Art School Girlfriend (ASG) is one of the coolest lesbians on the indie music scene.

I’m disgusting, I’m a shame to this so-called human race,” sings Clottie Cream on Country Sleaze, one half of the 2016 double A-side debut single by Goat Girl. The flipside, Scum, pondered: “How can an entire nation be so fucking thick?” A bracing introduction to the disaffected, often damning eye that the young London four-piece (Clottie, Rosy Bones on drums, LED on guitar and Naima Jelly on bass) cast over their world before documenting it in rambunctious, idiosyncratic post-punk. “British people are overly polite, which staggers progress,” they told Beat magazine. “We need to talk more openly about sex, religion and mental health. We are human, after all.”
Fearless, omnivorous Goat Girl (named in reference to Bill Hicks’s lusty alter ego, Goat Boy) found each other, and their sound, in Brixton indie venue the Windmill, signing to Rough Trade (over Domino and XL)two years ago before releasing anything. Taking their time and choosing the right home has served them well – their eponymous debut sounds self-assured: 19 songs crafted with care, in which dirty grunge riffs take strange left turns.
Clottie’s dark drawl is an unscratched itch on the lusty, harum-scarum The Man, while Creep, with its keening fiddle, gives voice to the rage of women harassed on public transport (“I really want to smash your head in”). It’s a weird, wily and unpredictable record, getting under the surface of things. Expect to hear Goat Girl trip-trapping over your bridge very soon.

On February 2nd 2018, Poppy Ackroyd releases her first full-length album with One Little Indian Records, Resolve.
A classically trained pianist, violinist, producer, and composer, Ackroyd turned heads in the neo-classical world with her previous works Escapement and Feathers, as well as her involvement in Hidden Orchestra (Tru Thoughts).
Having played alongside giants of the genre, Hauschka and Nils Frahm, the unique musician has returned, fresh off the back of a mini-album Sketches, and set to release her brand new self-produced full-length record - her most ambitious and progressive piece of work to date.
Ackroyd plays a combination of both upright and grand piano, and even plays the inside of the instrument using fingers, drumsticks and plectrums – and then arranges and multi-tracks the resulting sounds. The artist employed the same technique to record herself playing violin, pianino, harmonium and spinet, as well as record other musicians who played cello, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet and hang.
Although a keen collaborator outside of her solo work – having created soundtracks for film, dance, physical theatre and radio – this is the first record for which Poppy has written for and employed other players, including Manu Delago (Bjork, Cinematic Orchestra, Anoushka Shankar) playing hang, Mike Lesirge (Bonobo, Andreya Triana) playing clarinets and flute, and Jo Quail on cello.
Through studying contemporary classical piano works and listening to electronic music, Ackroyd quickly developed her signature compositional style on previous albums, using contemporary pianistic ideas whilst also inhabiting the world of sound beyond the keyboard, using extended techniques to 'play' other parts of the instruments as well. The intelligent artist works by recording improvised contemporary classical piano motifs and then rearranging and manipulating these sounds digitally. The result is a fantastic fusion of acoustic and electronic in a post-classical setting.

Richard Skelton is an English musician. Following the death of his wife Louise in 2004, he began to make music as a way of coming to terms with the tragedy. His music, which uses a number of instruments – principally guitar and violin, has been compared with that of Arvo Pärt among others.

'Truth Is A Beautiful Thing’ The Follow Up Album To London Grammar’s Critically Acclaimed, Platinum Selling Debut ‘If You Wait’. Includes The Singles ‘Rooting For You’, ‘Big Picture’ And Title Track ‘Truth Is A Beautiful Thing’.

Recorded by Alex Loring at Giant Wafer Studios
Mastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege Engineering
All tracks written by Owen Jones, Chris Pickering, Robert Letts, and John McCormick.

Submotion Orchestra's fifth studio album ‘Kites’ sees the band gloriously return to the smoky, jazz infused electronica which made ‘Finest Hour’ the cult record that it has now become.
As with all great albums the process is as interesting as the product. Musical Director Tommy Evans explains: "In the two years since ‘Colour Theory’ there have been a number of significant events for us all including new life and family death. We wanted to use these events as creative inspiration so we bought a disposable camera each and took photos based around these events, or the themes that they represented. Once developed, we selected 10 photos to be used as the inspiration for the 10 tracks on the album. Each track explores a different emotion, theme or event. All are honest, relevant and often hugely personal."
Honesty is something rare in music and all to often bands find themselves trying to second guess their audience or label. ‘Kites’ is emphatically not that. This is an album brimming with honesty, integrity and beauty.

