ORGAN: Six slices of new music to check out – The Krautrock flavours of Attraktors, Weasel Walter, Quest Ensemble, John Carroll Kirby, Martin Bisi, the avant pop of Thomas Azier and…

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195: GIRL SHIT – Collage

More new music you say, let’s have a look in the in-box then, let’s dive back in and see if there is anything worth actually posting on these pages and sharing with you today, let’s battle through the very un-punk generic “punk” made by the punk-by-numbers bands who sound like some third division fifth-hand impersonation of some band who wanted to be like Operation Ivy doing their bad version of The Clash. Hey look, Operation Ivy couldn’t quite pull it off twenty years ago, what makes you think you bad version of Operation Ivy’s bad version of The Clash will cut it now? That and the style over substance never mind the music look at my new tattoo metal-by-numbers pedlars and the endless line of heard-it-all-before indie bands with new albums produced by the bloke who once made the tea for the producer who once worked on a My Bloody Valentine album, that and the never ending parade of electronic auto-pilot merchants and their labels and PR people who insist “you’ll love this one at Organ”, no, we almost certainly probably bloody well won’t! Stop crying wolf, one day you’ll send us something we might actually really like but by then we’ll have given up on opening your e.mails! We get hundreds of e.mails loaded with music and links and claims in invite to head to a Bandcamp page or to view a Youtube, most of it is tediously generic, most of it not worth sharing, most of it conservative (with a small c), most of it is scared to challenge us as listeners, most of it we listen to so you don’t have to,here then are five things we do think are worth sharing…

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164: TOM OF BRIGHTON – Oil on board,

Five slice of music that have landed here at Organ in the last week or so, five pieces of recommended music dug out from the hundreds of things that have come our way in the last week, five slices presented in no particular order..

1: Thomas Azier “Hope you are well and safe! Just wanted to send you the poignant short-film avant-pop songwriter Thomas Azier unveiled today for his new single Love, Disorderly’. The documentary-style music video directed by Laurent Chanez is a mind-bending free-form travelogue that journeys from Asia to Europe and America. A non-linear short film where the viewer travels between the real and the mythical, the individual and the collective”.

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2: Quest Ensemble –  “London-based trio Quest Ensemble present a distinctive twist on the traditional piano trio format. A collaboration between three powerful performers/composers, ‘The Other Side’ sees musical styles woven together into a lyrical tapestry of sound, blending improvisation with co-created original compositions. A truly unique ensemble in compositional process and performance style….”

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“On 5th June, Quest Ensemble will release their new album ‘The Other Side’. With nods to influences as broad as the contemporary minimalism of John Adams and Steve Reich, the experimental melancholic textures of Radiohead to the progressive jazz precision of Brad Mehldau, ‘The Other Side’ inhabits its own soundworld somewhere in the gaps between chamber, jazz, folk and contemporary classical music.

From the emotive ‘Moments’, the elasticated melodies of ‘Pendulum’, to the fluid lines and compelling urgency of ‘The Boatman’ and ‘Pedal Down’, Quest Ensemble’s compositions fuse layered melodies and rhythmic patterns to create contrapuntal webs of sound. The process involves sharing improvised ideas, building up layers of music on each instrument to create a patchwork of musical themes with a rich vein of surging Reichian rhythms underpinning each.

Fusing their backgrounds in western classical, Indian classical, jazz and improvisational technique, Filipe Sousa (piano), Tara Franks (cello) and Preetha Narayanan (violin) are all graduates of the Guildhall School of Music Leadership Programme.

In May 2014, Quest Ensemble released their much-lauded debut album ‘Footfall’, a collection of part-composed and part-improvised original compositions, steeped in the sense of place that inspired the sound and imagination of their stories. From an ancient leper hospice in Oxford to a stark urban underground rehearsal space, each piece poetically reflects a moment in time, a passing footfall.

Since 2009, Quest Ensemble have regularly worked with schools, colleges, youth and community groups across the UK, leading creative music projects with musicians of all ages and backgrounds, transferring their collaborative composition methods to community settings, enabling others to experience their way of working. Most recently, the trio were commissioned to create a show with visual artist Somang Lee that was premiered at Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Portugal as a part of the Big Bang Festival 2018″.

Previously from the rather beautiful Quest Ensemble….

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3: John Carroll Kirby -Well the weather report is good and it sounds like the soundtrack to some cop movie from the 70’s but this is rather hitting the spot just right in today’s sunshine. Pianist, producer and composer John Carroll Kirby has surprise dropped a new LP titled Conflict. It arrives ahead of his upcoming My Garden LP, out April 24th via Stones Throw, here it via Bandcamp. And here’s his website.

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23: ZORAN CRNKOVIC – ‘Long Play America’, 2019 mixed media on canvas, 60″×30″ (150×75cm)

4: Weasel Walter‘s “Curses” didn’t actually come out this week but he has added it to his treasure trove of a bandcamp page and it is “Four long movements in 99 tracks/79 minutes of detailed abstract madness from this prolific musical contrarian”. here it is…

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If you don’t know Weasel Walter already then this is probably the best place to start, this is beautiful, it was beautiful when it first landed, it remains a piece of beauty today, it will be next year and the tears after that, Weasel Walter deals in beauty, Weasel Walter is beautiful, go explore his beauty….

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5: Martin Bisi – Here we go, chew on this, we’ll be back with more about it is bit, for now chew on this video “NYC producer Martin Bisi, releases Solstice, his first solo record in 5 years. A psychedelic opus through light and dark. Out on Bronson Recordings“. Expect more coverage on these fractured Organ pages in an hour ow two….

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6: Attraktors – Okay six then, still in no particular order though, Nottingham trio Attraktors are former members of Julian Cope’s band, Six By Seven, Bivouac, The Selector and The Nectarine No. 9, who together make a glorious noise amalgamating the best bits of krautrock, kosmische, spacerock, artrock and synthpop into an idealised whole….

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Right then, that should do it, we’ll dive in for some more in a bit, this batch was the result of opening around two hundred e.mails and clicking on all the links, there’s loads more ot open yet.

All the paintings and pieces of art on this page today, including Girl Shit’s piece at the head of the page, are pieces that feature in the #43Artists online show that can be explored here, And here, in celebration of Emma Harvey‘s recent paintings in the Nothing is Square Pt 2 show and in deed the #43Artists show  is a slice of classiv Bikini Kill.

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46: EMMA HARVEY – Bikini kill – various canvas pieces, 20cm x 20cm, painted for the recent Cultivate group show Nothing is Square Pt2 – March 2020

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2 thoughts on “ORGAN: Six slices of new music to check out – The Krautrock flavours of Attraktors, Weasel Walter, Quest Ensemble, John Carroll Kirby, Martin Bisi, the avant pop of Thomas Azier and…

  1. Pingback: ORGAN: Six more slices of new music to check out – Hollow Ship, Ben Lukas Boysen, Manchester’s rather wired Blanketman, more Martin Basi, more Supermilk, Lorenzo Senni and some classic Tribe 8… | THE ORGAN

  2. Pingback: ORGAN: Five (quiet) Musical Things – Bendrix Littleton, Noemie Nours, Thomas Azier, Jon Hassell, Sarah Davachi and… | THE ORGAN

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