Source: Echoes.

Henrik Lindstrand, keyboardist for the Danish Alt-rock band, Kashmir, takes the neo-classical, solo piano route on a trilogy of recordings, Leken, Nattresan and Nordhem. These are a long way from his albums with Kashmir which showed influences of Radiohead, Emo and pop-punk. These are introspective works which still have some strange sounds although everything comes from the grand piano. We go inside the creaky piano sound of Henrik Lindstrand in the Echoes Podcast.

We ring the Tubular Bells of the 11th Icon of Echoes, Mike Oldfield. Oldfield made one of the signpost works of the 1970s, but he’s done so much more, right into the middle of the last decade with Return to Ommadawn. We’ll hear Oldfield tell the story behind Tubular Bells.

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

By combining Persian overtones and harmonies with jazz structures, Modirzadeh started formalizing his own musical system, which he dubbed ‘chromodality,’ while studying at Wesleyan University. (Anthony Braxton was on his dissertation committee.) He worked on it throughout the 1990s and early 2000s on a series of independent releases, then signed with Pi Recordings for 2012’s Post-Chromodal Out!, a collection of 27, mostly short, linked pieces performed by trumpeter Amir El-Saffar, pianist Vijay Iyer, bassist Ken Filiano, and drummer Royal Hartigan, plus a few guests. The music swings at times, but lurches sideways at others, and while the harmonies between the horns aren’t “Persian” in any clichéd way, they have a keening quality that nods to Middle Eastern music while also drawing on the sharp-edged interplay between Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry in 1959.

Source: Artforum International.

AS A CHILD IN JAMAICA, Queens, Milford Graves played on tin cans in the woods, “sending signals, trying to get everybody’s attention.” This spirit of adventure, showmanship, and defiance of convention never left him. Beginning on conga drums, he learned about Afro-Cuban music through a distant cousin, viewing it as the missing link between bebop and the African diaspora, and studied with tabla player Wasantha Singh. Forming a Latin group with pianist Chick Corea, who predeceased him by a matter of days, he gravitated toward jazz for its greater harmonic openness, switching from conga and timbales to drumkit but incorporating the percussion-heavy approach of his Cuban groups. In 1964, he joined the New York Art Quartet, co-led by Afro-Danish saxophonist John Tchicai and trombonist Roswell Rudd. His highly active style—what Rudd called an “anti-gravity vortex”—virtually eradicated divisions between “front-line” and “rhythm section.”

Source: The Quietus.

On first approaching the new work by Zimoun, the listener is confronted with what appears to be a rustling, flickering susurrus of synthesised sounds, a dense electronic thicket woven of complex algorithms and daisy-chained Max patches deftly entwined in a digital feedback loop of dizzying complexity. But appearances can be deceptive. The piece, titled Various vibrating materials (2020), consists of just that. “These are different small materials,” Zimoun confirms when I reach out to him via email. “Metal swarf, wood waste, PVC abrasion, small stones, clay and concrete crumbs, paper, cardboard, wires… but also small objects from the workshop such as springs, washers or nails.”

Source: The Quietus.

Pauline Anna Strom (1946–2020) – visionary synthesist, composer and spiritualist. Born blind, she taught herself to compose intuitively, releasing a series of hauntingly beautiful cassette tapes and LPs between 1982 and 1988 under the name Trans-Millenia Consort. Not much was known about her and – aside from a cultish following on Discogs – she passed into near-obscurity, having allegedly sold all of her production equipment due to financial constraints. Until 2017, when RVNG Intl delivered a critically acclaimed anthology of the re-mastered compositions. Since then, an ever-growing fanbase of ambient enthusiasts has become fascinated by her otherworldly music and hermetic existence. Living secluded in her apartment with her two beloved iguanas Miss Huff and Little Solstice, Strom was a fiercely independent mind who even refused to learn braille, declaring it “boring”. The posthumous arrival of Angel Tears in Sunlight (her first album in over three decades) is a testament to her unique life and the often forgotten yet essential part women have played in the history of electronica.