New music round-up (for w/e 21 April 2023)

Our selection of the best new music across a range of genres from the week ending 21 April 2023.

Guitar virtuosos Rodrigo y Gabriela have announced the follow-up to the GRAMMY-winning album Mettavolution. In Between Thoughts…A New World is the duo’s first full-length album in four years. It is a spontaneously composed yet unified work which brings the same expansion of consciousness that inspired its creation. Self-produced in Ixtapa, Mexico, the album sees Rodrigo y Gabriela building their original sound to include electronics and orchestral elements.

 

Quatuor Diotima makes its Pentatone Music debut with a recording of Györgi Ligeti’s string quartets. While the second quartet from 1968 is an avant-garde classic, the first from 1953-54, “Metamorphoses nocturnes”, is often nicknamed Bartók’s seventh quartet, pointing out the continuity between these two Hungarian master composers. Despite moments of nostalgia, it already possesses the ferocious, adventurous nature of the later quartet. In-between these two iconoclast works, the Andante and Allegretto from 1950 offers an intimate moment of repose. The members of Diotima long postponed recording Ligeti’s string quartets, intimidated by their music-historical significance and the demands they place on the players, but now the time has come to pursue this fascinating project and share it with the world.

 

Oceans flow through the center of Cinder Well’s music. Cadence, the new album from Amelia Baker’s experimental folk project, drifts between two far-flung seas: the hazy California coast where she grew up, and the wind-torn swells of Western Ireland that she’s come to love. Out now on Free Dirt Records, the album’s name refers to the cycles of our turbulent lives, to the uncertain tides that push us forward and back. Recorded at Hen House Studios, just blocks from the famed Venice Beach Boardwalk in Los Angeles, the songs of Cadence search for a sense of grounding and a feeling of home.

 

Francophile indie singer/songwriter April March has released the new album April March Meets Staplin. April March became a singer and animator by gazing into Spanish Harlem drawing while harmonizing over the fire escape with her sister. She sang and wrote songs, opening for and recording alongside artists until she began making unique music of her own. The world was soon introduced to her at the movies via Quentin Tarantino, Gus Van Sant, Alexander Payne and Bertrand Tavernier, all of whom featured her on their soundtracks. Working alongside her for this album, the group Staplin includes artists Arno Van Colen and Norman Langolff. Staplin’s first album was released in 2020 to earning them acclaim in the soundtrack genre.

 

Damien Binder’s latest album Bright Side continues his open-minded and heartfelt exploration of new sounds and styles within his songwriting. Two decades into his solo career he’s taken his proven credentials as a consummate songwriter and married them with Matt Gio’s (Katy Steele, Birds of Tokyo, Abbe May, Rudimental) acclaimed production nous. The melodies sound even sweeter, the songs more poetic and the overall sound is one that defies categorisation by way of its universality.

 

The new album project Dreams, Visions, and Illusions from trombonist Nick Finzer is a culmination of over ten years of leading his sextet Hear & Now (whose first album, Exposition was released in January 2013) featuring Lucas Pino on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet, Alex Wintz on guitar, Glenn Zaleski on piano, Dave Baron on bass, and Jimmy Macbride on drums. The new album is the result of a Chamber Music America “New Jazz Works” grant received by the ensemble in 2020. The album set out to explore the role of the muse in a creative life. The ups and the downs, a sense of searching for the unknown, and navigating a world in which the future is so often veiled and confusing.

 

Jason Doell’s new record Becoming in Shadows ~ Of Being Touched is out today on Whited Sepulchre Records. The record is a beautifully eccentric work that hovers in a liminal dimension between acoustic free improvisation and algorithmic electronics. Derived from what can only be described as an audio journal that Doell performed on piano while in residence at the Banff Centre, Becoming In Shadows ~ Of Being Touched employs this source material, folding, layering, and bending it into surrealistic panoramas of sound via Doell’s custom-built software, sad(john).low. While the presence of the computer is audible, the piano’s organic, evocative resonance is the foreground, making this a disorienting but vividly familiar listen.

 

Other reviews you might enjoy:

• New music round-up (for w/e 27 October 2023)
• New music round-up (for w/e 24 May 2024)
• New music round-up (for w/e 19 April 2024)