New music – Joseph McGann: Old Wounds (Young Echo Records)

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posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the press release

Releasing under his own name for the first time, Bristol-based dubstep legend Kahn, aka Joseph McGann, reveals a different side on Old Wounds. Revisiting a shelved project from his earliest days as an artist, the album reveals a softer hue and sees McGann step forward as a singer for the first time. Drifting across a slow, smudged and hazy atmospheric backdrop that harks back the opiated sound-world of David Sylvian’s Japan or classic trip-hop, the record features contributions from Natalia Escobar (Poison Arrow),Bogues and Amos Childs (both Jabu / Young Echo)

McGann writes: “At times, it felt like Old Wounds was destined never to see the light of day. This is a body of work that began in the throes of youth but would remain unfinished until life had moved on, and enough distance existed to grant the necessary perspective to complete it. The core ideas for several songs on this record were conceived back in the early 2010s. The title track itself contains vocal performances originally recorded during one of my very first studio sessions with Amos Childs and Alex Rendall (Bogues), new-found comrades in the then fledgling Young Echo collective. The music made in those sessions was dear to us, but never found a home.

Years later, and with a mind to breathe new life into those early pieces we’d written, I reached out to the incredible Colombian artist Natalia Escobar (Poison Arrow) and it was through this crucial collaboration that Old Wounds truly began to reveal itself. Natalia’s voice and the story she told through her lyrics lent an aching intimacy that took the music to a whole new emotional dimension. She understood the heart and intention of the songs, and I’m eternally grateful to her for giving so much of herself to this album and for helping me to realise what it was meant to be.

To put it plainly; this is a record about longing. Not simply for a person, but for a peace. An attempt to navigate the unique grief of a love unrealised. And, as such, a life unrealised. The waking purgatory one exists in when there is an absence of love, and the agonising want to experience it.

A crying out to someone who isn’t there. 

Resigning yourself to bitter fantasy and dejection. 

Bereft to a point of self-sabotage. 

The sound of accepting your fate. 

This is music inspired by a period in my life I hope never to return to. 

It’s also my hope that, in completing this record and sharing it with you, I can honour these songs for what they are and finally let them go.”

With gratitude, Joseph McGann

Published post no.3,047 – Wednesday 14 October 2026

New music – Arandel: L’Heure du Loup (Edit) (InFiné)

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posted by Ben Hogwood, mostly with text from the press release

Arandel returns with L’Heure du Loup (Edit Version), the first single from his forthcoming album Cosmogonies du Silence, due out on InFiné on 22 January 2027.

Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, the track evokes the unsettling hours between 3 and 5 a.m., when fears and nightmares emerge.

Built around an improvisation on a small Baroque organ, the piece opens with an uneasy pulse before gradually unfolding into a powerful instrumental journey, driven by the drumming of Louis Delorme (Air, Sébastien Tellier, Katerine).

Moving from tension towards light, L’Heure du Loup offers a first glimpse into an album exploring the relationship between silence, memory and absence.

As you will hear below, Arandel gradually adds new colours to complement Delorme’s fluid drumming:

Created over a period of ten years, the upcoming album explores the relationship between silence, memory and absence. Combining electronic experimentation with acoustic instruments and echoes of Baroque music, it features contributions from Ben Shemie, vocalist and guitarist of Canadian band Suuns; Moroccan singer-songwriter Meryem Aboulouafa; British singer-songwriter and pianist Douglas Dare; and French actor Félix Maritaud (120 BPM).

Published post no.3,046 – Tuesday 13 October 2026

Pulse Music – Steve Reich: It’s Gonna Rain (1965)

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by Ben Hogwood

“It was, I have to say, one of the three to four really life-changing musical events of my life” – Brian Eno on hearing Steve Reich‘s It’s Gonna Rain for the first time (from Steve Reich: Conversations)

Background

Reich’s recording of preacher Brother Walter was made in Union Square, San Francisco, in 1964. The preacher was referring to Noah’s Flood, and the forty days of continuous rain in the Bible, but the contemporary significance – with the Cuban missile crisis gripping the Western world – gripped the composer.

