Itasca – Grace Riders on the Road

I hardly ever post something where the full tracklist isn’t available to listen, but the 6 tracks that are on this one are sooo good, particularly the experimental one at number 6 but I love whole caboodle. I’m even tempted to buy it on payday, despite the fact I hardly ever buy stuff where I haven’t heard the whole thing first but, as I say, these are just sooo good.

This is described on the page as the solo project of Kayla Cohen, so maybe she’s also involved in some other projects though a very lazy google search just now yielded no results (I’m an information professional, I am. Really).

So it’s largely a lady and acoustic guitar, really chilled, reminds me personally of Nick Drake in guitar style. I have heard music of some of the names mentioned on the review quoted on the page but I can’t actually bring them to mind so I don’t know whether they are also accurate descriptors, inasmuch as anything descriptive can do justice to the ineffable. I mean, how do you describe a language using a different language? But anywho, if chilled acoustic music with an experimental vibe sounds like your thing then give this a whirl. It is particularly appropriate for a Sunday, for it was last Sunday afternoon when I heard Milk Tea on a show on NTS.

As I type this, I’m listening to her first release and it is proper experimental, addled tape music, not at all like this. But I’m strongly liking that too.

Valerio Cosi/Enzo Franchini – Live Archives I: Batcave, Tilburg MMVII

It’s that Friday where Bandcamp do that good thing they do again. As promised, I bought myself the Follakzoid album that I promised myself last time, but I also added this to the cart, because I like this. But I almost always like what Valerio Cosi does.

 

Our Solar System – In Time

I meant to post about this when it came out since I eagerly anticipated its release after they did the pre-announcement thing and I listened to the first track, a marketing ploy I otherwise despise as being irrelevant to the digital age. But Other Things were Very Very Good and caught hold of my easily distracted attention span, so there you go, Beyond Beyond is Beyond records – you’d have had a proper on the moment big-up if you’d have just stuck it out when it was ready. Let that be a lesson to you.

Our Solar System are a collective from Sweden. This release contains two tracks, and so is definitely Music My Brother Would Not Like (I will explain that epithet in an upcoming post). Opener ‘In the beginning of time’ comes on like Pharoah Sanders chilling with a quite propulsive Parson Sound. ‘At the edge of time’ dispenses with the sax and brings the vox, largely wordless and ecstatic to start with but introducing actual words later on.

My own personal nearest reference point to this is actually Sungod – I could quite easily imagine these jams turning up on one of their albums. Both tunes exceed twenty minutes, and both tunes could keep going as far as I’m concerned. There’s a lot of repetition but also gradual evolution of the music too – not in a linear way, however. The music demonstrates an impressive understanding of the cyclical nature of the macrocosm. There, I said it (well, typed).

Like my most recent post, I’m going to put the many other projects so far associated with this amongst the tags to save me typing it all twice!