earbliss/20240404

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‘Quintela’, the debut album by Carme López, a performer, teacher and researcher of traditional oral music from Galicia, is a new experimental work for Galician bagpipe. Influenced by the approach of composers like Éliane Radigue or Pauline Oliveros, the Spanish composer creates slowly modulating sound environments, and stretches the sonic the possibilities of the bagpipe to its absolute limit. ‘Quintela’ is structured in four movements, plus a prologue and an epilogue, which serve as a link to the contemporary language of the instrument.

DOES IT LOOK LIKE I'M HERE? – Emeralds

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Washes over and propels forward, an aural whiplash of the best kind. Broad generalization (that only scratches the surface): what I imagine a collaboration between Steve Reich, Daft Punk, and The Cure might sound like.

staticy white screen, blue flowers, against black

SYSTEMIC (Divide and Dissolve, 2023)

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Seamlessly jarring and jarringly seamless transitions from pastorale to metal to spoken word poetry to any and all combinations in between that speak profoundly to what I can only imagine the Indigenous experience must be. Revelatory.

TRAVEL – The Necks

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yellow sticky note arrows against blue and black

Always a brilliant new release day (24 February) when my two favorite bands – the other being Algiers – release new albums. In the case of The Necks, they continue to do what they do best, which is whatever feels right to them in the moment: it just so happens that their best grows only more transcendent with each release; a testament to the synergy of the creative process, of being in the moment.