Music
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Ratatat has the unique ability to sound familiar and fresh all at once. So many bands strive for dubious originality that they lose focus of making music that’s simply good. Ratatat never fa...read more
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From Locust’s brilliant “Wooden Guitar” series comes another terrific release tailor-made for aficionados of the acoustic guitar. Steffen Basho-Junghans discovered the steel-strin...read more
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Saxophonist Paul Flaherty is New England’s purveyor of the ecstatic jazz pulse. Even before his 1978 debut, Flaherty remained unshakable in the pursuit of soul healing and demon dashing throu...read more
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More great acoustic-guitar music from Tompkins Square, which is quickly establishing itself as the Takoma label of our time. Berkeley Guitar features new recordings by three of the Bay Area’s...read more
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Modal guitarist Walker was the musical director for noted Harvard hippie Timothy Leary’s psychedelic “Celebrations” and made a pair of acoustic guitar raga LPs for Vanguard Record...read more
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Slabs of pulsating angst with moments of quiet lyricism, Scotland’s Mogwai here delivers their most varied effort yet.read more
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Cynics may wonder how many albums we need by an instrumental indie-rock band. If the band is Explosions in the Sky, the answer is “all of them and more,” since they just keep getting be...read more
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There are so many levels on which to appreciate the music of James Blackshaw. For guitarists, there’s the sheer how-does-he-do-it of his dazzling technique, used to produce three simultaneous...read more
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Continuing their recent trend towards quieter and more intricately constructed records, Scotland’s finest rock instrumental band may not be breaking any new ground, but they’ve perfecte...read more
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This group’s frequently cited link to Arcade Fire (two members in common) might seem irrelevant considering it’s an instrumental sextet including violin, French horn, and trumpet, and plays in ...read more
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A Broken Consort is one of several pseudonyms employed by U.K. artist Richard Skelton, who operates the Sustain-Release imprint, which issues music and other artisanal works that (in the accurate w...read more
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Composer, pianist, laptopper, producer, comrade to Eno, Coldplay and others—no wonder Jon Hopkins’s new album sounds afflicted with multiple-personality…well, “disorder̶...read more
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Sun City Girls, yada yada, whatever. I enjoy every one of Richard Bishop’s solo albums a lot more than anything he did with SCG. Though still quite eclectic, his discs are more focused and cohere...read more
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Texas always has kicked out this country’s best psychedelic stuff. The duo Headdress (who might live here in NYC now, hard to say with dudes like this) adds a hazy, shimmering new chapter to ...read more
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The greatest musicians are those that are not easily classified. As a solo artist, collaborator and producer, Jim O’Rourke has displayed an uncanny ability to create music that is at once fam...read more
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The four tracks on this Canadian band’s sixth full-length are called, fittingly, “Do,” “Make,” “Say” and “Think.” While they’ve always been known for their powerful instrumental...read more
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Pay little mind to the misdirecting names used here (“Black to Comm” being a blazing old MC5 psych-soul track, and 1968 being the most explosive year of the Sixties). This Black to Comm...read more
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Maybe it’s the leaves swirling by Sound Fix’s big glass windows, but the spare instrumental compositions on Glenn Kotche and Darin Gray’s (aka *Wilco*’s drummer and upright bassist, respect...read more
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After a five-year absence (which saw its members busily pursuing side projects), Austrian trio Radian have returned with this uncharacteristically (and excellently) shambolic and rock-oriented inst...read more
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Instrumental hip-hop record: Why does the notion seem tired and played-out? It’s probably a result of our (okay, my) laziness and the massive over-everythingedness of the music world that thi...read more
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This is the third soundtrack collaboration between Cave and the Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis, and while the movieread more
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Before scoring the Mad Men theme, RJD2 rose to fame in Columbus, Ohio, in the late-‘90s making beats for local hip-hop artists. Since then, through several albums on Definitive Jux and now, h...read more
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Richard Skelton‘s second album for Tompkins Square under his A Broken Consort guise (and he does have several) is a masterwork of psychogeography. Skelton, who lives in County Lancashire, dre...read more
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If the oddly named solo artist The Seven Fields of Aphelion sounds more familiar than it should, it’s because she’s (isn’t it obvious that that’s a lady’s name?) a mem...read more
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