I guess we just pick up like we nearly did last time and where we left off and who needs who? Still no time for editorials, repeat, replete, reheat, let the actual music do the actual talking and the walking and leave the rest of the toys in the attic….
Straight in with a new album from Dutch composer Rutger Hoedemaekers…
Rutger Hoedemaekers – All The Good It Would Have Done (Nouveau Goût) – Says here’s that “for the last ten years Dutch composer Rutger Hoedemaekers has created music primarily for cinema. Collaborating closely with Jóhann Jóhannsson until the award-winning Icelandic composer’s tragic passing, Hoedemaekers’ credits include work on the scores for the films Arrival, The Mercy, Mary Magdalene, Last And First Men, The Last Berliner, No Man’s Land and, most recently, Angelina Jolie’s Without Blood. Alongside Jóhannsson and Hildur Guðnadóttir, he also co-scored the acclaimed Icelandic crime series Trapped…”
Those rather respected film soundtracks are only part of it though, Hoedemaekers has been releasing rather rewarding solo non-soundtrack projects in more recent times, of which this is the latest one. It would probably annoy him to read that this does rather sound like a film soundtrack, the kind of left field film that has you needing to go hunt the soundtrack down, that is on first few listens before you really start yo unpack it. I want to say this is a delight but that’s too throwaway and this feels like a serious piece of art, I mean it is, on the surface, a delight, it is refreshing, it is (far) deeper than that though. Yes it is classic minimalism at times, fuller bodied at others, it is always good, no ups and downs, well not in terms of demanding attention (and rewarding that attention paid), At times unassuming, it can swell now and again, right now, towards the end of ten minute closing piece There Will Be No Other End of the World, it really is lifting in a rather beautiful, dare we think hopeful way
Rutger Hoedemaekers’ first solo project was the thing to ignite an interest in him around here, About, a vaguely indie electro-pop thing that was far (far) more interesting than that lazy pigeonhole suggests really did grab attention, do try and find the debut About album Bongo (released on Jason Forrest’s Cock Rock Disco label in 2006) if you can…
We’re back listening to the start of this new work again now and something called Problem of the Straight Line as the Shortest Distance Between Two Points (if indeed it is a problem?). Is it sounding a little like a more organic Steve Reich, or maybe early John Adams when Adams was more influenced by minimalism (that reference is meant as high compliment rather than disparagement); there’s a stumbling feel that give this album life, this particular opening piece, a not quite straight line that really does warmly invite you into the whole album rather well, does set the pace. It is an album that feels united, a focussed body of work, there’s enough variety to hold when sometimes things of a similar (vague) nature can struggle to hold a listener – no problem here, All The Good It Would Have Done never lets you go with it and in return you never want to not go. Does it feel like a portrayal of organic processes (rather like those posts of Sarah Jones), it does feel like it falls into sync…
Hoedemaekers explains, “I started to see that climate change is too big a problem, none of us can fix it alone. I noticed that everyone around me was attempting to address, or ignore, the issue to very different degrees. Really it was chaos, everybody was out of sync, and the situation was only getting worse. I started to wonder if everybody changed little things in their lives, how much might this alter the end result? Would the chaos fall into sync?” This became the working hypothesis for the album.
It really does stumble into place, it does kind of say that if everyone did do a little bit (more) then we might still get away with it, and yes, that statement does make sense in terms of the way the whole body of work evolves. Those bits with the violins drones in, The General Problem of Boundary Values, do give a sense of something bigger than just us, that heat rather than warmth, this heat if you like, that little bit of ominousness, a touch of Radiohead’s Pyramid Song maybe? Do like how it all comes together, the way the music slowly sorts itself out, defrags, the way it falls into sync. This is a rather recommended piece of work, don’t just grab 15 megabites and then move on, it deserves more that 15 minutes of soup, there is still… (sw)
Bandcamp / www.rutgerhoedemaekers.com
2: Insect Factory – There is new Insect Factory, a rather warm fifteen and a half minute piece of live performance that radiates in all the right ways. Performed by Jeff Barsky. Recorded by Pierre Toureille on 9/19/26 at the Washington Waldorf School in Bethesda, MD.
Insect Factory is a rather different side of Jeff, here’s his slight more noisy bed making side – ORGAN: Albums, more music – Bed Maker, Babe Report, Scott Collins, Die Verlierer, Henrik Meierkord, London Underground and…
And…
3: Masayoshi Fujita – and there is this rather refined rather tranquil piece of music (I typed that before I saw the title of the tranquil piece of music), The title track of an album so it seems, here’s some links and here’s the Bandcamp. The album is out in November of Erased Tapes
“The Berlin-based Japanese vibraphonist and marimba player, came to the attention of Erased Tapes founder Robert Raths in 2012. Not only because the vibraphone is an intriguing instrument, but also the way Masayoshi treats his instrument and draws ethereal and layered sounds, is what truly attracted him to Fujita’s work…”
4: Yoo Doo Right are a Canadian band we’ve covered rather a lot on these pages over the last two or three years, this latest track, a second from their new album is on their more refined relexed and rather mellow side. The new album Build and Rest by the Shepherd’s Light is out on November 6th, 2026 via Mothland. Here’s yet more links, here once more is the Bandcamp and just down there are links to some of that (rather unquotable) previous coverage. They do have the ablity to see into the dark so they can call it light…
Previous coverage…
ORGAN THING: Let’s get it right this time, more from Canada’s rather refined Yoo Doo Right…
5: And this is London’s Nathaniel Kemeno and a rather delicately strong album called Legacy Media that flows in just the right way without ever being obvious about where it might be flowing. The piece of beauty has been regular late night listening for a good few weeks now, that relief after all the noise we make while listening to bands like Miocene and such…
“A high-concept, low-fidelity ambient album about information being destroyed by the systems intended to amplify it.
Instruments are fed into tape loops which erode in real time. Each pass through the system – a 1960s four-track tape recorder – changes the signal a little more. Those changes become part of the next pass, errors accumulate, and eventually what began as music dissolves into noise….”
Here’s the Bandcamp
“Made with Lizzie (a 1960s Elizabethan LZ29 four-track), the Kinotone Ribbons pedal, the Goodhertz Lossy plugin, and a sense of existential dread rising to panic” you might like to note…
Oh and something new from Robert Fripp, well no, not quite new but: “Fourth in this monthly series featuring Robert Fripp Soundscapes with visuals by Emmy-nominated filmmaker Matthew Dimakos. Exploring how sound can transform the way we experience visual art, Matthew creates an immersive body of work combining image and sound to explore our connection with each other and the natural world. Rooted in the Japanese concept of Yūgen, the series encourages viewers to move beyond explanation and reconnect with the beauty, mystery, and interconnectedness of direct experience”.
MFQM 29, A Full Heart was recorded live in Paris on 13th October 2009 at the Olympia
And while we’re here, seeing as we mention him, some classic John Adams…
