Back catalogue: Post Rock/Experimental

Review: The last album by Colin Newman, Bastard came almost a full decade after his establishing panhandle of albums, released across Beggars Banquet, 4AD and Crammed Discs. A driving left turn into dance music, Bastard hears Newman come into his own, not only hearing him embrace then-emergent styles like trip hop and breakbeat for the first time, but also breaking through as the first full-length effort for his very own record label, Swim, established after a parallax-shifting abandonment of conventional song formats and welcoming a new, largely minimal/ambient electronica posse; the likes of Lobe and Silo. The tracks on Bastard reflect an early embrace of dance music in a time of ambivalence towards the arch-genre as a whole, reflecting the wilful keeping-ahead-of-the-curve that Newman and his partner Milka Spigel had by then cultivated.

Review: A fresh, atmospheric sound is proferred by South Carolina singer and producer Nancy Blues in the form of her latest vinyl LP Exit Simulation, in which she cuts through the intertwined hazes of childhood memory and personal psychogeography to produce a veritably ultra-ambient dust cloud of sound in 13 tracks. At its core, the album trickles faintly forth from the watershed that is neo-soul - multi-layering her voice; harmonizing; pitting honest, raw rimshots-n'-crackles against contemporary stylistic cornerstones like lo-fi and night-bussy ambient electronica - all to evoke, convincingly, the mood of stasis in which she finds current solace in her current home of Charleston. Evocative of having found a newfound time and place to reflect, Blues conjures up the weekends of her youth, spent mesmerized at the ambient music of the slow-paced devotionals performed by the local Oklahoman church band.