‘Psychedelic funk, cosmic disco, Balearica… and beyond!’

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.

‘What does it mean to listen? I mean, really to listen to the infinite possibilities of every moment of our sonic lives? No composer in 20th and 21st century music asked the question more sensitively, or more profoundly than Eliane Radigue, who has died at the age of 94.
‘Radigue was a sonic pioneer. Pre 2001, her music was made exclusively for synthesisers, because the technology allowed her to get inside the world of sound, stretching individual pitches into seeming infinities of slowness and concentration, in a way that traditional composition didn’t. Listen to the epic scales of ever-changing changelessness — a paradox that makes sense when you encounter her music — of her Trilogie de la Mort to experience what I mean. As Pascal Wyse wrote in his interview with her, Radigue’s use of synthesisers meant that ‘the music didn’t contain sound: the sound contained the music’ (The Guardian).

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.

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.’