Norway’s Jaga Jazzist have shared an incredible, moving and weird animated video to accompany ‘Prungen’, the closing track off their latest album Starfire. The video was made by Trista Namo & Fehl Roch and you can watch it below.
Starfire is out now via Ninja Tune.
Today sees the much anticipated release of Twenty-Two Strings, the new album from experimental mallet-guitar trio Ex-Easter Island Head. With an ever evolving line-up, and currently comprising Benjamin Duvall, Benjamin Fair and Jonathan Hering. Ex-Easter Island Head started as the solo project of Benjamin Duvall in 2009, existing with different line ups including large ensembles. With two incredible albums under their belt, the Liverpool based collective also count a number of stellar collaborations, including with the BBC Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Arnold Dreyblatt, experimental instrument builder Yuri Landman and avant-garde artist / choreographer Kei Miyata.
Described as “their most complex and focused release yet”, the new album “finds the group refining their overtone-rich string explorations around a skeleton of tuned bells and drums, bringing a new propulsive momentum to the group’s goal of “an ever changing surface over an unmoving centre”. The press release adds that “Ex-Easter Island Head push the boundaries of their intentionally restrained set-up, balancing austere physicality with luminescent abstraction to create a bold summation of the group’s work to date”.
Ex-Easter Island Head are celebrating the album’s release with two launch shows later this month. They are performing in Liverpool on August 18th at the Philharmonic Music Room, and in London the following day at Iklectik.
To get you enticed, here’s the album’s heavenly ‘Sixteen Snares’. Listen to it below and grab the album from Low Point.
Following the outstanding 2014 debut album Gist Is, Adult Jazz released Earrings Off, a 7-track EP, earlier in May via TriAngle. Lead singer Harry Burgess explained the themes behind the record:
“The record is about masculinity. Embodiment, lust, idealisation, privilege, legitimacy and limitation. It’s about acknowledging the weight, with a view to liberation from its past clout. It’s about picking your ideal body, and playing with body language to achieve authenticity. It’s about the possibility of authenticity.”
The quartet have been pairing the EP’s songs with videos and the latest to emerge accompanies the sublime ‘Ooh Ah Eh’. The video was directed by Sam Travis, and as the band puts it “it’s iffy, not for dinnertime”.
Brighton’s Luo have recently shared a new version of ‘In The Dark’, originally released in the 2013 Imprints EP.
Initially birthed as the solo project of electronic musician and producer Josh Trinaman, the band’s live line-up has incorporated a number of different guests. Now a quartet with the addition of Jake Keeble, Rik Coe and Sam Hughes, Luo are gearing up to release their debut album. If the staggering and explosive ‘In The Dark’ is anything to go by, we are in for a treat. Listen to it now.
‘In The Dark’ is out now via Small Pond Recordings.
This September Montreal outfit The Luyas return with the release of five-track EP Says You, the band’s first new music in four years. Says You, which will be released on September 16th via Paper Bag Records, follows their 2012 third album Animator.
“Each of the EP’s five songs is a little world of its own characters, particular sense of humour, rules of physics, blue skies and acid rain”, describes the press release. “Like sitting down at a table with a friend, Says You bounces from the banal, to the absurd. It cuts a joke, it empties its wallet, it promises to get the tip next time, and when you smile, it smiles back.”
To get us excited, The Luyas have shared the marvellous EP opener ‘Engineers’. Take a listen now.
Four years after Jherek Bischoff released his magnificent debut album Composed, which was a Pick of the year then and remains a favourite of ours to this day, the follow-up has finally arrived. Cistern, a profoundly beautiful and majestic album, came out a couple of weeks ago via The Leaf Label. Coinciding with its release, and marking his first UK show, the immensely talented multi-instrumentalist and composer launched the album last Tuesday at The Courtyard Theatre in London, accompanied by a string quartet in what was an incredibly special and sweaty show. Bischoff’s longtime friend and collaborator Amanda Palmer also took part in the show, joining him to perform material from their Strung Out In Heaven: A Bowie String Quartet Tribute EP as well as a few of her own songs. The two and a stellar slew of other musicians and guests will perform Bowie cover songs arranged for string quartet tomorrow at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms.
In more recent related news, Bischoff has shared a video for the album’s resplendent and poignant ‘Automatism’, directed by Jim Batt. Here it is.
