Jane Weaver Septiéme Sœur

The Fallen By Watch Bird (Expanded Edition)

Fifteen years ago, Jane Weaver’s took a sharp left towards a strange and almost magical new sound. Now, she revisits that classic album with new material and a suite of reinterpretations by the likes of Demdike Stare

The Fallen By Watchbird (Expanded Edition) by Jane Weaver

What is a watch bird? In Jane Weaver’s telling, it’s a remarkable creature that can travel long distances, seek out the lost, and weather great storms. This album, too, is of sweeping scope: it dances through eras and splashes through genres with abandon. Fifteen years on from its first release, and now in an expanded edition, The Fallen By Watch Bird remains as chimerical as it ever…

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When the band PVA asked if they could do something slightly different for their interview we were only too happy to assist, with the help of a witchcraft shop in Hackney and a deck of tarot cards. Words: Jim Osman. Portraits: Rachel Lipsitz. With thanks to Helgi’s Bar and the state51Conspiracy

No More Like This by PVA

London trio PVA make music that sits somewhere between electronic pop, post punk, and sound art, driven as much by the physicality of their performance as any genre allegiance. Made up of vocalist and synth player Ella Harris, producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Baxter, and drummer Louis Satchell, the band have spent the last eight years steadily building a practice rooted in collaboration, rhythm, and live…

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Pullman

III

Instrumental supergroup featuring members of Tortoise, Come, Rex and Eleventh Dream Day, return after three decades for more fuzz clouds, soft drones and gentle shimmers

III by Pullman

The instrumental supergroup known as Pullman first slunk onto the scene with their dream-like debut of genteel post-rock, Turnstyles and Junkpiles, in 1998. Consisting of Tortoise’s Ken “Bundy K.” Brown, Chris Brokaw of Come (the alternative indie outfit rather than pre-Whitehouse electronics obliterators), Curtis Harvey from Rex, and Doug McCombs also of Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day, they followed this, in 2001, with Viewfinder for which they enlisted the drumming talents of Tim Barnes, whose CV includes working with Silver Jews, Jim O’Rourke, Wilco, Sonic Youth, and so many more. A studio-only outfit, the…

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From Shostakovich, to Pet Shop Boys, to DIY and grassroots collectivism, Luke Richards celebrates the centenary of the first public screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, on January 18, 1926, and the myriad interpretations of its soundtrack which keep it relevant and radical today

Battleship Potemkin serves as a technical landmark of the cinematic form. Its rhythmic, montage filmmaking which was directly influenced by the music of the time heralded a new era of meaning-through-editing. It is so dynamic and visually striking, that modern audiences around the world continue to be mesmerised by its set pieces. 

But Eisenstein understood that what was technically progressive at one time was not guaranteed to be progressive at another. If Potemkin were to have long-lasting political…

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Richard Foster peels back the multiple layers of this collection of heavenly covers belted out as if at a karaoke bar in Hell

Xiu Mutha Fuckin' Xiu: Vol. 1 by Xiu Xiu

Xiu Xiu’s new album, Xiu Mutha Fuckin’ Xiu: Vol. 1 is worthy of a quote by Buenaventura Durruti: “We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We carry a new world here in our hearts.” Xiu Xiu certainly have no fear when it comes to covering other artists’ songs and their new world is so big they couldn’t fit it all on the album proper. Those preordering will receive a 7” single exclusive to Bandcamp, featuring CoBrah’s ‘Brand New Bitch’ and OMD’s ‘Enola Gay’. 

Enough of enticements. I suppose one could be critical and say that the choice of some…

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Toby Manning looks beyond woeful sleeve art to find the UK’s underrated Be-Bop Deluxe, serving up a unique blend of art rock, pop prog and late period glam in 1976

Be-Bop Deluxe barely register in music’s critical or popular canon: under-rated by critics even in their lifetime, never really attaining proper popular success, could they be the ultimate 70s cult band? Their relative outsiderdom was partly due to plain oddity, Be-Bop being a very British amalgam of mannered glam a la Cockney Rebel, post-Tommy classic rock, the proto post punk of Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy and the avant-prog of King Crimson’s Red. As such a DNA might denote, Be-Bop’s other problem was poor timing: not only debuting with the…

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Craven Faults

Sidings

Anonymous synth twiddler hymns the Yorkshire moors and the railways that run through them

Sidings by Craven Faults

Craven Faults is known for his anonymity, giving rare, select live performances without revealing his identity. He plays with his back, for the most part, to the audience, while manipulating a wall of analogue modular synthesizers. Over the course of several EPs and one other full-length album, he has built a strong following for his deeply atmospheric tracks which express the Yorkshire landscape from which he presumably hails. His new album, Sidings, moves into more stately, sombre territory which suits his simple, yet multi-layered sound down to the stoney Yorkshire ground.

Sidings consists of three long tracks, each around 15 minutes, bookending shorter tracks,…

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With a focus on the years between 1960 and 1980, Thurston Moore provides Stewart Smith with ten entry points into the wild world of free music

Sonny Sharrock

For fans, free jazz is the most beautiful and liberatory music there is, yet the genre can be a step too far for many. With its unconventional approach to tonality, harmony and rhythm, free jazz can be difficult to get a hold on as a listener. Yet as with reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, the best approach is to just go with the flow and not to worry too much about “understanding” what’s going on. Before long, you realise the music isn’t so much “freeform” as creating its own forms, pulling them apart and recombining them…

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In this month’s antidote to the algorithm, Derek Walmsley celebrates the rich treasures of the independently-spirited region on the borders of France and Spain

“I guess it’s shadowy seen from an outside point of view,” says Mikel Acosta of Hegoa Diskak, an independent label repping the undervalued music of the Basque Country. ‘Shadowy’ was the term given to the scene by the London based experimental music writer Bradford Bailey, writing on the Sound Ohm website, but it stuck, and is now proudly quoted on the Hegoa Diskak Bandcamp page. “The history of the Basque Country is shadowy,” considers Acosta, who grew up in Irun on the Spanish-French border. “There’s elements of conflict, so there’s a lot of questions about what’s happened…

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After 45 years, JG Thirlwell has decided to bring his ever-evolving Foetus project to a close with an album that reflects on the past, while casting an uneasy eye on the present. Wesley Doyle waves goodbye

Photo by Dan Efram

Knowing when to stop is a much-undervalued attribute, particularly in the music industry. So rare is the artist who calls it a day – and doesn’t renege on the decision – they are exceptions that prove the rule. Syd Barrett, Mark Hollis, Meg White… Even rarer is knowing how to stop – David Bowie of course set the benchmark for career-concluding swan songs with 2016’s Blackstar. But fellow New York resident JG Thirlwell has made a similar creative choice with the release…

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