* 12" vinyl available at kontrabandstor.es/forestswords *
Original audio score created for contemporary dance piece 'Shrine', premiered in January 2016 in Liverpool, UK.
All pieces composed & produced by Matthew Barnes.
Mastered by Carl Saff. Available via Dense Truth.
Design & art direction by Matthew Barnes.
Commissioned by Metal.

This is the 2014 vinyl special edition of Charcoal by Brambles, also available digitally.
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Brambles is the solo project of Mark Dawson, born in Britain, permanent resident of Australia and currently living who-knows-where as he travels Europe and beyond.
Thanks to a prolific spell of writing from Mark, what was originally pegged as an EP quickly turned into an album. Charcoal is the result of long hours spent recording, editing and mixing. A lot of this material was recorded during his stay at "The Painted Palace" (see the Brambles Forecast mix of the same name), a communal house in Melbourne open to all manner of creative outsiders.
Crucially, the house also played home to a piano; during the night-time this was where Brambles sat, working out melodies and making recordings into the small hours. Sometimes the piano is at the forefront (as on the solo piano piece, 'Unsayable'), while at other times it plays a support role to plucked and bowed strings, haunted woodwind instruments, whispered field recordings and distant chimes ('To Speak of Solitude').
This is undeniably a night-time album, it has that still, peaceful quality to it, the same you get when you walk down a deserted street at night. And despite the slow pace, the music rarely seems melancholic - there's a sense of contentedness which pervades the album from beginning to end. Mark seems very at ease with life and there's a similar spirit to the music, it is deep, thoughtful and optimistic - in the words of Donal Whelan (who mastered the final album), "it's like being wrapped up in a warm blanket". Even the slightly more sinister "Deep Corridor", which plunges you to the depths of the ocean, has that "cosy catastrophe" feel to it. I can't help but think of Blade Runner and Vangelis when I hear it.

Through 2010/11 limited editions and now sold out EPs appeared on DIY labels such as Rural Colours, Heat Death, Audio Gourmet. Resting in Aspic is a compilation of some of the earlier material plus one unreleased track.

An astonishing solo debut by acclaimed cellist and composer Lucy Railton featuring one side of filigree, multi-layered autobiographical collage-work, the other of raw and phased cello glissandi. RIYL: Mark Leckey, Alvin Lucier, Beatrice Dillon, Nate Young, Valerio Tricoli, Popol Vuh...
Lucy Railton is a prolific performer who has appeared on countless recordings and collaborations with many important figures in contemporary music over the last few years. Paradise 94 is, remarkably, her solo debut - featuring archival, location and studio recordings which serve as a time capsule of all the myriad disciplines and influences that have brought her to this point in time. It both plays up to and shatters expectations of her music, which harnesses a duality of energies - acoustic/electronic, real/imagined, iconic/iconoclastic, pissed-off/romantic; out of place and androgynous - resulting in a visceral emotional insight and rare narrative grasp.
Variegated, asymmetric, and located somewhere between her usual fields of exploration, Paradise 94 gives free reign to aspects of her creativity that have previously been subsumed into collaborative processes and interpretations of other composers’ work. Here, she’s free to probe, sculpt and layer her sounds through a much broader range of techniques and strategies, placing particular focus on non-linear structural arrangements and exploring the way her cello becomes perceptibly synthetic through collaging, rather than FX. At every turn Paradise 94 is bewilderingly unique.
The A-side unfolds an oneiric, inception-like sequence traversing temporalities, timbres and tones from what sounds like a spectral ensemble playing on a traffic island in Pinnevik, to bursts of rabbit-in-headlights trance arps emerging from meticulously dissected musique concrète in The Critical Rush, and a collision of masked vocals, string eruptions and a deeply moving, light-headed Bach rendition in For J.R.
On the other hand, Fortified Up on side B tests out a far rawer approach, sampling herself playing the same glissandi over and again, which she layers into a sort of perpetual, sickly motion, the Shepard Tone riffing on the listener’s psychoacoustic perceptions before calving off into a cathartic dissonant folk coda in its final throes.
In the most classic sense, you can only properly begin to f*ck with something from the inside once you truly know it. Railton’s dedicated years of service have more than equipped her with the nous and skill to do just that, gifting us with what will no doubt be looked back on as a raw, exposed and important solo debut in years to come.

In “1950”, King Princess pays tribute to LGBTQ+ people that faced barriers in expressing their queerness decades ago. She tells The Line of Best Fit:
Queer love was only able to exist privately for a long time, expressed in society through coded art forms. I wrote this song as a story of unrequited love in my own life, doing my best to acknowledge and pay homage to that part of history.