Earth Ball

Outside Over There

Panicked beats and sparking guitars animate the latest record from the improvising Canadian quintet

Outside Over There by EarthBall

Based out of a similar neck of the Pacific Northwest’s woods that brought us Twin Peaks, Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy and Mandy by Panos Cosmatos, Earth Ball navigate the lure of nature with a weird bit between their teeth. Less in that saturated, folk horror, zeitgeist-y way, more like they’ve been left to their own devices and have been experimenting without any overarching fear of judgement. They trust in their own intuitions, no matter how wild. These dialled-in instincts were showcased spectacularly on the double live album they released earlier this year.

Their studio follow-up, Outside Over There, doesn’t let the…

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Hannah Pezzack looks back half a century and finds a crucial album which is pulsating with erotic energy

A few years ago, I caught Patti Smith at Rewire, the Dutch experimental music festival. It was not my first encounter – I’d attended her concerts before, including in my hometown of Cardiff and once in Amsterdam, where she prowled into the front row, sermonising like a preacher, fierce and familiar. Then, as in this instance, I thought I knew what I’d find: her indomitable public persona – that New York drawl, the ragged poet brimming with gravelly charisma. But this time, it was different.

She stood in The Hague’s vast Amare dance theatre, together with her bandmates, the Soundwalk Collective, bathed in flickering…

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With the publication of his new book, Grime, Roony Keefe talks to Arusa Qureshi about Rhythm Division, Grime Gran and how he became the documentarian of the grime scene

When people talk about the early days of grime, they talk about MCs, pirate radio, and an innate energy that rewired British music. Behind the lens, however, shaping how we saw it all, were those that chronicled the scene and its most significant moments, ensuring a record was kept of the people and projects that set the tempo for those that came after. Roony ‘Risky Roadz’ Keefe – filmmaker, archivist, and now author – didn’t just capture grime; he helped define it. His new book, Grime: Documenting the scene’s rise and reign,…

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Julian Marszalek relishes a live box set that captures a band at the moment of transition – in invention and reinvention – but, he asks, were they the Beatles of hardcore?

From a vantage point of almost 40 years, it’s strange to think that such a stalwart band of the underground was featured on a 7″ release with a massive distribution in relative terms, even though that group, by this point, were then considered deeply unfashionable. In February 1986, NME – then selling around 100,000 copies a week – cover mounted a free, four-track vinyl EP called The Big Four. And there, alongside joint Album Of The Year winners Tom Waits (Rain Dogs) and The Jesus And Mary Chain (Psychocandy), plus…

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Angus Batey delves into his own extensive interview archive to reassess Liquid Swords three decades later. This feature was first published in 2015

Pardon what appears to be an opening digression, but there’s a point here, which I’ll get too in reasonably short order, I promise.

There was something oddly, disconcertingly, hard-to-put-your-finger-on familiar about the Marvel film Avengers: Age Of Ultron – beyond, obviously, the fact that all the key players had been introduced and built up as three-dimensional characters via a string of preceding films, and notwithstanding their appearance for years beforehand in the comic books the Marvel Cinematic Universe films are based on. Rather, what I found nagging at the back of my mind was the formal similarity the…

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Two decades on Matthew Barton considers how the revered artist came back after a 12 year absence with an album that was well worth the wait

November 7, 2005, somewhere around 4pm. Here on CD, its cover depicting a mysterious waveform, a beautiful, honeyed backdrop and a typeface that reminded me of Emirates Airlines, was Aerial, Kate Bush’s first album release in a dozen years.

Twenty years have mellowed that feeling of utter improbability in holding a new Kate Bush album in my hands – but only a little. The intervening years have since brought us more improbabilities – two albums in one year (2011’s Director’s Cut and 50 Words For Snow), a handful of public appearances and, most improbable of all,…

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Danny Brown

Stardust

Danny Brown goes hyperpop, calling in a bevy of younger collaborators (Jane Remover, Frost Children, 8485, Issbrokie, femtanyl, and more) for the Detroit artist’s most joyour album to date

Stardust by Danny Brown

After 2023’s Quaranta captured him at his lowest ebb, Stardust is Danny Brown’s first album written and recorded entirely while sober. It sounds like the windows being thrown open. On the bright, psychedelic opener ‘Book of Daniel’, fizzing with live drums and celestial backing vocals, Brown narrates his emergence from addiction and arrival at a place of inner peace: “Sleeping real good at night ‘cuz I’m proud of myself”. This wholesome head-held-high attitude carries this fun, typically eccentric album, which knowingly disrupts familiar tropes of sobriety albums.

Stardust is…

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Kate French Morris heads to the ancient city of Guimarães in Portugal, where These New Puritans and a host of local acts guide her through the rain-lashed, autumnal gloom

These New Puritans by João Octávio Peixoto

They may be Essex boys, but Jack and George Barnett of These New Puritans make music that’s just as at home in the Portuguese city of Guimarães. Located a hairsbreadth inland from Porto, Guimarães may not share the main character energy of its neighbour, nor the country’s capital, but it’s in fact considered to be the birthplace of Portugal. The small city moves at its own pace. Its narrow streets with their ancient, bulging buildings and countless alminhas (street-side Catholic shrines) are easily clogged by modernity: on my…

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Gary Suarez gives us an American perspective on one of Autechre’s most revered albums and a duo about to sever all remaining ties to the culture that surrounded them. First published in 2015

When The KLF orchestrated their 1992 televised kiss off to the industry, there seemed little intent on their part to put on a good show. Replete with automatic weapons, dead livestock, and the grindcore stylings of Extreme Noise Terror, the Brit Awards version of ‘3AM Eternal’ looked and sounded awful. Even by their already well-known standards of mischief making and reputation for taking the piss, this was radical. Having mixed, remixed, sampled, and re-sampled their way to fame and small fortune with their dance music beginning in the…

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Charmaine Lee

Tulpa

With a contact mic taped to her throat, the Australian vocalist expands the very concept of vocal music

Tulpa by Charmaine Lee

In Tibetan mysticism, a ‘tulpa’ is a being created through the art of intense concentration. For composer, vocalist and sound artist Charmaine Lee, the concept extends to the human voice and all its mystery. Vocals can be material or transient; organic or an otherworldly entity. With Tulpa, she approaches the voice with attentiveness to its every angle, sculpting eight uncompromising tracks that highlight its malleability.

Tulpa centres and expands the vocal techniques Lee has shaped over the last several years through releases like 2021’s KNVF and live performances as a soloist and collaborator. She tapes a contact mic on her…

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