Absorbing new music from Ecuador, named after a street in the historic centre of Quito.
A poignant, trippy, astute, bass-heavy blend of a range of styles including juke, reggaeton and UK garage, flavoured by their to and fro between Latin America and Europe.
Quixosis’ grandad was a key, controversial player in the explosion of musica nacional in the city in the early sixties, and the mix is studded with evocative samples of Italian chanson and South American folk from his record collection, in a kind of reverie about national and self identity, Beat Konducted at the centre of the world.
Check it out.

The CD is from Important.

‘Dave Cudlip’s debut album, inaugurating the highly promising, experimental label Klang Tone (spawn of the estimable Stroud record shop): a stunning and unique combination of ethereal ambient soundscapes, undulating rhythms, and atonal sound collage, with Harmonia and Autechre looming amongst its forebears.’

Two long-form pieces of modular minimalism. Both sides unfurl fifteen minutes of urgent, high-octane loops, repeating patterns, and distorted vocal frequencies, drawing on Terry Riley, Suicide, no wave and synth pop — not to mention the history of modern Lebanon. (Hush, hush.) Enter Ghost, a wonderful novel by Isabella Hammad, also comes to mind.

The return of Jim O’Rourke’s Moikai imprint, after an interlude of two decades.
‘Threading together twelve distinct episodes into a flowing whole, Spectral Evolution alternates moments of airy instrumental interplay with dense sonic mass, breaking up the pieces based on chord changes with ambient ‘Spaces’. At points reduced to almost a whisper, at other moments Toral’s electronics wail, squelch, and squeak like David Tudor’s live-electronic rainforest. Similarly, his use of the guitar encompasses an enormous dynamic and textural range, from chiming chords to expansive drones, from crystal clarity to fuzzy grit: on the beautiful Your Goodbye, his filtered, distorted soloing recalls Loren Connors in its emotive depth and wandering melodic sensibility…
‘Spectral Evolution is the quintessential album of guitar music from Rafael Toral.’

‘Sidesteps the traditional logic of how to play a song, moving outside the framework with which one would expect a standard to be treated. Three decades ago, in the early years, Toral used the guitar as a generator, to create discreet texture and droning tones. Later, he abandoned the guitar entirely, focusing on self-made electronics to render his music, and the silence from which it came, with a post-free jazz perspective. For the music of Spectral Evolution and Traveling Light, Toral has combined his methodologies, remaining ‘in the tradition’, even as the elongated harmonies seem to alter time and — says Toral — ‘the chords become events on their own.’ At points, the long tones evoke the sacred ennui of liturgic music, the choir or the organ standing in for silent contemplation while rumbling the ground beneath our feet. In addition to Toral’s guitars, sine wave, feedback and bass guitar, each track features clarinet, tenor saxophone, flügelhorn, and flute, by turn. One of Toral’s self-made devices incorporates a theremin to modulate feedback melodies. The spring of the old pours through the new in an unstoppable flow.’

Washed between industrial and devotional fronts, eight pluviophile excursions by Giuseppe Ielasi & Giovanni Civitenga, steeped in the manifold evocativeness of rainfall — how it orchestrates some of our deepest memories and fantasies. 

‘Yesterday it started to rain…
‘The smell of damp tarmac rising up through open windows from a suburban pavement, a school playground, a basketball court…
‘The rain cut through a band of low pressure that had been lying over the city for days, pinging rhythmically off metal, causing rolling tyres to hiss and spit.
‘Its soundtrack is the debut full length from Rain Text, run through with build-ups of low-end pressure relieved by the fizz and clatter of metallic rhythms…
‘Static… discord… release…’

Country punk from 1985.