Back catalogue: Post Rock/Experimental

Review: So what happens when a European post-punk outfit meets an American 'ambient country ensemble'? The answer: A Nanocluster. In fact, three. This being the third. Immersion first met SUSS in September 2021, and the results were mesmerising. Three years on and the impact was no less staggering. Originally landing in September 2024, part tres takes us into the kind of musical places we're used to finding Spiritualized or Mogwai, and even then the references are misleading. For as many times as Nanocluster Vol. 3 sucks us into a thick soup of ambient and atmosphere, inviting us to get lost in opiate cloud formations, it also asks us to jump on board a stream train of rolling and driving rhythms, juggernauts gathering depth and complexity as they forge ahead. A stunning collection of highly evocative and incredible musical instrumentals.

Review: Ash Ra Tempel's fifth and - in most ways of judging it - final album was really also a swan song for the late, great Manuel Gottsching. Recoded at Studio Dierks, in the small, picturesque and windmill-happy German village of Stommeln by none other than Scorpions studio chief Dieter Dierks, there's a lot happening on Starring Rosi. And all of it really pretty damn good. It's funk, it's epic. It's moody, it's upbeat. It's steeped in an air of Krautrock and space rock, yet also wouldn't sound out of place providing the slap bass and guitar licks for a 1970s movie trailer. Simply put, it's Ash Ra Tempel, from the cosmic warmup and gradual build go 'Laughter Loving', through the folk-ish serenity of 'The Fairy Dance' and warbling, warped cacophonies on 'Schizo'.

Review: James Ford is one of the most important unsung heroes of contemporary pop and rock. As a studio producer, he's helped craft and hone incredible work from Fontaines DC, Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Blur and more. As an artist in his own right, he's perhaps more incredible. So, his impact on the latest and long-awaited new addition to Black Country New Road's catalogue should not be underestimated. Nor should the result of splitting the songwriting and vocal duties between members Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery and May Kershaw. "It's definitely very different" said one of the trio about how this compares to preceding long form outings. We'd say it's definitely very different to most music you'll hear this week. It's folk, soft rock, experimental garage something, and none of the above, with tracks that almost seem at odds with themselves, chopping and changing, evolving and progressing, until you hear them as a whole.

Review: Recorded for BBC Radio In Concert during Can's 1973 UK tour, this exceptional live performance showcases the cult favourite band at their peak. The five-piece group did their usual trick of expertly weaving together repeating themes and riffs while responding to each other in real-time. The dynamic interplay between keyboards from Schmidt, guitar from Karoli and Suzuki's vocals is driven by the powerful Czukay and Liebezeit rhythm section. Featuring comprehensive sleeve notes and full recording details, this release includes all tracks written by Can members Czukay, Karoli, Liebezeit, Schmidt and Suzuki, all of which were captured live at The Paris Theatre, London on February 19th. A great bit of Can history.

Review: Based out of Melbourne, Australia, Takiaya Reed (better known as Divide & Dissolve) is a one-woman monolithic force of industrial-tinged, neo-classical leaning instrumental doom metal. Originally a duo, 2023's fourth full-length Systemic marked the first effort from the project following the departure of percussionist Sylvie Nehill (of M?ori and White-Australian heritage), with guitarist/saxophonist Reed (of Tsalagi and African-American heritage) embarking on a solo venture from there on out. Her second singular display of overtly political, droning sonic dread comes in the form of Insatiable, which coalesces mercurial beauty with bombastic abrasion, almost as if sonically illustrating the warring of mindsets active in our collective conscious. From drawing ire back in 2018 for their controversial music video for 'Resistance' which featured spitting and spraying urine-coloured water on monuments of colonial figures such as Captain James Cook and John Batman, Reed has made it clear ever since that their punishing instrumentals are designed with the artful intention of "decolonising, decentralising, disestablishing, and destroying white supremacy", which she makes overwhelming ends to accomplish without a single word uttered.

