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Birds of a feather
Like many encounters with the famous, they’re smaller than you imagined. This little drum-kit was on stage at E7’s Cider House at their second Forest Gate Improvisation event on 25 April. It looks almost like a toy, the manufacturer’s name askew at the top, as if the supports below have gone a bit flimsy. The…
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Five things about [Ahmed]
![Five things about [Ahmed]](https://slowmotion.blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/ahmed-cropped.jpg?w=1024)
[Ahmed] – the quartet of Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip, Pat Thomas and Seymour Wright – have become a monster group in a live setting. For their current London residence at Cafe Oto, they follow an unbeatable blueprint for any creative ensemble, which is that each set consists of one idea taken as far as they can, with…
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More a feeling than a melody
The brand new release of a previously unheard Alice Coltrane performance from 1971 is like a gift from the gods. It seems miraculous that a music so personal, even reverential, could have made it to New York’s famous Carnegie Hall, in probably her most important year as an artist. To consider the personal, Alice’s first…
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Alexa, stop
The Wire’s takeover last month at Iklectik, part of the South London space’s closing events as it moves onto new things, featured a cute and memorable film by Frédéric Acquaviva, as part of his partner Lore Lixenberg’s solo set. AI Music features Antoine Spennato arguing with his Alexa when he asks a Microdot device to…
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Radical atheist culture
If ever a label had its own aesthetic, it was Emanem. “My magnum opus is the Emanem label” said the main man Martin Davidson For any record label of any genre which seeks to get across its ideas or ideology, the rigour and clarity with which Emanem operated provides an exemplary model. Davidson’s sudden death in…
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This record could change the world
I didn’t know Neil Kulkarni in real life, but I knew him from his words, which in many ways is better than real life. Some but not all will know he stayed in Coventry when he might have opted to move to London when writing prolifically for Melody Maker in the 1990s, at which point…
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Large speaker systems and very large spaces
The death of Phill Niblock breaks a golden thread which ran all the way back to the postwar cultural explosion on America’s East Coast. He was a composer of minimalist music, but before that a film maker, and a photographer who worked amid the jazz scene – he snapped his teenage idol Duke Ellington many times,…
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Ten more from 2023
Every year brings more music than could fit nearly into a top ten, and it’s been that way ever since the tools of production and distribution migrated into people‘s homes in the new millennium. A top ten these days might be best considered a guide to what feels most urgent at a particular point in…
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The world won’t listen
Deep Listening: The Story Of Pauline Oliveros (Daniel Weintraub, director/Capone Productions 2023) Video of avant garde musicians can help make real what sometimes seems close to magic. So it is with Daniel Weintraub’s new documentary, which captures the epic span of Pauline Oliveros’s life and work, parts of which were so wildly imaginative and esoteric…
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Seek him everyday
John Coltrane‘s A Love Supreme is a suite of music that‘s epic in its scope yet, in the way it gives thanks in a naked coda, as humble as its composer. For another musician to perform it is exceptionally challenging, as they have to pull off the role of someone undergoing something akin to spiritual…
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