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
Category Archives: Mini-Review
Porcus vs. Equus – Music out of Shit
Australia’s experimental rock band Porcus vs. Equus just released a single, or short EP, under the name Music out of Shit. With merely three tracks and a runtime of just eight minutes, M.O.O.S. is very short, but also very sweet. First of all, ‘Wet Sugar (Player vs. Environment)’ is a magnificent song to begin with. Reminiscent of the Spaghetti Western aura of Robotmonkeyarm, with their reverb-laden, aggressively-plucked overdriven guitar notes, Porcus vs. Equus bring in some rhythmic and structural surprises into this complex ear-worm of a song. At over three minutes long, it’s the least concise of the triptych, … Read more
The Tangent – The Slow Rust of Forgotten Machinery
Marateck – Time Is Over
We recently discussed a band that takes math rock to the extremes in terms of technical skills, to the detriment of the ‘math’ aspect, but here’s a band that does the opposite. Marateck don’t play thirty-second notes and they don’t quickly arpeggiate extended chords, but they ingeniously integrate polyrhythmics and polymetrics into often odd-time signature compositions. This is more evidently displayed on their debut album, Time Is Over, which was released on July eleventh. Of course, playing such counter-intuitive timings and measure subdivisions is a technical feat in itself, but it unfortunately garners much less attention than playing … Read more
Nhor – Wildflowers: Spring & Summer
Spring and Summer are the two first releases of the Wildflowers tetralogy, but, as I’ve just come across this project, I’ll write about both EPs at once. Nhor was a British atmospheric black metal band who released a transcendental album in 2013, Within the Darkness between the Starlight. Since then, however, the project seems to have remained focused on the softer side of things, with 2015’s Momenta quintae essentiae and following shorter releases. All of their catalogue displays the same high standards of quality despite the genre change. The newest comers are the first two parts of Wildflowers, … Read more