The culmination and pinnacle of five years of dedication to writing pop music Bonfire Night is literate, funny, clever and experimental; as expressive as it is catchy, as interesting as it is indispensable. The final album from Talk Less Say More.
Alight, Alight is Les Étoiles’ most beautifully unadorned album. With only sparse piano arrangements for accompaniment, these songs have a quiet intensity that brings to mind not only the solo work of Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis but also early Low at their most austere.
A work of breathtaking sonic minimalism, beauty and honesty. These four tracks condense and deepen Les Étoiles’ concerns to date: memory, loss, homecoming and the lifting of sadness. Listen as the nights close in.
One disc of frayed and extreme high-BPM blackened doom combined with unsettling, complex post-rock. One disc of exquisite instrumental music for an non-existent art house film. A heavy record, perhaps the heaviest they have ever produced. For multiple meanings of that word.
From broken ambience to heavy riff to folk harmony to post punk thundering to stripped down blues. The most musically diverse and brilliant All The Empires Of The World release yet: euphoric, symphonic, sublime and ridiculous.
An urgent, visionary record which lays down a marker for how daring pop can sound in 2014. Ten discombobulatingly anthemic songs laced with an exuberant lyrical and sonic wit as well as flashes of darkness – moments of disquieting melancholy built on hazy recollection of times past.
Blue Duck’s first full length release – a heady combination of hazy party jams, experimental rap and warm glitching hip-hop. Woozy synthesizers, harp and cut and paste combine with surrealist rhymes, sharp sampling and a fierce energy. Stunning stuff from a unique voice in the UK hip-hop scene.
37 minutes of postmodern pop perfection. England Without Rain bursts with vitality, oozing with surreal mirages and sultry pleasures, yearning for the release of a storm. Joy, sadness and frustration embodied in shimmering guzheng, exuberant synths, thumping Kompakt beats and Fleetwood Mac guitar duels.
All The Empires of the World return with their most expansive and ambitious album to date. Four tracks of furious chug, crushing doom and Jodorowsky desert vibes.
Formed partly through collaboration across our roster, Little Measurements is a collection of brief encounters, which hinge on the slightest details and gestures: a written note, a fleeting facial expression, a movement of eyelashes. Intimate, evocative and beautiful, this is a moving work, full of echoes, spaces and haunted memory – as sad as it is hopeful.
A fresh cut of sharply appointed bloop-hop. 8-bit chirps, cut up pianos, smooth beats, woozy synths and enough extra-terrestrial pitch wheel abuse to keep the cockles warm as winter closes in.
Eliot-step with a chaser of crunching guitars. Skipping drums and bass ruminate over matters mundane and metaphysical, splicing genres with modernist aplomb like Thomas Stearns gone futuristic lit-pop.
Eccentric excursions into duets between improv drums and a shouting man. Quite odd, certainly surreal and often hilariously funny.
Hop aboard the mothership Ga’an and take a journey into the beyond! Six psychedelic trips of Zeuhl-ish gothic horror prog. Now avaliable on glorious vinyl from Captcha Records.
Post-Dilla beats, electronic flourishes and aqua-crunk wonkery served in perfectly formed chunks of exuberant instrumental hip-hop.
Seven bombastic post-metal paens to the immensity of the universe. Crushingly heavy but with subtleties and an ear for melody that mark it out as a release from a band on top of their game.
The second record from Les Étoiles, To Leave A Mark’s detailed, beautiful songs pay tribute to his home town of Bridgnorth, its beauties and tragedies, it as a container of memory, people, times, love and loss. Carefully produced by Tim Wright, it is a sparse, subtle and gorgeous piece of music.
The companion piece to last year’s critically acclaimed Go Lucky, IDKWIAIDKWID brings tracks recorded over the same time, remixes and fresh material. Bursting with sonic inventiveness, lyrical cleverness and possessing a still beating pop heart, this is a release to treasured as summer fades.
Talk Less, Say More once again effortlessly connects the abstract with the concrete in this album of glinting futuristic glitched hip-hop. Raps about quantum mechanics, suicidal mathematicians, Zeno’s paradoxes as well as home towns and girls being, you know, sometimes quite difficult to understand. Wonderfully skewed, weird and utterly unique, something like Timbaland meets the Copenhagen Interpretation with Kool Keith on vocals.
Another masterful weaving of the personal and the natural from EL Heath. Yawning martenot, sad ambience, spoken word rumination on life’s inevitable movement.
Ritualistic distortion and pealing noise melts into spaces that morph into colossal riffs that open into beautiful evocations that close into foreboding caverns of turbulence.
Like a less pastoral Canterbury Scene record, Mash relentlessly perverts generic conventions- rocking like a mother and bewildering and overjoying in equal abundance.
An intensely personal record that falls into love’s sunlit glories as well as the strange chasms opened when it departs. A celebration and an elegy, this is the height of the best traditions of experimental pop: cyclic guitars, minimal techno throb, snapping drums over impressionist cello and joyous poundshop electro.
An album that nearly failed to see the light of day: a spare melancholic rumination on the idea and reality of an unforgiving winter. Walking to the cell of Father Zosìma through the crisp snow.
“Good things, when short, are twice as good” said Baltasar Gracian. A twenty-four track, two disc tumble through more genres than you can shake a big stick at. Each avant miniature never dips over two minutes, but always dips into a big bubbling pot of inventive electronic imagination.
A heart stoppingly beautiful Proustian evocation of the tranquility of the countryside in Autumn: of following water, long childhood walks and glorious sunlight through fading trees. Gorgeous washes of ambient sound.
Syd Barrett does indie pop: songs about animals and their sports days, the sun with his hat on and wanting to be a car. Not to forget ruminations on turbulent personal relationships, melancholia and mortality.
For those who like a bit of kiss on their cheek: stupid-core lo-fi electronica with tasty surrealist pop icing. Clouddead let loose in a warehouse of broken toys.
For those who like a bit of grit in their coffee: speedball, distorted, smirking clatter-and-bass. Like Aphex and Shitmat at their most slapstick, puerile, and irreverent.
Spare, intimate and disarmingly honest singer-songwriting in the vein of late Talk Talk, David Thomas Broughton or Will Oldham. A record of old letters, pressed flowers and single battered photographs; of the sepia mysteries of age, time, memory, love, loss and death.
As one FBI agent might have it: That’s a damn fine cup of experimental oddness. Labyrinthine minimalism, mind-bending apocalyptic space rock, Lynchian jazz, musique concrete, Wickerman folk and the darkness from the hearts of beasts and machines.
Strap explore the edges, the limits and the outlines in a record that is by turns dreamy noise, deconstructed post-rock, slow-burning kraut, sublime improv pop, frenzied prog and galloping white noise psych.
“All music…must be the earthly representation of the music there is in the rhythm of the Ideal Realm.” The realm of pure forms described in two tracks of beautifully spartan Platonic ambience.
Abstract hip-hop that considers quantum mechanics, the nature of time and space and the problems of life and love caused by these quandaries. Schrödinger’s rap, McTaggart-hop, Zeno crunk.