Review: Here we go then. Listening to the first two track on Soft Power, Ezra Feinberg's intoxicating third album is quite simply exhilarating. We begin with the gentle and playful, inquisitive electronic balladry of 'Future Sound', which seems to be the very noise of stargazing itself, captured through keyboards and synths set to 'weird'. The title number is equally beguiling, strange and otherworldly. So by the time we're at 'Pose Beams', the track's more solid structure feels like we've finally grounded ourselves, ready for blast-off. That comes with the appropriately-titled 'Flutter Intensity' - which gathers its rhythm like rocket fuel before launching into the stratosphere once again. And it's here we stay, floating on planetary rings and gravity-free air, for the remainder. A record that lead you feeling very fuzzy inside.

Review: Canadian post-hardcore art-punk collective, Fucked Up, have been releasing projects at a ludicrously prolific rate ever since their 2001 inception, yet even by their own standards, they've gone majorly overboard in the past few years. Following on from 2021's epic Year Of The Horse EP and the 2022 follow up Oberon EP; named after the king of fairies from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, 2023 saw the release of their sixth full-length One Day (with all member's individual parts recorded under a strict 24-hour time limit) while 2024 birthed two sequels in the form of Another Day and Someday (both recorded with the same mantra). Their eighth album overall, with a promise to take a much-deserved hiatus following release, from the opening squall of 'City Boy', the band's reliable concoction of proggy, art-rock inspired chaotic hardcore is unleashed with allusions to Greek tragedy and even a chorus-like back and forth between the vocals and lyrics, conjuring the type of poetic, epic, theatrical spectacle not traditionally standard for the punk scene. In Fucked Up terms however, it makes perfect sense.

Review: The Fun Years is a group formed by multi-instrumentalists Ben Recht and Isaac Sparks and they have crafted a fine blend of ambient, drone, post-rock and turntablism since the early 2000s. Baby It's Cold Inside was originally released in 2008 and still stands as their pinnacle with evocative turntable loops creating textures that bring to mind Philip Jeck and Jan Jelinek while baritone guitar drones and subtle processing add depth. Tracks like 'My Lowville' offer slow post-rock motifs while 'Auto Show of the Dead' explores piano and guitar intricacies. This reissue has been remastered by LUPO and is right up there with any 2000s ambient masterpiece.

Review: Elliot Galvin is a leading figure in UK jazz with four solo albums that have topped year-end lists in respected media outlets. He is also a member of the Mercury-nominated Dinosaur and has collaborated with key jazz cats such as Shabaka Hutchings, Emma-Jean Thackray and Norma Winstone. Known for his improvisational prowess, his latest solo album taps into that skill once more and is an entirely improvised record that takes in quiet beauty like the opener, more theatric drama on 'Still Under Storms' and world jazz sounds on 'High & Wide'.

Review: Mercy is a collaborative work between the late great Lee "Scratch" Perry (during his post-Black Ark Studios era), Peter Harris and Fritz Catlin, the drummer from the industrial funk dub act 23 Skidoo. What they cook up is unashamedly experimental outsider works that collide mad mixing desk trickery, Perry's trademark vocal mutterings and plenty of occult sound designs. Melodies are smeared and smudged, rhythms are drunk and off balance and moods range from balmy to bonkers, often within the same damn track. A maverick collage, for sure.

Review: The difficult second. Apparently not for composer and producer David Jospeh. Once again delving into the latter work of Mark Hollis with and without Talk Talk for jumping off points and inspiration, this time the lead artist drafts the muse's son, Charlie Hollis, to play piano on no less than four tracks, alongside band veterans Robbie Macintosh, Laurence Pendrous, Andy Panayi, Martin Ditcham and Simon Edwards. Listing all the other musicians who have contributed here would be a long task, so let's cut to the chase. This is lush stuff, which incorporates but never obsesses over elements of jazz, post rock, ambient and soundscape. It's vast and also notably intimate, like finding the perfect spot of seclusion and shade under a beautiful tree while gazing out over endless horizons.

