The Quiet Temple release their self-titled debut album on Point Of Departure. An amorphous musical collective put together by Rich Machin and Duke Garwood, with a rolling cast of players assembled from the likes of Soulsavers, Spiritualized, Stereolab and Julian Cope.
For Machin, Garwood and the other musicians (Ray Dickaty, Tim Lewis [aka Thighpaulsandra], Pete Marsh, Paul May, Doggen) a sense of adventure and devil-may-care inventiveness took precedence over precise design when they started the recording process at Gabriel’s Real World studio in the autumn of 2017.
The album is a potent and nuanced record that beguiles as much as it charms. Across six tracks the album moves from the languorous lysergic shuffle of the opening The Last Opium Den (On Earth) to the beatific - almost Balearic - lazy grooves of The Bible Black. Elsewhere, the opening cinematic vistas of Shades of Gemini soon gives way to something far more menacing and whisky-sodden. Finally, the closing Utopia and Visions takes the electronic post-punk visions of Talk Talk into unapologetic cosmic dub territory.

Mercury Prize-nominated Portico Quartet has always been an impossible band to pin down. Sending out echoes of jazz, electronica, ambient music and minimalism, the group created their own singular, cinematic sound over the course of three studio albums, from their 2007 breakthrough ‘Knee-Deep in the North Sea’, and 2010 John Leckie produced ‘Isla’, to the self titled record ‘Portico Quartet’ in 2012. Now rebooted as Portico Quartet after a brief spell as the three-piece Portico, the group are set to release their fourth studio album Art In The Age Of Automation this August on Manchester’s forward thinking indy jazz and electronica label Gondwana Records. It’s an eagerly anticipated return, with the band teasing both a return to their mesmeric signature sound and fresh new sonic departures in their new music. So much so that their four-night run at Archspace E8 (June 22-25) sold out in less than an hour as fans from around the world scrambled for tickets to hear the return of Portico Quartet.
Recorded at Fish Factory Studios in London at the beginning of the year and mixed at Vox studios, Berlin, Art In The Age Of Automation finds the band building on the sound world they first explored with their eponymous 2012 release Portico Quartet, mixing the cinematic minimalism, that first made their name, with electronic and ambient textures alongside a welcome return for Jack’s ethereal saxophone and Duncan’s unique mixture of live and electronic drums as well of course as the band’s signature sound, the chiming other worldy tones of the hang drum. It’s hard music to define, as Jack acknowledges. “Our sound falls between many genres, jazz, electronic music even minimalism in places, but naturally it’s an amalgamation of everything we’ve listened to”. And as you would expect from a band that have evolved with each recording, this is no barren retread of the past, instead it represents another step forward sonically and musically in the band’s ongoing evolution, as Jack explains. “We’ve really gone into detail with the sounds and production, building dense layers and textures but retaining a live, organic feel to it. We wanted to use acoustic instruments but find ways in which they could interact with more modern production techniques and technologies to create something that was identifiably us but sounded fresh and exciting, futuristic even.” Its an ethos that also informs the album’s title and the distinctive artwork by Duncan Bellamy (under his Veils Project identity) that adorns the album’s cover “The artwork came about when I started to explore the idea of scanning moving images. The resulting image is exactly that - a film playing on a tablet whilst the scan is in action. So the image is something created by the scanner itself, and in this way it establishes a relationship with the title of the album”. And it’s the mix between the human and the electronic that makes the music on AITAOA so fresh and exciting as Portico Quartet one again evolve their music into the future.
The album opens with insistent, catchy Endless, which references the classic Portico Quartet sound, but expands outwards into a hypnotic, blissful collage of strings, hangs, electronics, saxophones and Bellamy’s unique drumming. It’s a sound that permeates the whole record, feeling both familiarly Portico Quartet, but transformed into something bold and new, sounding somehow bigger than ever but even more detailed. Elsewhere Rushing draws on the bands love of minimalist music, a repeated piano motif merges with a contorted vocal sample that twists its way through juxtaposed spaces to reach an uplifting resolve. Meanwhile the title track offers a moment of down-tempo respite: the hang drum is joined by a full horns and string section, culminating in a orchestral outro where cellos and violins blend with saxophones and hang drum to form a densely layered blanket of sound. The sound of strings are prevalent on much of the record, and as Jack explains they add an extra layer of humanity to the music “It’s exciting working with a string section and to hear the ideas you sketch on a computer being played on acoustic instruments, then being able to direct them in a way in which is just not possible on a computer, it brings a real emotional depth and nuance to the record”. On A Luminous Beam an infectious drum grove drives the piece while synths, flutes and strings are layered with the saxophone floating freely over the top. Beyond Dialogue is classic Portico Quartet, exploiting the ethereal, otherworldly timbre of the hang drums and Jack’s saxophone to create a hypnotic track that references minimalism and ambient music to create something beautiful and new. Current History has nods towards more electronic and urban music as drum machines underpin a collage of hang drums and saxophones. The album finishes on the aptly tilted Lines Glow, the saxophone weaving its melody over an organ and string section culminating in an epic, euphoric moment of release. It’s a fittingly uplifting way to end an album that announces the return of one of the UK’s most singular, and influential bands, one that a decade from their founding are still pushing the boundaries of their music into the future and still sound like nothing you ever heard before.

