Lisel and Booker Stardrum team up for debut collaborative album Mycelial Echo

17 March 2021

Photo: Lisel by Gregory Wikstrom / Booker Stardrum by Brian Guido

Drumming wizard, improviser and composer Booker Stardrum and singer, producer, and experimental artist Eliza Bagg aka Lisel⁠ have joined forces for a debut album entitled Mycelial Echo. Crafted remotely over a six week period, the album is closely tied to other artistic projects. Half of the music was written for an opera about trees⁠ set to be presented in a virtual reality installation this year and the other half was composed for The Vanishing Point, a 25-minute music and dance piece commissioned by National Sawdust. The piece was made with dancer/choreographer Gwendolyn Gussman and conceived as video art.

The press release elaborates on Bagg and Stardrum’s collaboration:

“Lisel’s manipulated vocal samples, processed vocal improvisations, and patterns built from extended techniques are combined with Stardrum’s complex sequences, organic percussion, and synths to create a portrayal of our relationship to the natural world that is both tactile, sensorial, and seen from a distance.”

Preceding Mycelial Echo‘s release on April 9th through Luminelle Recordings, the pair shared two riveting and celestial tracks,  ‘In The Dome’ and ‘I Am Not Ready To Go’.  ‘In The Dome’ comes paired a video directed by Bagg herself and featured Gwendolyn Gussman.


Manslaughter 777’s debut album World Vision Perfect Harmony incoming next week

17 March 2021

Photo: Zachary Harrell Jones

Earlier this year we were thrilled to learn about the storming collaboration between two of the most powerhouse drummers out there,  Lee Buford (The Body) and Zac Jones (Braveyoung/MSC).  Under the name Manslaughter 777, the duo are set to release their debut album, World Vision Perfect Harmony, later this month. Sharing an interest in electronic music and soundsystem culture,  on the upcoming record “Buford and Jones blend bracing and imaginative takes on rhythmic-centric forms from dub, breakbeats, hip hop and beyond for a phantasmagoria of bristling drumscapes”, as the press release explains.

Manslaughter 777 had already previewed the album with the fierce and entrancing ‘Do You Know Who Loves You’. The track comes with a video by Alex Lee. Check it out.

World Vision Perfect Harmony is out on March 26th through Thrill Jockey

Fire!’s new full-length album, Defeat, out now

16 March 2021

Photo: Johan Bergmark

Swedish supergroup Fire! released last month their new album Defeat. Despite the fatalistic title, the album finds the core trio of reeds player Mats Gustafsson, bass player Johan Berthling and drummer Andreas Werliin “still honoring their 12 year old vow of presenting a fresh approach to improvised music.” Unlike previous efforts where the tenor saxophone and the bass saxophone played a prominent role, on Defeat Gustafsson elected the flute as his primary instrument.

For a taster of what´s on offer, listen to the album track ‘Defeat (Only Further Apart)’ below.

Defeat is out now through Rune Grammofon.

Lea Bertucci announces new album A Visible Length Of Light

16 March 2021

Photo: Colin Conces

Following last year’s Acoustic Shadows, Lea Bertucci is gearing up to release a new album this Spring. Entitled A Visible Length Of Light, the album features field recordings made in places like Rio de Janeiro, the California coast, and Dead Horse Bay and saw the New York-based composer, performer and sound designer use a number of instruments, including bass clarinet, alto sax, manipulated tape, organ and a venu wooden flute.
According to the press release, A Visible Length Of Light “channel[s] temperaments of dislocation and wanderlust, filtered through impressions of distinctly American landscapes – coasts, cities, prairie – and the sonic material of everyday experience, defamiliarized by crisis.”

The album marks the relaunch of Bertucci’s own Cibachrome Editions and it promises to be “one of her most pointedly melodic, harmonically rich, and structurally distinct efforts to date.”

‘On Opposite Sides of Sleep’ serves as the first taste from the album and is offered with an accompanying film by Fern Silva. Here it is.

A Visible Length Of Light is out on April 16th through Cibachrome Editions.

Fly Pan Am set to release new album, Frontera, in May

16 March 2021

Photo: Yannick Grandmont

Frontera is the title of the new album from Canadian quartet Fly Pan Am, following their 2019 C’est ça. Originally composed as a soundtrack to a contemporary dance piece of the same name, Frontera is a multimedia performance devised with Dana Gingras and her Montreal dance company Animals Of Distinction. Fly Pan Am performed it live as part of the dance production until early 2020 when the pandemic brought everything to a halt, and later in the summer the quartet recorded the work with Radwan Moumneh at Hotel2Tango. According to the press release, “the studio album superbly captures the bristling, sculpted, intensely evocative live score” and is further described as “their most direct, visceral and immediately satisfying work”.

Frontera is set for release on May 21st through Constellation and Fly Pan Am have shared the first single, ‘Scanner’. Take a listen below and check out the album teaser straight after.

Hannah Peel’s new album Fir Wave out this month

16 March 2021

Ingenius Northern Irish composer and producer Hannah Peel is set to release her new album, Fir Wave, later this month, through her own label imprint My Own Pleasure. At the heart of Fir Wave is the “process of re-sampling and generating her own new digital instruments”, as the press release described, “allowing for fresh inspiration in pioneering, experimental electronics from the early 1970s”. Speaking about what prompted the album, Peel explains:

“The specialist library label KPM, gave me permission to reinterpret the original music of the celebrated 1972 KPM 1000 series: Electrosonic, the music of Delia Derbyshire and the Radiophonic Workshop.”

Ahead of the album’s release on March 26th, Peel has already shared two singles, ‘Ecovocative’ and ‘Emergence in Nature’. The latter comes with accompanying visuals created by Dan Conway.