Competition is the music making moniker of Craig Pollard. Based in Newcastle (UK), Competition makes experimental pop music that plays with sparseness and vulnerability, pitched down samples and orchestral programming, crafting songs that build hooks from within their limited materials. Recent releases on London’s glint music have seen a tentative return to the electric guitar – having (admittedly) felt for years that playing guitar was deeply embarrassing, this renewed interest accepts the way the world keeps spinning and, as ever, time renders all things eternally untethered. New album ‘The Bored Fire’ is out April 2.
Poole’s new album Ben Beinn follows 2024’s In a River Shadow, further exploring an electronic folkway rooted in abstraction. While the previous record moves with flowing water and submerged song, Ben Beinn climbs into elemental instability through passing storms, coded skies, and sodden ground. Ben Beinn is located in the land, shaped by field recordings of the West of Scotland. Rather than reflecting the place, these recordings press against it, layering the sonic materiality of landscape with synthesis and song. Shaped by the slow pressures of land and sky, Ben Beinn continues Poole’s excavation of environmental and folk material through contemporary methods.
Unfortunately Euro Herc have abandoned their UK tour .
Fortunately we have Free Magic Show instead!!!
Free Magic Show is a duo of Joe Coghill and Michał Fundowicz formed when they shared a flat cluttered with music gear and disintegrating artworks. Jamming together in their Edinburgh DIY Peace Hammer Studio became a practice for the years to come. Every session of improvised magic with sound effects is different, the project mutates in time, which can be tracked on the releases on such labels as Czaszka (Rec.), Steep Gloss, Falt, tanzprocesz. Their polymorphous sound mixes analogue techniques with digital; cassette players and junk objects meeting with computer manipulation on their magicians’ table.