Anenon is the project of Brian Allen Simon, a Los Angeles based saxophonist, producer, artist, RBMA Madrid alum and Non Projects record label owner. He occupies the gray area between jazz, classical, ambient and electronic musics, taking elements of these styles and creating his own, hybrid sound.
On March 4th, Anenon will release his third studio full-length, the Petrol LP, on Friends of Friends Music, the proper follow-up to his Camembert EP that was shared by the label in October 2015.
The concept for Petrol was born out of a series improvisational sessions between Anenon and friend, drummer and collaborator Jon-Kyle Mohr, who also plays drums on the recordings.
As Simon & Mohr continued to build and explore their sound, the music began to take on aspects of life in Los Angeles. Anenon explains, an Angeleno is "one who understands the beauty of distance and the consistencies of irregularity" and those juxtapositions can be found throughout Petrol, a spacious album that needs to be lived in to be believed.
From the frenetic saxophone rifts, string arrangements and breakneck drum patterns evoking the kinetic energy of the LA freeway on songs like "Lumina" and "Once", to the ambient moments of early morning solitude on opener "Body" and "Panes", Los Angeles is a central theme throughout Petrol.

Credits
Design – Craig Hansen, Leah Ball
Double Bass – Joshua Abrams
Double Bass, Bass Guitar – Junius Paul, Matt Ulery
Drums, Sounds [Beats], Loops, Edited By [Overdubs] – Makaya McCraven
Guitar – Jeff Parker
Mastered By – Shelly Steffens
Mixed By – Dave Vettraino, Makaya McCraven
Photography By [Cover Photo] – Nathan Michael
Producer – Scott McNiece
Recorded By – Dave Vettraino
Tenor Saxophone – De'Sean Jones
Tenor Saxophone, Electronics – Tony Barba
Trumpet – Marquis Hill
Vibraphone – Justefan
Notes
Nearly 48 hours of live improvised performance recorded at 1 venue over 12 months and 28 shows - culled, cut, rendered, and remixed into 19 potent pieces of organic beat music.

When the biggest stars in our universe begin to burn up and collapse they release neon gas. When electricity is passed through neon gas it glows. When it’s captured within glass we can use it to make coloured light. When that glass is shaped into the outline of a naked girl it can be hung outside a strip club. In this meeting of the celestial and the profane, the epic and the particular, lies Jaga’s new album Starfire.
In December 2012, Jaga’s main songwriter, Lars Horntveth, left Norway and moved to Los Angeles. There, on the other side of the world, inspired by the space around him, the size of the sky above him, the endless light flashing past as he drove round the city at night, he began composing the new suite of works which would become Starfire. Periodically he was joined by other members of the 8-piece band who would lay down their contributions in his apartment/studio before returning home to Norway. When the basics of the album were in place, he went back to Oslo to finish the record in the professional studios that the band had built and furnished over the years.
The result is a revelation — in itself no mean feat for a band with a twenty year history. After the more heavily scored work of One Armed Bandit and Live with the Britten Sinfonia, Starfire moves to a more experimental studio-led approach - "The idea was that we thought about the songs as both the original song and a remix in one" - morphing each song into a variety of sonic directions. With an increase in the use of electronics and the guitar work of Marcus Forsgren given new prominence, it’s probably the least straightforwardly “jazz” of their records. Instead, all the elements which have made them such an important band—the way their technical chops combine with the kind of mutual sympathy which comes from growing up together—are here melded into an utterly unique sound on what could turn out to be the group’s crowning achievement.
Centering around the Horntveth siblings (Lars, Martin and Line) the eight piece band Jaga formed in 1994, when Lars was still only fourteen. In their two decades of existence they've released five studio albums, one live album, five EPs (CD and vinyl), one live DVD and now a box set. Five of those eight original members are still in the group and all this has contributed to the group’s deep mutual understanding. Add in a guest like Leon Dewan, who plays his own Swarmatron on "Shinkansen" and Lars’ increasing use of a Pocket Piano synth as a tool for composition and you get the basis of a more hard-edged, electronic sound, perfectly melded with live musicianship.
Starfire is a beautiful, visceral, utterly exhilarating piece of work that keeps spiralling up and away, structurally complex, musically rigorous, but without ever losing touch with a certain earthy sensuality and human sympathy. It could just be Jaga's masterpiece.

