This is a blast — a tremendously entertaining survey, centred in the Basque country, uproariously mangling together everything from Suicide to dub, Surf to tribal-style chanting, Satanism to toothpaste, with zinging wit, energy and intelligence, and knockabout anti-authoritarianism. Well-presented; warmly recommended.

Ignatz is the alter-ego of Belgian musician Bram Devens, who has released a string of albums for labels like (K-RAA-K)³, Ultra Eczema, Fonal, Mort aux Vaches, and Okraïna, over the last twenty years.
Devens recorded this wonderful, haunted music at home in Landen, on the family piano.
There is pervasive, ambient Dub, mesmerically shifting; sometimes aghast. Somewhere in the swirling mist are the guitarist Hans Reichel, and blues pianists like Jimmy Yancey, amongst other ghosts. Time Well Spent even musters a kind of motorik energy, determinedly mis-firing.
It is quite unlike any other piano record.
Beautifully presented, too, to the customary high standards of this label.
Check it out!

‘Dora’s signature, sublime, open-hearted refinement of modern classical, folk and ambient is at its most colourful and rhythmic in this suite of keyboard instrumentals; an aural mille-feuille, in dramatic contrast with her previous, melancholic vocal works.
‘Atmospheric drone miniatures underpin flowing, cyclical arpeggios, spiralling into an unpredictable dream space of melodic polyphony. Drawing on an essay by Hartmut Rosa, the music mulls over conceptions of the acceleration of time and the experience of alienation. It reveals the inescapable pulsation of time as at once mesmerizing and unsettling.’

Two spellbinding extended improvisations referring to meteorological and planetary phenomena: evocations of light, wind, clouds, and tidal cycles as shimmering, roaring, rubbing, coalescing and diverging environments of sound; consistent and yet in perpetual flux. The quartet’s signature, singular, honed minimalism subsumes flashes of chaos into winding paths of musical detail; hushed but suspenseful.

Quietly ravishing, stunning music from Norway, by trumpeter Torstein Lavik Larsen, double bassist Adrian Fiskum Myhr, guitarist Fredrik Rasten, and drummer Jan Martin Gismervik.
Gorgeously presented, in a tiny run.
Warmly recommended.
Something else.

Spectral, nostalgic, highly evocative, sometimes-desolate reflections — alone on the piano, and together with saxophonist and flautist Finn Peters —  soaked in Satie, Ravel, and Mompou. Expressive and enchanting, but mournfully distracted, with a tentative, exploratory wonderment which reminds you of Paul Klee’s well-worn idea of a drawing as a line taking a walk. Easy to recommend to those of you who recently enjoyed Mashu Hayasaka’s Etudes LP, on All Night Flight. This is lovely stuff from Jesse, in an unexpected departure from his work with Elmore Judd, the Gorillaz, Nyege Nyege Tapes…