Review: Some 37 haiku poems are given an avant-garde, 64-minute musical backing with translations from poet Harry Gilonis, on this unique project by composer and multi-instrumentalist Tim Hodgkinson (Henry Cow) and vocalist Atsuko Kamura. We hear a vignetting lingual interplay, with lines in English by Hodgkinson sung in Japanese by Kamura, as a wide instrumental span covers percussions, violin, viola, harp, clarinets, guitars and electronics result. Recorded between Tokyo and London, the album offers a startlingly satisfying sonic renga (a Japanese poetic form encompassing a succession of haikus), lending the brevity of classic haiku an expansive, stretched-out prosthesis. From the 17th through to the 20th-century, this is a subduing but still irregular experience, as it formally demonstrates the laconic and aphoristic essence of the haiku.

Review: Rhode Island post-metal avant-garde duo The Body have made a name for themselves due to their caustic maelstrom of harsh, brutalist experimentalism as well as their prolific output and collaborative nature, releasing collab albums with the likes of Full Of Hell, Thou, Uniform, and most recently, Dis Fig. Their latest endeavour sees the pair link up with another duo of musical extremity, Toronto, Canada's recently reformed industrial two-piece Intensive Care. Was I Good Enough? has been on the cards since the artists first began making plans as far back as 2018, trading, warping and ruining mutual sessions with layers of loops, distortion, samples and even dubs, constantly striving to find the ideal haunting balance between both of their sonically hideous, oppressive worlds. For all of our ears' sakes, they just might have succeeded.

Review: Beginning life in the late 70s as a Leeds based art collective, The Mekons have gone on to become one of the longest-running, most prolific and sonically diverse acts to be considered part of the first wave of British punk. Spanning numerous decades, projects and literal continents, the sprawling array of visionary contributors return with the succinctly titled Horror; a work written towards the end of 2022 that showcases their expansive yet solely unique approach, drawing on elements of dub, country, harsh noise, rock & roll, electronica, punk, music hall, polka and even waltz. Myriad vocalists lead differing sonic journeys such as the Jon Langford-led 'Mudcrawlers' telling the story of the Irish famine and subsequent refugees traversing to Wales, whereas Rico Bell leads the charge on the harrowing folk-horror climate change breakdown 'Fallen Leaves', with swelling violins painting an aural tapestry akin to Rolling Thunder era Dylan sitting on a dimly lit rolling green hill accompanied by The Pogues. Ranking somewhere between the collective's 23rd to 25th album (depending on which member of the fanbase or artists themselves you ask), Horror marks their first work for Fire Records.

Review: Los Angeles-based Monde UFO - a shadowy collective helmed by multi-instrumentalist and producer Ray Monde - has a well-earned reputation for being one of music's more hard-to-pigeonhole acts, with their two previous albums variously mixing and matching elements of improvisational jazz, dream pop, Latin rhythms, space rock and lo-fi experimentalism. They're on a similarly breezy, blurred-at-the-edges tip on third album Flamingo Tower, attractively sashaying between jazz-flecked, string-laden dream pop ('Samba 9'), richly percussive post-punk jazz ('119', with its subtle nods to Tony Allen and Ginger Baker's infamous drum battle in support of Fela Kuti), cinematic noir-jazz (the effects-laden excellence of 'Solitaire') and much more besides.

Review: Neu! 75 was the third and final studio album from Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, and many years on it stands proud as a great piece of electronic rock history. Released in, you guessed it, 1975, the album's signature insistent rhythms, phased guitars and propulsive drums continue to sound fresh and retain a vitality that feels futuristic even decades later. This official reissue is a great way to get back into the raw energy and precision that made Neu! 75 so influential with their groundbreaking fusion of motorik beats and experimental soundscapes. It was their finest work, frankly.