You're Dead! is the upcoming fifth studio album by electronic musician Flying Lotus. It is set to be released on October 6, 2014, in the UK, and October 7, 2014, in the US, on Warp Records.

The art of Kammerflimmer Kollektief is deception. It is a persuasive and seductive art, resulting in incorrect assessments and doubtful perceptions. It is an art of disorientation and misdirection. In the Kollektief’s current production Désarroi (disorientation), their 10th and wildest album, they do it again: Welcome to the Kammerflimmery!
Right from first track, the Kollektief leaves its referential indicators. Heike Aumüller's free, unsentimental Harmonium played with a Sehnsucht (like a Free Jazz counterpart to Reggae producer and Melodica master Augustus Pablo), followed by Johannes Frisch’s magic double-bass, creaking and free-wheeling. Shortly after a dash of Swedish Biker-Rock passion, that makes you forget the benedictions of modernity – for a moment at least – until we come to the end of Désarroi, where we are brought back into the blessings of concrete- solid realities.
Clear articulated comprehensibility is definitively not one of the aims of the Kollektief’s sign systems. Rather, it masters the ancient art of secret-keeping, and it does it in times in which everyone reveals all of their intimacies without asking the rest of humanity whether or not we’d like to know them. The Kollektief clips musical and cultural fragments out of their cultural frameworks and pieces them enigmatically together. They have worked on this amalgam of FX-Cultures, Psychedelica, Free Form, Dub, Improv, and ritual activities for a long time. These elements are gradually connected and placed in an opaque, vertical system, about as (non-)coherent as the constitutional laws of an alchemistic proto-science can be. The Kollektief takes only what is of use. And what is of use has usually a mythical crux. What was once a bass becomes a creak. What was once a voice becomes a phoneme. What was once a guitar becomes a gnarly notion of “something strummed”. At the same time, the special effects that guitarist Thomas Weber extracts from his strange apparati, he masks as unidentifiable. Rather, they are incorporated as the seemingly "familiar" in the singular tone continuum of the Kammerflimmery. The strange, unreal impressions lurking as soundtrack behind these psych, improv, and editing wars might be regarded by the complete outsider as seemingly strange events.
Like the shaman, who in the morning simply hangs up his magic roots for drying to prepare them for his nightly ecstatic routines, the Kollektief adds something ordinary and familiar to its rituals. Maybe that’s why they cover Zurück zum Beton (Back to Concrete), the 1978 hit by West-German punk legends S.Y.P.H. Here Zurück zum Beton is not interpreted as a grim punk anthem, but as an erotic celebration of a life in order, of Alltag and Künstlichkeit – familiarity and artificiality. A tender embrace of the art of sculpting concrete – the technique to shape public spheres. Over there “pure nature”. Over here “mankind”. In between the magic pragmatism of the Kollektief. On Désarroi, in a fashion perhaps even more pronounced than on previous works, the Kollektief is working with a delicate, tender sensibility (And particularly delicate and disorienting is the singing of Heike Aumüller, which has never been heard like this on record before). If tenderness becomes maximally tender, it is also a maximality of radical tenderness. And because of this, Désarroi is possibly the Kollektief’s most radical album to date.

Early Riser is the debut studio album released by Taylor McFerrin on June 2, 2014 through Brainfeeder.
The album took nearly six years to complete. McFerrin intended to sing on the entire record before realizing that it was not always necessary for him to sing over his music.

Portico Quartet are an instrumental band from London, UK. They are known for their use of the Hang, a modern percussion instrument. Their debut album, Knee-Deep in the North Sea, was nominated for the 2008 Mercury Prize and was Time Out's Jazz, Folk and World album of the year 2007.

Jaga Jazzist (also known as Jaga) is a Norwegian experimental jazz band, that rose to prominence when the BBC named their second album, A Livingroom Hush (Smalltown Supersound/Ninja Tune), the best jazz album of 2002.

Jaga Jazzist (also known as Jaga) is a Norwegian experimental jazz band, that rose to prominence when the BBC named their second album, A Livingroom Hush (Smalltown Supersound/Ninja Tune), the best jazz album of 2002.