Feeding the Machine

07 January 2022

The year is starting on a very high note with the just announced new album from London jazz duo Binker and Moses. Entitled Feeding the Machine, the record features honorary third member Max Luthert on tape loops and electronics and was recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios. As the press release describes, the new album sees them “moving their sound into an entirely new dimension that crosses into ambient, minimalism and experimental electronic territories, whilst also nodding to the duo’s roots in riff-heavy free jazz.”

Last month the adventurous saxophone and drums duo shared a new track, ‘Feed Infinite’, which will be on the album, and to get us even more excited, they have just unveiled a new single called ‘Accelerometer Overdose’. Listen to it below and grab the album when it’s out on February 25th through Gearbox Records.

Mophradat to release Songs for Kids, Vol. 1: AFFRATTA later this month

04 January 2022

Mophradat Songs for Kids, Vol. 1: AFFRATTA is an enchanting and entrancing new album that will see the light of day later this month. Mophradat, a non-profit contemporary arts organisation that creates opportunities among Arab artists, conceived Songs for Kids, a project that is “looking for ways for children to be offered joyful, nature-loving, non-patriarchal, imaginative, and evocative music that encourages them to be kind, curious, adventurous, and loving”, as the press release describes. It continues:

“Music and song are one way children learn, express emotions, hear and tell stories, and get to know their bodies. The Arab world, unfortunately, has limited offerings of musical production for children, and this project is one of Mophradat’s first attempts to engage some of the region’s most exciting musicians with this genre.”

Last year Mophradat brought together a sublime cast of children’s writers and musicians to produce an album of progressive songs for young children. Writers Ahlam Bsharat, Hadil Ghoniem, and Yosra Sultan and musicians Huda Asfour, Rehab Hazgui, Maurice Louca, Aya Metwalli, Sam Shalabi, and Aalam Wassef were invited to create music for children around the ages of four to six. Mophradat Songs for Kids, Vol. 1: AFFRATTA is the fruit of this collaboration, a 6-track album mixed by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and slated for a January 28th release.

Lead track ‘Kalbi Balady’, which translates as ‘My Balady Dog’, is the first wonderful single to be let loose and you can listen to it below.

Ben LaMar Gay’s album Open Arms to Open Us out now

30 December 2021

Photo: Alejandro Ayala

Open Arms to Open Us, the outstanding and adventurous new album from musical polymath Ben LaMar Gay, slipped under our radar when it came out last month but we now have it firmly stuck in our ears and hearts. One of the year’s standout records, Open Arms to Open Us is an impressive feat with disparate stylistic dimensions. On his new album, the tremendously talented and versatile composer, multi-instrumentalist, singer and poet runs the gamut from blues, jazz and R&B to Tropicália, hip-hop and eletronica, and everything in between, often within the same track.

In adition to Tommaso Moretti on drums, Matthew Davis on tuba, and Rob Frye on woodwinds, Open Arms to Open Us saw Gay enlist a cast of stellar collaborators, including OHMME singers Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart, bassist/vocalist/arranger Ayanna Woods, multi-disciplinary Rwandan artist Dorothée Munyaneza, poet A.Martinez, cellist Tomeka Reid, and vocalists Onye Ozuzu, Gira Dahnee, and Angel Bat Dawid.

In an accompanying prologue written by him, Gay says the album “deals with rhythm as an inheritance of information – sort of like DNA or RNA. Coping with the present-day bombardment of data and recycled ideologies from sources essentially fed by the creed “Destroy Them. Own the Earth” often leaves me with only one thing to look forward to: Rhythm. More than anything, I’d like my babies to always trust in rhythm. It’s the one trueness that travels great distances and constantly survives the crumbling of facades.”

He continues:

“Open Arms to Open Us is full of rhythm or information that will assist my young folk in dealing with the repetition of things that aim to harm them or stunt their holistic progression. The title is a suggestion of a body movement that is used in many spiritual practices and is also a gesture that represents a type of understanding that leads to touch or a hug. The music is for dancing, reflecting, celebrating, bellowing, bawling, stimulation, focus and deciphering messages from loved ones here and beyond. It was the space in between the sound of my great grandfather’s hammer that made me understand that, no matter what, We Gon Win.”

For a taste of the out-of-the-box sound and far flung influences at play in the album, here’s the three marvelous singles that preceded its release, ‘Sometimes I Forget How Summer Looks On You (feat. Ohmme)’, ‘Aunt Lola and the Quail’ and ‘Oh Great Be The Lake’.




Open Arms to Open Us is out now through International Anthem and Nonesuch Records.

Patrik Fitzgerald releases new single ‘No Santa Clauses’ feat. Lemur

18 December 2021

With Christmas at our door step, cult punk troubadour Patrik Fitzgerald has teamed up with Norwegian ensemble LEMUR to release a fitting single for the season. Entitled ‘No Santa Clauses’, the single is out now through Crispin Glover Records and is backed by B Side ‘With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm’, an old music hall song from 1934. Both dark and delightful, ‘No Santa Clauses’ depicts the horrors of poor small children who were forced to sweep chimneys, a prominent practice in England in the late 18th and 19th century. The track is offered with a brilliant animated video made by The Branch and you can watch it below.

Watch Poppy Ackroyd’s video for new single ‘Suspended’

17 December 2021

Last month saw the release of Poppy Ackroyd‘s Pause, her magnificent fourth album comprising 10 solo piano works that came to life during the pandemic, following the birth of her first child. The extraordinary multi-instrumentalist and composer Poppy Ackroyd has shared a new single from the record called ‘Suspended’. She had this to say about the track:

“It’s about the eerie quiet of a city in lockdown. Walking through Brighton in the early hours of the morning, often with the streets to myself, I found myself imagining what the bird’s eye view of the city would be like. Everything was so still, time almost felt suspended. This track was my attempt to capture that feeling. It is performed with both hands inside the piano, using the instruments strings rather than the keys. The left hand gently hammers the strings repeatedly from above, while the right picks out a plucked melody that floats over the top.”

‘Suspended’ comes with a gorgeous video by videographer Jola Kudela, who comments:

“I knew about the genesis and Poppy’s intention when I started working on the video – empty quiet city, deserted by covid. But I live in London, not in Brighton, so I was experiencing anxiety rather than quietness created by this artificial state of suspension. That’s why I imagined a mysterious presence walking through the city, something that had taken the ownership of our space. But what at first seemed menacing became salvation and escape.

From a technical point of view, I shot the video in the post-lockdown era so it wasn’t easy to find empty streets anymore. So I based most of the process on still images that I projected into simple 3D forms and moved the camera in that space. This process is called camera mapping. The clouds where generated based on VDB objects (OpenVDB is an open-source library comprising a hierarchical data structure and tools for manipulation of sparse volumetric data discretized on three-dimensional grids). It required 3 weeks of rendering at a render farm of 8 computers. It was quite a technical challenge for me, working on my own, but it was very fulfilling to achieve the final result.”

Watch the video below.


Pause is out now through One Little Independent Records.