Magazine Sixty reviews

Francesca Guccione – Tales from the Deepest Lights Vol. I – Modularfield

(Artwork by Madeleine Stepponat)

A dreamy, drifting across forever skies quality inhabits Francesca Guccione’s wonderful musical creations like they were made for each other. A heavenly journey touched by a sensitive, introspective enquiry playing out towards a cosmic tomorrow. Searching arpeggios populate the narration forming the beginning Parallel Echoes contrasted next by the sheer intensity of Ganymede as it reverses over a cascade of heavy synthesizer. The breezy melodies of Moonquarium follows revealing another contrasting aspect of the artist’s thoughtful process, leaving you with the deep reaching How We Left Saturn to finalise questions about the expanse of being while sounding like a note celebration and then completion.

Release: March 17
Buy https://francescaguccione.bandcamp.com/album/tales-from-the-deepest-lights-vol-i
https://linktr.ee/francescaguccione

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Blank Gloss – Cornered – Kompakt Records

This is a sublime album expanding the beauty of being with all of its inherent light and shade. Words speak in-between the tense, atmospheric piano and guitars as they gently, poignantly strum across the horizon of extensive imaginations by quoting past and present experiences. The meaning is found in the use of effects that reverberate around the room almost as much as it is in the playing itself, which is expressive yet subtle and exemplary. The track Crossing is particularly devastating via its direct narrative, as brutal and simple notes cut to the core. You could say this is mood music for day and night reflecting the world around. Cornered does that successfully in a unique, breathless way leaving its trace intimately lingering.

Release: March 17
Buy https://blankgloss.bandcamp.com/album/cornered
https://kompakt.fm/releases/cornered_lp_dl
https://www.blankgloss.com

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Cabbaggage – Microscripts – The Submarine Broadcasting Company

Close your eyes and see what happens. There is a lost and found quality at wort here given the fractured composition of the notes, treated, resembling another time and place as they glide around your imagination. Suggests to me the movie Kubrick didn’t get to make, one which would have been stunning. Listen to the classical air contained within the opening piece Radio or New York Page haunted by forgotten melodies, almost lullabies, and the movement of a ballroom rotating as couples waltz. There is something deeply penetrating going on here as if music has been taken to an extreme and yet contradicts its innately radical nature forming a warmly familiar, reassuring location to land. Dedicated to Robert Walser, who I will now be reading up on, Microscripts is a classically attuned, creatively searching album that isn’t afraid to challenge the world, or to propose the possibility of getting in lost in it completely, as piano’s rumble and roar while alternatively soothing emotion, soaking in an unknown bliss.

Buy https://submarinebroadcastingco.bandcamp.com/album/microscripts
https://cabbaggage.com

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Surprise Chef – Rosemary Hemphill – Big Crown Records

I love this. It combines almost all of my favourite influences into one syllable. Setting the scene with curiosity as cinema brushes against the haunt of ambience intertwined by reflections of Jazz and Blues, chord structure and lose affiliations breathing as one. Very nice bass playing too as shuffling rhythms, keys and vibes drift across the endless spectrum of sound, creating thoughts and imaginary process’s like a long-lost summer’s evening.

Buy https://lnk.to/RosemaryHemphill

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Mike Nasty – Journey ft. Omari Clarke – Mike Nasty

Like the lost link between The Warning and the future of Acid, Mike Nasty’s brilliant new single from his forthcoming EP ignites the senses beyond belief. It’s a spellbinding combination of rolling 303’s, expressive sting stabs alongside cool, jazzy leanings, heart-warming pads plus bold drums all hotwired to the soul. Which feels like a riot going on in a variation of life enhancing ways.

Release: February 24
Buy / listen https://www.traxsource.com/artist/624155/mike-nasty
https://linktr.ee/djmikenasty

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Kirk Degiorgio – Beersheba – BBE Music

Jazz is as much about defiance as it is about exploring the human soul for me. Defiant simply because it is still here, existing despite all the odds while teasing out communication between emotions in its own uniquely, certain language. Beersheba touches all of those edges supplying a taste of what’s instore from his forthcoming album Modal Forces / Percussive Forces and I expect the sun will duly shine upon its release. Music of this quality and nature very much speaks for itself centred on deep chord structures, the prolusion of heavy rhythms and the beautiful breeze of melody.

Release: March 10
buy https://orcd.co/beersheba Listen https://www.traxsource.com/title/1958329/beersheba
https://www.instagram.com/kirkdegiorgio_official/

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Natalie Duncan – Silver Gun – Fallen Tree 1Hundred

I’ve listened to this song a number of times today and each play becomes more involving than the last. I also miss good songs and the impact that the soul inspiring qualities contained within the human voice can have. Natalie Duncan’s vocal delivery smoulders and soars in equal measure while the arrangement is perfectly timed to heighten every last ounce of emotion being suggested, as the instrumentation sparks with a deceptively reserved intensity. Timeless or classic take your pick. The choice remix comes from Lenzman who replays the vocal over fizzy D’n’B drums while retaining the soulful touch accompanied by a killer instrumental.

Release: February 24
https://www.instagram.com/natalieduncanmusic/
https://1hundred.net

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Sasha Scott – Spiral

Four pieces of brisk, high-energy infused music occupy the space denoting this debut EP by Sasha Scott. Dragonfly opens fast and lose via a chaotic sequence of electrical impulses, exploding in all directions, seemingly dark while gazing towards the light at the end of the tunnel as colliding sounds gently resolve themselves by the outro. The title track itself then proceeds to add heavy-duty drums in amongst its defiant whir of edgy loops feeling rigorously fired-up by the accompanying tempo. Next, the haunting strains of Adrenaline follow allowing space for soulful breath before the incendiary haywire kicks in. The EP ends on the intense ambience fuelling the excellent Swarm with shimmering sounds clashing to provoke a myriad of reactions, while asking one question about cause and effect.

Release: February 24
https://www.sashascott.com

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Camp Of Wolves – Planetar – Subexotic Records

Planetar miraculously stimulates the sensation that you are drifting around the expanse of space gazing wide-eyed at the surrounding wonder of it all. Or possibly being horizontal at an observatory lost in sound amid the unfolding, lonely yet cosmic beauty. The synthesizers employed mould a kind of lost in time feeling which may echo television from a distant 1970’s or 1980’s as space exploration seemed far out of reach, completely fantastical unless you were tuned into a Sci-Fi antenna. Combining orchestral textures alongside a mixture of light and shade, deep bass and rousing highs, tones proceed to twist and turn into something unexpected like the propulsion of freeform flight itself. David Salisbury’s richly atmospheric journey to the unknown is rewarding and is in many ways exceptional given that it imagines worlds outside of the trajectory of their mainstream counterparts, connecting with a deeper, evolutionary understanding of the human soul and its hasty flight forwards…

Release: February 24
Buy https://www.subexotic.com/release/camp-of-wolves-planetar/
https://linktr.ee/campofwolves

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Brown Fang x Torn Sail – Exit & Endless – NuNorthern Soul

Occasionally music truly excels. Exit boasts that stamp of excellence throughout as its life-affirming warmth cruises across lilting melodies, drifting over a simple shuffle of drum infused machines and sunshine guitar. Endless, contrasts next via darker brushes of synthesizer creating a more introspective story completed with an array of harmonised voices touching the soul that likewise pulses with emotion and an endless sea of possibility on this thoroughly excellent, sublime release.

Release: February 24
Buy / listen https://www.juno.co.uk/products/brown-fang-torn-sail-exit-endless/920710-01/ https://brownfang.bandcamp.com/album/exit-endless
https://mynunorthernsoul.bandcamp.com

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