Congolese collective Konono N°1 have announced a new album, due out in Spring 2016 via Crammed Discs. The effort was recorded in Lisbon earlier this year with Angolan/Portuguese musician Batida aka Pedro Coquenão. We’ll keep our ears peeled for more news on the album. Now check out the album teaser.
Leo Abrahams’s fifth full-length album, Daylight, arrives next month and ahead of it, the producer and guitarist has already teased the effort with two excellent tracks. ‘Halo Effect’ served as the album’s first taste and last week saw the release of new single ‘Chain’, featuring vocals from Brian Eno.
“The sound of Brian’s stacked vocals is, for me, one of the greatest sounds in music history,” explained Abrahams. “On ‘Chain’ I originally sang all the vocals myself, but as a result of some unconscious plagiarism people started saying it reminded them of Brian! So I asked him to do it, and the end result is both of us singing together. He is very generous with his time and, luckily for me, loves to sing.”
Other than Eno, Daylight also features guest contributions from Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa on drums.
Now take a listen to both ‘Chain’ and ‘Halo Effect’.
Daylight is out on November 20th via Lo Recordings.
A month in from the release of Won, the new EP from Toronto’s four-piece Fresh Snow, they have unleashed a fittingly cinematic and epic video for the album’s intensely beautiful, hypnotic and fierce closing track ‘Don’t Fuck A Gift Horse In The Mouth’, featuring guest Damian Abraham (Fucked Up) on vocals. Ghostprom directs. Watch it below.
Won is out now on vinyl and digitally via Hand Drawn Dracula and on limited cassette edition via Reel Cod Records.
Photo: Jeremiah Chiu
Chicago’s experimental trio Bitchin Bajas are about to embark on an extensive European tour, starting this Wednesday 14th in San Sebastian, Spain. This tour also marks their first ever performances in the UK, with a handful of shows taking place, including a London date on October 26th at Cafe Oto.
Bitchin Bajas’ latest musical explorations saw them joining forces with fellow Chicago based band National Information Society. Automaginary is the fruit of this perfect collaboration, a full-length album released last August via Drag City. As the label described, “the exploratory sonics of these two groups emerge from different, yet occasionally parallel paths to meld into a psychedelic, ambient and jazz-fried coalescence – yet their sum is equal to none of these things in particular, either, arriving on an astral plane unique and of its own.”.
Listen to Automaginary‘s opening track ‘Anemometer’ and straight after let yourself be absorbed by ‘Pieces of Tape’, taken from Bitchin Bajas’ 2014 eponymous album.
With two outstanding albums under their belt since their inception in 2006, Tokyo based trio Mouse On The Keys released earlier this year their magnificent third album, The Flowers Of Romance. The compositions of Akira Kawasaki (drum, keyboards), Atsushi Kiyota (piano, keyboards) and Daisuke Niitome (piano, keyboards), who make up the trio, exhibit far-flung influences from Burt Bacharach to Claude Debussy, from Johann Sebastian Bach to Beastie Boys, from Napalm Death to Steve Reich. Mouse On The Keys also cited western philosophers like Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud or Karl Marx as important influences on the album.
“When I joined Mouse On The Keys”, said Kawasaki, “I envisioned a concept that mixes diverse elements of contemporary music, such as dynamic hardcore drumming and modern French harmony with the feeling of a Detroit techno follower”.
Unlike previous efforts written together, The Flowers Of Romance saw each member writing songs themselves, before teaming up with collaborative guests, including violin player Atsuko Hatano, trumpetist Daisuke Sasaki and guitarist Masahiro Tobita, amongst many other musicians.
The press release describes the album as “an exhilarating utopian masterpiece of venturesome music made for ears with a deep sense of intense and playful radicalness, precision, fidelity and frankness.”
The Flowers of Romance is out now worldwide via Mule Musiq. To get you enticed for this release, here’s the video for the tremendous album track ‘leviathan’.
With less than two weeks to go until the release of Calico‘s self-titled debut EP, the Brighton quintet have premiered a video for new stellar single ‘Fold A Winning Hand’. Here it is.
Calico is out on October 19th via Small Pond.
