The Trypes – Music For Neighbors - May 2012 May 27th, 2012

The availability of everything dissolves the presumed linear progression of popular culture. Thirty years ago, pop music scorched away its immediate past, and no legal reissues or illegal weblogs enabled the immediate reformatting of forgotten forms. The Trypes, New Jersey practitioners of the ‘Hoboken Sound’, alongside The Feelies and The Willies, were amongst the first…

John Butcher & Mark Sanders – Daylight - May 2012 May 27th, 2012

Once, John Butcher pitched saxophone improvisations into the unknown acoustics of highland caves and offshore oil tanks. Here he engages with the percussionist Mark Sanders, a human arguably more inspiring, it appears, than a vast empty space. Most popular music takes place en plein soleil. Butcher maintains that Ropelight, the thirty minute live recording that…

The Imagined Village – Bending The Dark - May 2012 May 14th, 2012

Simon Emmerson’s Imagined Village seek a rapprochement between the English folk tradition and post-colonial world music. Their third album finds sitars and tablas alongside the pedigree vocals of Jackie Oates and an especially majestic Eliza Carthy, and Get Kalsi and The Guvna mix devotional sincerity with an arch meditational lounge muzak. Perhaps Bending The Dark’s…

Haight-Ashbury – Haight Ashbury 2 : The Ashburys - May 2012 May 6th, 2012

Haight-Ashbury’s name suggests acid-drenched guitar jams, but the Scottish trio’s second album swamps Galswegian indie rock indolence and studied pop classicism in ludicrously lush, reverb heavy, Mamas And Papas Sunshine state harmonies. Sophomore, the album’s single, contains all trio’s signature moves. Fuzzed Jesus and Mary Chain guitars throb way down deep in the record’s Marianas…

Various Artists – I’m A Romany Rai, Songs By Southern English Gypsy Traditional Singers - April 2012 April 29th, 2012

Whenever Topic trawls its archive for new Voice Of The People compilations, the aural artifacts they dredge seem ever more distant, ever more valuable. Taped in the ‘50s and ‘60s, these unaccompanied gypsy singers, their distinctive sound the musical manifestation of a lifestyle that today appears unsustainable, are moving, vivid and often quietly disconcerting. Seven…

Ivor Kallin – A Wee Dug Stole A Haddy Bone, Pibroch Viola Improvisations - April 2012 April 29th, 2012

Emptying his East London bedroom to decorate, the viola player Ivor Kallin noticed its exceptional acoustics, and he’s rush-released the recorded evidence as a free download from Linear Obsessional. Kallin, a transplanted Glaswegian, claims to be playing viola in the Pibroch tradition of extended bagpipe compositions. Thus, these three lengthy and oddly timeless pieces recall…