Three weeks ago I went to see David Thomas Broughton play at the Basement in London’s City Arts and Music Project (CAMP). A bit of a delayed review, you might think… well, yes, it is, and that’s because it’s taken me this long to work out what I thought of the gig. Here goes…
On record, I like his music. It’s beautiful, it has a wonderfully stark, malevolent ambiance, and it is kept from being standard, “one man and his guitar” fare by the subtle employment of loop-pedal-layering and an un-precious …

There is a curious new (to me at least) music website called thesixtyone.com, which describes itself as ‘a music adventure’. It’s worth checking out as an interesting way of discovering new music. And it features lots and lots of unsigned artists, which can only be good! I spent about half an hour trawling through it yesterday and after listening to some truly awful stuff – which is all part of the adventure, I suppose – came across Happiest Lion, the Boston-based project of an enormously talented young fellow called Caleb …

Arch M is from London. He crafts spluttering, beautiful, barely-there songs from urgent guitar melodies and skittish, overdriven bass lines. You can find the seven track E.P. The Mountain Tan Commercials, free to download, by clicking here. It only lasts nine minutes long, but the brevity somehow adds to it all. Not included on that record is the excellent ’21st Union’, which can be heard at www.myspace.com/archm.
The Young Equestrians, who make rather lengthier songs, are from New York. They use, according to their myspace page, “ keyboards, electronics, accordion, guitar, cello, …

On Friday night I saw Sam Amidon and Valgeir Sigurðsson at St. Barnabas’ Church in Soho; unobtrusively nestled into the dirty back-streets – from one angle it is disguised as a town house – it provided a beautiful and interesting setting for the music.
 
Sam Amidon was the big draw for me, and he rendered beautifully his reworked traditional American folk songs. He was accompanied by four other musicians, including Valgeir on bass, the others sharing duties on bassoon, cello, violin, accordion and banjo. They expertly played the sensitive arrangements written …

The Internet is a wonderful thing, particularly it seems, for finding new classical music. Until recently I hadn’t realised how much contemporary composers had embraced t’interweb, assuming unfairly that their chosen musical discipline indicated a lack of technological aptitude… How wrong I was! Myspace is veritably alive with classical music, a great many young composers posting interesting, unusual and often compelling examples of their work. One such is Caleb Burhans. Have a listen to ‘the things left unsaid’, an extremely rousing piece for several cellos, and then click on his …

BEF is a new project featuring Yourcodenameis:milo guitarist Justin Lockey and Aid Burrows, the singer/guitarist from My Architects. Their first record, ‘Chapter One: A Long Way Home’, is released digitally via the relatively new label Erased Tapes on the 26th of November. I have always been a massive fan of the misunderstood and frankly underrated YCNI:M, but the music offered here is rather different from that band’s dense and (at times) over-complicated music.
On their debut BEF layer beautifully harmonised …