Once recorded, Reich took to the studio, and with two recordings of the preacher playing side by side, he observed during playback how one tape was slowly going out of phase with the other. The resultant sounds were bringing some extraordinary effects to the speech and its resultant melody and rhythm, which Reich honed in on for the final edited tape piece.

The piece is effectively in two movements – the first hones in on the words “It’s Gonna Rain”, looping them relentlessly, while the second takes on snippets of the scene in the ark: “But Noah couldn’t open the door; it had been sealed by the hand of God!”

Listen

Part 1:

Part 2:

Thoughts

Nothing quite prepares you for your first encounter with Brother Walter. The impassioned message is powerful enough, given extra perspective by the street sounds, but when it starts to go through Reich’s phrasing process all sorts of weird and wonderful musical tricks are created.

The baton is quickly passed to the listener, and the ear zooms in on unexpected micro details, with fragments of words and music taking on new effects and meanings. On headphones the effect is overwhelming; on a home stereo it is still incredibly powerful. My two live encounters with this piece have generated a headache through the overstimulation!

What Reich is also doing here, unexpectedly, is preparing the way for rap music. Brother Walter’s speech is so melodic, and so rhythmic, that it creates a profile all of its own, a dance only enlivened by the phased repetitions.

The stereo picture shifts, an unsettling experience but also a wholly stimulating one. The melodic properties of the speech of “It’s Gonna Rain” hit home in a kind of microtone key, between D and E flat major. When the two tapes reach the maximum distance apart the effect is that of an aural eclipse, with intense kinetic energy generated at the expense of all other noise.

With the second part we know a little more what to expect, but here the effect is that of a sonic whirlpool. As Reich’s process works through the manic intensity grows, the perspective of the voice changing as it gets chewed up by the machine. The vortex takes hold so that halfway through the words inaudible, and then the effect – to this listener at least – becomes that of a sonic plane coming into land, the pitch of the tape sinking towards the ground before disappearing slowly into the distance. A quite extraordinary piece!

Quotes / Legacy

Brian Eno again, from Conversations… “Everything I thought I understood about music needed to be revised. It had a very, very big impact on me. it really set me thinking again about what music could be, and what the act of listening consisted of, because it made me realise that listening was a very creative activity”

Recordings

Just the one – part of the 1987 collection Early Works (Nonesuch)

Also written / released in 1965: John Coltrane A Love Supreme; John Barry Thunderball

Next up: Come Out (1966)

Published post no.3,045 – Monday 12 October 2026

On Record – MahlerFest XXXI: Das Lied von der Erde (with Stacey Rishoi, Brennen Guillory)

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Stacey Rishoi (mezzo-soprano), Brennen Guillory (tenor), Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra / Kenneth Woods

Mahler
Das Lied von der Erde (1908-09)

Colorado MahlerFest 195269164287 [58’46”]
Producer Mike Quam Engineer Tim Burton
Live performances at Macky Auditorium, Boulder, Colorado, 19-20 May 2018

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

Colorado MahlerFest here issues on CD the ‘official’ first instalment of its Mahler cycle with current artistic director Kenneth Woods – The Song of the Earth being heard in a performance whose attributes have been maintained as well as enhanced throughout the intervening decade.

What are the performances like?

Nominally his ‘Ninth Symphony’, Mahler’s uncertainty over so-designating this piece means it is still frequently overlooked in traversals of his symphonies. Launching his cycle thus (the Seventh and Tenth Symphonies, heard at MahlerFest XXIX and XXX, will be given again in the 2028/29 editions), Woods gave notice of his identity with a work he had earlier conducted and recorded in the chamber transcription begun in 1921 by Schoenberg then completed over six decades later by Rainer Riehn (SOMMCD0109) whose virtues seem no less evident here.

