Monthly Archives: December 2021

Brighton based performer and composer Poppy Ackroyd has returned with her fourth full length album ‘Pause’. A collection of 10 solo piano works written during the pandemic and shortly after the birth of her first child, the title refers to the feeling of normal life being temporarily put on hold.

As individual stories ‘Pause’ is compelling and ambitious but in its entirety it’s a flawless snap-shot of its time, highlighting the highs and lows of the period as well as a unique and challenging era for its creator. It carries with it a host of stages we’ve all found ourselves working through and has done so with gorgeous, poetic lucidity, all the while expanding on the sounds usually expected of a solo piano record.

Using a combination of hardware hacking and industrial manufacturing techniques, Lomond builds his own unique instruments and devices for creating sound which he combines with modular synths, piano and voice. ‘LŪP’ came about when Campbell was commissioned to build a custom tape-looper for prolific Fife-based independent singer-songwriter King Creosote.

The machine itself, takes tape loops that are 601mm long which allows for approximately 10 seconds of audio. On its journey the tape passes a large, rotating disc containing magnets inside. The magnets gradually erase the audio information on the tape, whilst the rotating disc simultaneously drives two small follower gears with eccentric cams that generate gate signals. The small difference in size between these gears cause the gate signals they generate to slowly drift in and out of synchronisation. Using LŪP alongside a modular synth you can patch the drifting gate signals into your synth to trigger patterns that meander in and out of phase, whilst your tape loop is slowly disintegrating. The result is a dynamic, minimalist and introspective ambient pleasure.

When violinist and composer Galya Bisengalieva first conceived her 2020 album Aralkum, it was to be a meditation on ecological loss and grief, both metaphorically and literally through the shrinking of the Aral Sea, one of the worst man-made environmental disasters on the planet. Bisengalieva’s sombre, mournful drones sound a furious death knell not only of the natural world, but humanity’s connection to it, now seemingly severed for good.

Aralkum Aralas is a deepening of the wound, and yet it’s a remix album of great hope — if not in humankind’s ability to instigate radical structural change, then certainly in wide berths of artistic expression about our dying ecosystems. Where Bisengalieva unfurled misty ambiences, Coby Sey and Nazira see potentialities of rhythmic energy — ominous joy, even. Jing draws out an icy trip-hop soundscape and CHAINES emphasises the dreamlike nature of the music in a sublime, delicate rework. Footwork game changer Jlin clips and snips violin squeaks into a percussive landscape of mourning, while Moor Mother drenches the bilious, gaseous rise of reverb-laden sound with some fire and brimstone lyricism. 

Contemporary virtuoso duo AVAWAVES, comprising of Anna Phoebe and Aisling Brouwer release their exquisite new LP ‘Chrysalis’. AVAWAVES are rooted in cinematic narratives, evoking emotional journeys of the heart and mind.
 
Their second full-length album masterfully layers ethereal keys over swelling strings and pulsating synths in a series of euphoric epics. Sublime, celestial textures ebb and flow, building towards far-reaching climaxes where everything comes together in effortless, natural harmony