Max Moon - The Grand Howl - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Growing up in Minnesota, life constantly took multi-instrumentalist and producer Lutalo Jones back and forth across the Mississippi River, through the beating heart of the Twin Cities, from their home in Minneapolis to school in St Paul. In 2021 Lutalo and their partner moved east, to settle among the green peaks of Vermont, having taken ownership of an area of land with the intention of building a small community for themselves. The aim is to accomplish a long-held dream to live life differently, to invest in and create something tangible that can be passed on to future generations. The to-and-fro of that early life has been replaced by something altogether more steady, a burning desire to not get so caught up in the intensity of the world.It's this overwhelming potency of modernity that ripples through Lutalo's musical work. Their six-song debut EP, Once Now, Then Again, bristles with tension, despite the open laidback nature of the performance. The new EP - which follows a few well-received singles in 2021 and a run of live shows alongside Adrianne Lenker - spans both of Lutalo's contrasting worlds, the songwriting beginning in the Twin Cities before being finished in the serene surroundings of Vermont, and both environments leave their mark on Lutalo's rich and absorbing sound.For now, Lutalo's world consists of new pastures and new beginnings, the search for brightness in spite of all the dark. They remain optimistic in attitude, and steadfast in their belief that change can only happen when you believe in a better future. InchAt the same point you also have to recognize that this is also your time to be alive,Inch Lutalo says, Inchand to try to find beauty in those moments and focus on the smaller details to watch the water trickle down the stream, to see the ice as it melts from the rooftops.Inch

2020 . RY X, solo alternative artist and member of The Acid, and Frank, one half of me, bring fans a bigger, sharper follow-up to their debut, 'Sacred Ground.' On 'Colure', the Berlin-based Wiedemann and Los Angeles-based RY X conjure transcendent creations out of their contrasting musical backgrounds and environments. The album is assuredly dualistic electronic and acoustic sounds sit comfortably side-by-side, and big melodic hooks are laced into hypnotic club productions.

For innovative composer Max de Wardener, music is a kind of time travel, a means of exploring the antique and the arcane and repurposing them for a forward-facing now. Classically trained, de Wardener is nevertheless renowned for compositions that explore everything from church organs to self-built instruments, as well as electronics and more orthodox chamber configurations. On Kolmar, his debut album for Village Green, the composer teases pure, dream-like sine wave tones from recondite, early-to-mid 20th century instruments like the ondes martenot, the Cristal Baschet and the glass harmonica. de Wardener melds these seamlessly with heavily manipulated Buchla and Oberheim analogue synthesisers, grand pipe organs pitched down several octaves (or with all the stops pushed in Inchso that the sound collapsesInch) and miscellaneous exotic but precisely applied acoustic percussion, most of it courtesy of prodigious jazz drummer Moses Boyd. Yet for all it's vintage kit, this is no techno-historical grab bag or sonic museum piece. Nor is it merely an exercise in arch retro-futurism. Kolmar, over two years in the making, is often ravishingly mellifluous and emotionally stirring, while simultaneously retaining the power to disorient - provoking and unsettling the ear as readily as charming and seducing it. Kolmar was recorded at Tramways Studios in London, at synth specialists Simon Sound in Brighton and at the Alsace-Lorraine studio of rare instrument collector and sometime Radiohead and Tom Waits affiliate Thomas Bloch, whose painstaking glass instrument multi-tracking was crucial in realising what de Wardener had envisioned for these delicate devices (he is Incha craftsman of the monophonicInch, the composer submits). The album is in fact named after the small town in the Franco-German borderlands, Colmar, close to Bloch's studio. Propelled and defined by such playful means