Music offers stability in unstable times, but in 2023, the ground beneath the music industry continued to shift.  This year’s top stories: an explosion in musical releases, the sale of Bandcamp, the publication of an ACL-related book and a glimpse at the possible future of music.  This month marks our twelfth anniversary; we thank all of you for your support!  We love what we do, and we hope you love what you read.  Across the next two weeks, we’ll be sharing our Year-End Charts; it’s the most wonderful time of the year! Our cover image is “Piano Suite No. 1” ©Yurii Nagulko ..read more

It’s been over a year since the last time I posted a mix of my own here on ACL, and nearly as long since the last mix I published in general (Soundtrack Politica, commissioned by Cinema Politica in Montreal). So it seemed time to fix that, just before we head into our End of Year season. On 27 August 2023, Stefan Christoff organized an event at La Sotterenea in Montreal, bringing together artists and community members in opposition to the CAQ government’s proposed legislation to end the tenants’ right to lease transfers. Lease transfers are one of the few tools renters have in this provence ..read more

Joseph Sannicandro reviews the 19th edition of AKOUSMA in Montreal, including an interview with Aho Ssan, who closed out the festival. Shortly after the release of his stunning new collaborative album, Rhizomes, Aho Ssan presented a live diffusion of The Falling Man at Montreal’s Akousma immersive digital music festival. He had previously presented the Rhizomes A/V show at Berlin Atonal, but Akousma emphasizes multichannel diffusions, encouraging experimentation with different modes of presenting live music. “The Falling Man” was produced at Paris’s GRM studios, and while elements of that trac ..read more

Note to recording artists: when you include a staffer’s name in the title of your release, someone is bound to notice and smile.  con richard (por la adversidad a las estrellas may have been written for another Richard, but I’d like to think that all Richards are in solidarity throughout the world.  Our name was once one of the most popular on the planet, but now we are a dying breed.  According to one site no Richards have been born in the U.S. in the past three years, compared to 58,862 in 1946.  But Gil Sansón remembers his NYC friend Richard Garet from th ..read more

Pilgrims to the Kingdom of Heaven is an album about war and peace, past and present, fear and trust.  It is an album about faith, but it is also an act of faith.  The invasion of Ukraine has reopened young wounds and revived old anxieties in the Czech Republic, itself no stranger to russian aggression.  War and the specter of war loom large in Ká’s soundscape, primarily a set of field recordings, occasionally bordering on radio-play.  Harry Truman announces the surrender of Japan; the thread extends to today’s headlines. Where might one find peace in such a climate? &n ..read more

The anthropocene epoch has become a rich if grim source of inspiration for legions of artists. Defined as the period in which human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet, the epoch began some say in the 1950s, around the time that radioactive fallout was beginning to be detected around the planet, far from the sites where nuclear bombs were being tested. A terrifying hallmark of the anthropocene is that it stands to be the age in which much of the human race perishes, owing to our heedless reliance on fossil fuels and concomitant embrace of an exploitive consumerist syst ..read more

Oceans, lakes and streams get all the glory, but Action Pyramid & Jack Greenhalgh are interested in ponds: specifically, the ways in which ponds offer their own take on the dawn and dusk chorus.  In Mardle: Daily Rhythms of a Pond, hydrophones capture sounds that are normally unheard, while amplifications expose surprisingly conversational plant life.  The disc comes with liner notes and a poster, which delve deeper into the subject of acoustic freshwater ecology. The album jumps right in, beginning on a loud note before recessing, like the shock of cold water on b ..read more

Back in 2020, we believed Kofū to be the end of a trilogy when it was instead the beginning of a new one.  Kofū III concludes Meitei‘s mighty opus, and switches from the electronic realm to the field of experimental ambience, a metaphor for the journey that the artist, and perhaps the nation has made. The album may begin with “Dawn” and end with “Hiroshima,” but it’s not dour.  Meitei is referring to today‘s Hiroshima, thriving in a manner that few would have thought possible, despite its ghosts.  The artist makes his home in “the tranquil rural town of Onomichi.” &n ..read more

In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh writes of “colors, which are heightened by being juxtaposed,” yet “will destroy one another by being mixed.” When mixed, such colors produce a sad gray, but in the right proportions can produce what he calls a broken tone. And as we know—to paraphrase a bit—broken tones can sing a little. While listening to Soft Octaves, I encountered the above quote in Rainer Hanshe’s Closing Melodies, which juxtaposes letters from Van Gogh and Nietzsche, and this discussion of color theory seemed especially apt to describe not only the relationship between t ..read more

The immediate association is with the spaghetti western scores of Ennio Morricone, but younger listeners may connect Desolation and Radiation with the music from Red Dead Redemption.  It’s no surprise that DELREI (Alessandro Mercanzin) is from Italy, as his music is soaked in cinematic tradition; the liner notes declare that the artist “avoids and embraces the clichés” of the music he loves.  This is a good thing, as it allows an access point for fans of the mini-genre without being mired in the past. “Solitario” begins with a shimmer, then proceeds to patient percussi ..read more