SANAM

Sametou Sawtan

Sandy Chamoun joins guitarist Anthony Sahyoun, buzuq player Farah Kaddour, bassist Antonio Hajj, plus electronics from Marwan Tohme, for an album that explores the horizons of post-rock beyond the Western world

Sametou Sawtan by SANAM

SANAM couldn’t choose a better opener for their new album than the majestic and multilayered ‘Harik’. It best encapsulates what the Beirut-based group can do. ‘Harik’ (“Fire” in Arabic) is woven from disparate sound worlds – spanning contemporary Arabic music, free psych rock, and Western post-rock tropes, calling to mind the likes of Egypt-based group The Dwarfs of East Agouza. This music opens ruptures in time and space.

There is a sense of urgency right from the start. It’s announced by the pounding drums of Pascal Semerdjian…

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Out in January, it’s preceded by lead track ‘Time Inside The Violet’

Photo by Josh Sisk

The Soft Pink Truth, otherwise known as Matmos’ Drew Daniel, has shared details of a new album, titled Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever?

Spanning eight tracks, the album features guest contributions from a vast cast of artists that includes Bill Orcutt, Andrew Bernstein of Horse Lords, M.C. Schmidt of Matmos, string player and arranger Ulas Kurugullu, and vocalist Helen Spencer Wallace, among others. The record sees Daniel explore elements of chamber and electronic music.

The album is preceded by lead cut ‘Time Inside The Violet’, which you can watch a video for below.

In a statement about the song, Daniel said: “The phrase ‘time inside the violet’ appears…

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Among the more than 450 items featured in the sale are the EMS Synthi AKS suitcase synth from Kraftwerk’s Autobahn era, and the bicycle Schneider rode in the video for ‘Tour de France’

More than 450 items previously belonging to the late Florian Schneider of Kraftwerk are being put up for auction.

Handled by Julien’s auction house, the sale is open until 10am CST on 19th November. It’s described by the auction house as “the first auction to feature a comprehensive collection of items from [Schneider]’s personal life and career”.

Among the key items available for sale are the EMS Synthi AKS suitcase synth from Kraftwerk’s Autobahn era; the Panasonic bicycle that Schneider rode in the 1984 music video for a remix of…

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Patrick Clarke reports from Braga’s Semibreve, where high-concept programming and the use of beautiful interior spaces reap rich rewards

Lucy Railton performs at Semibreve’s Theatro Circo. All photos courtesy of Adriano Ferreira Borges / Semibreve

From the outside, the Congregados Basilica is, like the rest of Braga, beautiful in an understated kind of way. It’s a city where you have to strain just a little to catch the sunset at the end of a narrow medieval street, pause for a minute to notice the way old and new buildings subtly juxtapose. Slotted as the Basilica is into a terrace of shops and restaurants by the side of a busy pedestrian thoroughfare, at ground level you could easily miss its unremarkable front door….

The post The Sublime to the Meticulous: Highlights from Semibreve 2025 appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/live-reviews/semibreve-2025-review-suzanne-ciani-emptyset-rafael-toral-aya/

Ahead of their appearance at this year’s Le Guess Who festival, Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko speak to Jennifer Lucy Allan about interpreting the music of Hildegard Von Bingen via Ukrainian folk song in the context of the Russian invasion of their homeland

Live photograph from Unsound Ephemera by Kacper Dudziak

“The main reason this recording exists is to talk about the wartime experience and to renegotiate Ukrainian identity on our own terms,” says electronic musician Heinali, aka Oleh Shpudeiko, about Гільдеґарда (Hildegard), the album he and singer and musician Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko released earlier this year. The Hildegard of the title is Hildegard von Bingen, the 21st Century’s favourite Medieval polymath nun, whose compositions they reinterpreted with modular synths and Ukrainian traditional singing. 

