Void Rot – Descending Pillars (2020)

Entering the already crowded field of doom metal, Void Rot take a minimalist version of the glacial Skepticism or Thergothon approach and add a little more death metal and some of the post-rock open chord picking that gives atmosphere, creating a grating monolith of slowly moving sound which varies motifs as a form of texture.

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Dynatron – Aeternus (2015)

Synthwave attempts to recreate a Harold Faltermeyer or Jan Hammer soundtrack with additions from 1980s synthpop and a “cosmic spirit” borrowed from 1970s New Age music and experimental ambient like Tangerine Dream, working simple pop songs into the kind of quasi-symphonic layered and thematic environment of a movie soundtrack.

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Julian Bream (1933-2020)

We lost a giant among guitar players last Friday when Julian Bream passed on to the Other Side, where hopefully he is shredding still:

Bream was born in Battersea in 1933, the son of a father who played piano and jazz guitar – a self-built electric version – and taught Julian the rudiments of each instrument. Bream’s talent earned him a scholarship at the Royal College of Music, where he studied piano and cello. But he was largely self-taught on his primary instrument, the guitar. He played his first public guitar recital in Cheltenham in 1947, aged 13.

That year his father chanced upon a sailor walking through London carrying a lute and asked what it was. The sailor sold it to him and Bream began learning it, eventually helping to revive wider interest in the instrument and Elizabethan music.

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