Together with Woods, both these performances have in common the tenor Brennen Guillory – his impulsive while never histrionic tenor heard to impressive effect in ‘The Drinking Song of Earth’s Sorrow’, with its constant pivoting between despair and resignation prior to those fateful final bars. By contrast, ‘The Lonely One in Autumn’ has a seamlessness and lucidity duly accentuated by the flowing tempo (rightly) adopted here; mezzo Stacey Rishoi placing equal emphasis on that inward anguish and alleviating rapture as inform this masterly setting.

There is no falling off of insight during the triptych of scherzos – with trios – which follows. Guillory resists any temptation to over-characterize ‘Of Youth’ with its myriad subtleties of orchestration and piquant harmony, then Rishoi brings alluring elegance to the outer sections of ‘Of Beauty’ with its boisterous central section ideally integrated into this setting overall. Its barbed humour all too easy to caricature, ‘The Drunkard in Spring’ evinces wit and not a little pathos as Guillory veers pointedly if always securely between escapism and epiphany.

Whether or not his greatest achievement, ‘The Farewell’ is Mahler’s most personal statement – a ‘scena’ for voice and instruments with his increasing preference for stratified textures and ethereal sonorities at its most potent. At just under 28 minutes, Woods demonstrably has the measure of a lengthy though never discursive span whose settings of fateful anticipation then ecstatic fulfilment are linked, motivically as well as conceptually, by a central interlude with its fateful processional made as tangible as is Rishoi’s serene leave-taking towards the close.

Does it all work?

Pretty much throughout. Many accounts of this work have been affected by less than ideally matched vocalists and/or at least one less than perceptive movement, but the present reading avoids these pitfalls. The woodwind principals are never less than equal to their considerable tasks, and if the playing of the Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra has gained during subsequent editions in terms of unanimity and lustre, its underlying commitment is never for a moment in doubt heard in Mackey Auditorium’s close yet never confined or unsympathetic acoustic.

Is it recommended?

It is, not just as an indication of where the association between this orchestra and conductor was headed. No-one hearing their performance could question Woods’s standing as a Mahler interpreter of distinction, or this orchestra’s ability to rise to the challenge of Mahler’s music.

Listen / Buy

For further purchase options, visit the MahlerFest website – and for more information on the festival itself, click here. Click on the names for further information on conductor Kenneth Woods and tenor Brennen Guillory

Published post no.3,044 – Sunday 11 October 2026

New music – Andy Bell & Masal: Common Primitives (Sonic Cathedral)

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posted by Ben Hogwood, with text from the press release

Andy Bell (Ride / Oasis) and Essex-based harp and synth duo Masal have released their new album Common Primitives, on the Sonic Cathedral label.

It’s their second collaboration, following 2023’s Tidal Love Numbers, and it’s a stunning, meditative collection which veers from kosmische to astral jazz by way of Turkish folk tunes and all the way back again.

The trio launched the album earlier this week with two incredible, intimate live shows at SJQ in Dalston, which saw them incorporating a cover of Faust’s proto-shoegaze classic Jennifer into their set.

The unlikely trio of Andy, plus Masal’s Özlem Şimşek and Alastair Johnson, first came together when the duo supported Andy at a show in Chelmsford in early 2022. Their first album – 2023’s acclaimed Tidal Love Numbers – consisted of four lengthy, almost ambient tracks and is included here on vinyl for the first time as part of a two-record set. By contrast, the seven tracks that make up Common Primitives are almost concise, but also a lot more layered and complex.

“We tend to work from initial, free-jammed ideas, building form and arrangement from there,” explains Alastair of their working method. “This album became a more iterative process where we went back over the ideas – adding, editing and cutting the original material. This approach led to more fleshed-out finished pieces and contrasts with the first album which all came together relatively quickly. Above all, we believe you should go where the vibe takes you.”

Published post no.3,043 – Saturday 10 October 2026