New Music Video from Oort Smog for “Bright Empty Future”

We’ve recently reviewed the psychedelic Californian jazz-prog duo Oort Smog‘s upcoming masterpiece: Smeared Pulse Transfers. To recapitulate briefly, it’s a brilliant and innovative album that is full of surprises and good times.

Before the album’s release, on the 26th, you can watch this amazing video, directed by Dylan Louis Pecora, for the song “Bright Empty Future”, which you can also listen to on their Bandcamp page. The video uses various techniques in conjunction and superposition with one another, which gives it a pretty surreal feeling—not so far, in fact, from the feeling given by the music, too!

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Saint Sadrill – Pierrefilant

The Music

The Words

Pierrefilant is the debut album of Lyon, France’s Saint Sadrill sextet, who plays a thoroughly interwoven mix of avant-garde prog and jazz fusion. Out on November 2 via the excellent French label Dur et Doux, the album is over an hour long and features a full-time vibraphonist. I was anticipating the album since the first single came out, and, now that it is, let me tell you about it.

I was expecting the release to be good; I mean, listen to “Corq”: it’s beautiful. Even if it’s not the most theoretically interesting track on there, it … Read more

Les Rugissants – D’humain et d’animal

The Music

The Words

Les Rugissants is a nu jazz ensemble from Paris, France, and they recently released their latest album: D’humain et d’animalOf Human and Animal, if you allow me the free translation. At the junction of progressive rock and big band jazz, Les Rugissants plays an emotive and intellectually compelling brand of jazz that I must make sure you not miss.

After the lyrical and rather romantic introduction of “Le visage”, we get to an interesting \(\frac{5}{4}\) motif in “Second hymne delphique à Apollon”, which gets expanded upon throughout the song, quite rewardingly so. At … Read more

We Pyrrhic Conquerors – The End Is Nigh

The Music

The Thoughts

The general free-flowing complexity of zeuhl music and the band name We Pyrrhic Conquerors suggest a sizable ensemble of musicians, performing with some level of loose improvisation. Yet Bandcamp informs us that the richly composed The End Is Nigh is the product of one Joey M. Bishop. That’s about all the information I can glean about the artist; there’s no Facebook page to refer to, no specific location given (Bandcamp tags the project as United States, but the drums were recorded at a studio in Indonesia?), and even Google currently returns zero results for the band … Read more

Quantum Trio – Duality: Particles & Waves

With members from Poland and Chile meeting in the Netherlands to play modern, progressive jazz together, Quantum Trio just released a massive hour-and-a-half-long double album, Duality: Particles & Waves. Besides being of massive scale and tremendous musicianship, Duality is a concept album on the wave-particle duality, an important concept in quantum physics. The first disc, Particles, is focused on the tangible, while the other one, Waves, embodies the ethereal facet of matter and energy. Concretely, the shift is very noticeable on the music itself. As per their own description, Particles contain polyrhythmic tunes and ballads, both undeniably … Read more