Plutonic Rainbows

Ostensibly Demdike Stare's first proper full-length collaboration, 'Sketches Of Everything' weaves dark moorland ambient blues into guitarist Jon Collin’s windswept Americana. It's a highly evocative swing between porchside strums, sludge doom and weathered dub noise somewhere between Bruce Langhorne’s soundtrack for ‘The Hired Hand’, Neil Young's 'Dead Man', Loren Mazzacane Connors at his most swoonsome and a screwed Prince Jazzbo - proper stoner vistas.

Technically Demdike Stare’s first official collaboration, ‘Sketches Of Everything’ was recorded between Stockholm and Manchester and finds Miles Whittaker & Sean Canty inspired to create some of the most quietly expressive scapes of their career, feeding into Jon Collin's strung-out vibe with a mix of layered and smudged backdrops that usher us through ravines of feedback and unexpected midnight hallucinations.

Across two long, elliptical sides the results draw spectral parallels between the Pennine moors and ruined industry of Demdike’s native Lancashire, and the kind of moody Western Americana best described in ‘The Hired Hand’. Collin acts as lead protagonist with a lyrical form of guitar that sometimes takes the lead, and at others fades into mystic swirl, rendering naked strums into vapours redolent of Loren Mazzacane Connors or the loner Norwegian blues of Terje Rypdal.

In a sense it’s an album that applies dub mixing techniques to aesthetically dissonant source material, a sort of stream of consciousness flowing into the murkiest, most beautifully low lit interiors.

Low-key synth & keyboard studio album by Swedish all-rounder Gustaf Dicksson. Limited edition of 300 copies with insert.

From the early days of the found-sounds recordings (like the downright scary Unga Röster album and the hilarious Mandys Bil 7"), the homespun kitchen recordings/tape collages of the still-going Idiotmusik series to the more carefully elaborated and precise Leendet Från Helvetet and Knutna Nävar albums, the massive Livets Ord dropped like a bomb when it originally surfaced as a self-released cassette in 2018.

Heavily based on synths and keyboards and clocking in on no less than close 70 minutes over 4 LP-sides, this is arguably THE epic album from the cluster around the Förlag För Fri Musik empire. Gustaf Dickssons' fascination for christianity/religious assemblies shines through once again, the title Livets Ord ("The word of life") derived from the Swedish free church/sect with the same name that was based in Uppsala between 1983-2013 and casting a pastoral shadow over the ambient music of the album.

While dabbling with a long tradition of kosmische musik and private-pressed new age wonders, Blods now patented sound of a Björn Isfält-gone-sour still lingers throughout the entire recording. A cornerstone in contemporary Gothenburg underground music. Featuring guest appearances by Emelie Thulin and Jerker Jarold.

Vinyl and Digital.

Boomkat:

Stepping from the metaphoric shadow of her peers, ‘Peaks’ presents Hamann as a skilled sorceress of quietly rustic, funereal music It’s sorta dewy with pastoral melancholy in a vein recalling everyone from Laura Cannell to Anne Guthrie and Kassel Jaeger in her dreamlike transitions between real instruments and their processed apparitions.

Deftly repatterning her daily life into a woozier dream state, Hamann combines fragments of recordings made on tour into a pair of durational dreamscape collages that, to our ears’-eye, sounds like a music for steep sided valleys to the ‘Peaks’ of the title, hugging wooded clefts where the sun doesn’t always get through and life deciduously goes on in the shade.

Her decayed, organic decompositions connote a sense of melancholy whoch can be taken as intended - reflecting a state of homesickness on tour - or perhaps a sense of sehnsucht for something more indescribable, existential, most like Elodie or Akira Rabelais, that’s always going to haunt and soothe us at the same time, especially when it’s done well; just like this very fine introduction to Judith Hamann’s dream world newly uncovered by Oren Ambarchi’s ever on-it Black Truffle.

I thought the Silver edition was nice but the Gold is just absolutely stunning. A truly beautiful blend of Vanilla, Nutmeg, Coriander and Spices. This smells like true class. A man or a woman can wear this easily. Maybe better for Autumn and Winter.

This is the second fragrance I've tried from Maison Francis Kurkdjian that I've been really impressed with.