★Okraïna
Don't Drown
A meeting of two mavericks - Greg Malcolm, a guitarist from New Zealand who has played with Rosy Parlane, Toshimaru Nakamura, Tetuzi Akiyama and Bruce Russell, as well as solo releases on his own label Corpus Hermeticum, and Stefan Neville aka Pumice - a long-running, endlessly inventive project whose shambolic music is equally reminiscent of Kiwi pop groups such as The Clean and Tall Dwarfs as well as the country's experimental noise-rock bands like the Dead C. "Who would attempt to combine cun…
Up In Air
"After a near decade of solo and collaborative projects, Up in Air is Ben Pritchard's most confident foray into songwriting yet, nestling lopsided experimentation into a bed of lowslung blues and reflective folk." Featuring collaborators Sholto Dobie on self-built organs, and bassist Otto Willberg.
Au Cube
"There is a sense of mirth rising within me as I riddle these notes down. I'm here at the Cube Cinema in Bristol with John Stevens from Qu Junktions in the garden talking music, while Rhodri Karim whizzes through setting up gear for Matana Roberts and Kelly Jayne Jones. They are in situ for three days for another playthecube. All the while I lounge back and time-travel back to Dec '17, picturing the times we all shared with the musicians you hear in these recordings. To slow things down a wee t…
Je Est un Autre
"This recording is not a 'best of', it is a reflection of Tori Kudo's evolution as a composer, from playing with seasoned musicians, to playing with people just starting out, from playing with meticulous scores, to playing call & response melodies written down, to the songs here on Je est un Autre: instant improvisations based on keyboard compositions that Tori plays for the group. Yes, that is it. He plays a recording of himself on the keyboard, with singing or humming sometimes and he leaves i…
Het Vlier, Een Hommel Op Aarde
“What you are listening to is the sound of a forgotten instrument. It has existed since the middle ages, but the earliest example still intact is from 1608. Once a staple in most households in the low countries, it is a true folk instrument, of the people, mainly played in the past by women who used their kitchen tables as a resonating surfaces to amplify & accompany traditional religious & secular tunes. Nowadays it seen rarely outside of museums in Brussels & other places you most likely have …
Last Year's Man / After Vermeer
"My first deep exposure to Leonard Cohen was the Bird on a Wire documentary by Tony Palmer, which was, against the odds, broadcast on public television in New Zealand around 1974 or 1975. At age 15 or 16 I thought it was too dark. A few years later, in the late '70s, I wanted things darker. The first Cohen LP was very clever but a little too "up." The second was too public and political for me. Songs of Love and Hate seemed more honest, more about personal failure. I liked it, although Cohen ten…
Calling The New Gods
The film "Calling The New Gods", by Vincent Moon, is the document of musicians Rully Shabara & Wukir Suryadi of the group Senyawa playing & being filmed on location, outside, tracing a path from the outskirts of Yogyakarta, Java (on the border of a rice field, on the edge of a garbage dump, etc.) until the center of the city (in the middle of a market, in a fair). In a sort of mandala, of centripetal spiral, during an entire day, from dawn until dusk, the film - with soundscapes shared b…
Le Corps Défendant
Delphine Dora and Mocke present Le Corps Défendant on Okraïna. Ned Netherwood of Was Ist Das? on the release: "There is something special about when artists like these collaborate. Two independent talents, both completely self-sufficient choosing to come together and see what happens, to let the muses mingle and share the results with the rest of us. What we have here, however, is not some quick jam caught on tape but a long distance collaboration carefully put together over three years. Th…
An Idea In Everything
2016 release. When David Greenberger first embarked on what has become a life-long journey, drummer Chris Corsano was not yet five years old! In 1979, after graduating from art school in Boston, Greenberger took the job of activities director at the Duplex Nursing Home, an all-male elder care facility in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and began collecting the stories, poems and music reviews of its aged patients for what became his Duplex Planet project, an undertaking that would eventually…