Review: This reissue of Janitor of Lunacy recaptures Nico in a stark, spellbinding 1983 live performance at Manchester's Library Theatre during a period when she called the city home. Spread across 20 tracks on double vinyl, the album distils her haunting presence and singular voice into raw, intimate recordings that draw from four of her solo records as well as Velvet Underground classics like 'Femme Fatale' and 'All Tomorrow's Parties.' The set also includes a brooding take on Bowie's 'Heroes' which is, like the rest of the pieces, minimalist and emotionally charged. This was Nico stripped down to her essence, namely bleak, beautiful and moving.

Review: Perila returns with a reflective spiritual successor to her 2022 album that comes on Vaagner's sister label A Sunken Mall. The album takes in eight tracks produced between 2021 and 2023 and they all do a fine job of conveying a serene vulnerability with its drifting, ethereal soundscapes smeared with echoing voices, droning guitars and resonant textures. It's like a whispered conversation during quiet moments and once again makes for a world that doesn't need to be understood, only felt. The Air Outside Feels Crazy Right Now reminds us that finding inner peace through music can counter the chaos of the external world and help turn fragility into strength.

Review: Those with an intricate knowledge of the sadly cut-short career of the late, great New York experimentalist and leftfield disco specialist Arthur Russell will happily tell you that his most celebrated solo album, World of Echo, was not only developed over several years, but also utilised edited and chopped-up recordings of shows he performed in his home city in 1984 and '85. This release presents both of those performances in full, with Russell - performing songs to his own effects-laden cello motifs and little else - delivering sparse (but effortlessly emotive) early versions and 'sketches'. These are a mix of lesser-known songs and familiar favourites, including a haunting take on 'Let's Go Swimming', a medley of 'Hiding Your Present From You/School Bell', and the inspired 'Sunlit Water'.

Review: British conspiracy thriller Utopia follows a group of young adults who, after discovering a mysterious comic book - The Utopia Experiments - embark on a manic quest for corporate restitution and prophetic fulfilment. As a shadowy government organisation detects their plans and resolves to track their every move, we watch an empathic but deadly game of cat-and-mouse; and Cristobal Tapia de Veer's acclaimed score only heightens the tension. This new 2xLP edition includes such instantly recognisable motifs as 'Brainwave Playground', 'Satan's Waltz' and 'The Monarch's Pyramid', capturing the series' eerie and intense atmosphere. The score continues to resonate to this day, following Tapia de Veer's success with The White Lotus and Babygirl.

Review: Brighton-based Australian vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Penelope Trappes drops her fifth full length album and invites us on a bare bones, spiritual journey. Making herself incredibly vulnerable in the process, these are the kind of tracks that induce meditative and psychedelic trains of thought, haunting and beautiful, blissful and tense. Cello drones, gothic aesthetics, a king of futurist folk, at least some of the inspiration for which has come from time spent in isolated corners of Scotland. You can almost feel the wind blowing through the room as A Requiem lures and entices, breaks and mends hearts. Ambient, neo-classical, trance inducing works of wonder. This is the kind of record that can help make you see the world for what it is, and realise just how lucky we are to be here at the same time.

Review: Based in New York City, YHWH Nailgun (pronounced "Yahweh") are a newfound experimental noise-rock four-piece who have varied acceptance on what can be deemed "noise". Built around the ludicrous percussive ability of drummer Sam Pickard whose use of rototoms conjures an organic yet mechanistic pulse, warped and compressed guitars collide with an array of synths and electronic elements all infused with the suffocated, ranting, rambling, unhinged shrieking of vocalist Zack Borzone. Their debut full-length 45 Pounds bubbles with a similar art-noise sass-punk quality to very early HEALTH (before they rebooted as the industrial-metal trio they're known as today) yet attempting to still fit in with the likes of The Jesus Lizard or Chat Pile. They don't whatsoever, and they're all the better for it, as these unhinged 21 minutes condense saccharine, bubblegum machinery into some of the most frenetic compositions recorded all year. Just because it can only be described as "noise-rock" doesn't mean it necessarily sounds like noise-rock.