Saienko and Shpudeiko met…

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source https://thequietus.com/interviews/praying-in-fire-with-hildegard-von-bingen-heinali-andriana-yaroslava-saienko-interviewed/

Jeff Tobias

One Hundredfold Now In This Age

From Queens, New York, the composer and multi-instrumentalist – some time member of Modern Nature, Thee Reps and Sunwatchers – makes jazzy, proggy sunshine pop with a scathing take on contemporary US politics in its tail

Jeff Tobias’s One Hundredfold Now In This Age begins at its paradoxically lowest yet bubbliest point. “Burn the American flag, one hundred times a day,” insists the Queens, New York-based composer and multi-instrumentalist, his catchy vocal melody supported by a fusiony dance of keyboard phrases, clarinet textures, and saxophone leads. While framed as Tobias’s reaction to the US-sponsored genocide in Gaza, opener ‘END IT’ is ambiguous, infected with an undertone of doomerism – a type of contemporary Weltschmerz that pervades…

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Stewart Smith looks forward to this year’s event by speaking to Neil Charles about a new work inspired by James Baldwin, and highlights sets by Charles Hayward, Linda May Han Oh and Tortoise

Mulatu Astatke by Karston Tannis

EFG London Jazz Festival returns this November with ten days of concerts across concert halls and clubs, churches and community spaces. Next to more tightly curated European festivals like Berlin or Wrocław’s Jazztopad, London can feel a little impersonal. Yet the sheer range and depth of the festival is impressive, while the dash between events is part of the fun. Navigating such a huge programme can be daunting, so let The Quietus be your guide. 

The festival has its fair share of legends playing, from the great…

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At the 69th annual International Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice, performances by the Kamigaku Ensemble, Jasmine Morris and Sunn O))) leave Robert Barry pondering what we mean when we call music ‘heavy’

SUNN O))). Ph. Andrea Avezzù. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Already, when I entered the theatre, some ten minutes or so before the start of the concert, there was this hum in the room. The deep, angry buzz of idling machinery. With its crumbling stone walls and wood-beamed ceiling intersected by grey arched colums, the Teatro alle Tese would make a fine set for a medieval banquet in some sword-and-socery movie. Tonight it was minimally dressed in a big red rug for the audience to sit or sprawl upon,…

The post Light Music: Sunn O))), Catherine Christer Hennix & More at Venice Biennale Musica appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/live-reviews/light-music-sunn-o-catherine-christer-hennix-more-at-venice-biennale-musica/

Keith Kahn-Harris celebrates a sometimes glorious, occasionally infuriating, always baffling album that remains entirely of its time

Rhythm is both the song’s manacle and its demonic charge. It is the original breath. It is the whisper of unremitting demand. ‘What do you still want of me?’ said the singer. ‘What do you think you can still draw from my lips?’ Exact presence that no fantasy can represent. Purveyor of the oldest secret. Alive with the blood that boils again and is pulsing where the rhythm is torn apart. How your singer’s blood is incensed by the depth of sound. Lacerations echo in the mouth’s open erotic sky where dance together the lost frenzies of rhythm and an imploring immobility.

It’s been forty…

The post All this and Ian McShane too: Grace Jones’ Slave To The Rhythm at 40 appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/grace-jones-slave-to-the-rhythm-review/

The Pastor Chris Congregation

West Virginia Snake Handler Revival “They Shall Take Up the Serpents”

Strychnine, speaking in tongues and ramshackle rockabilly spits forth from West Virginia’s last remaining snake handling church

West Virginia Snake Handler Revival “They Shall Take Up Serpents” by Sublime Frequencies

High in the mountains of West Virginia lies McDowell County. Formerly a hotspot for American coal mining, technological advancements and outsourced labour crept through Appalachia in the mid-twentieth century, leaving communities like McDowell destitute. From 1950 to 2020, the county saw its population fall by over 80%, and by 2015 it had the highest number of drug-related deaths of any county in the United States.

Alongside abandoned buildings and burnt-out cars, McDowell County is dense with churches. Typically…

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