Julianna Barwick – The Magic Place

This is one of the strangest albums I’ve heard in a long time. It’s instrumental music constructed mainly from Julianna Barwick’s vocals which she’s looped and distorted into a wash of ambient sound. There are snippets of some instruments such as piano and organ but they merely flesh out the vocal atmospherics. It probably sounds terrible but it is on fact very listenable particularly after you get your head around the unusual sound. I was expecting a regular gentle folky album and when I first played it I was about eight minutes and three songs in wondering when the intro to the first song was going to end. It’s probably not an album that you’d stick on and listen to very regularly but it suits a certain mood and shouldn’t be overlooked. If you ever feel the need to calm an upset child then this is the perfect music for you…6/10

MAP – Music Alliance Pact

This isn’t an album or a band but rather a music blog that’s worth checking out. It’s not technically a blog but more a collection of thirty five blogs from around the world that come together once a month to recommend one unknown artist from their country. So if you have an inkling to listen to indie music from Indonesia or Breakbeat from Brazil then this will suit you down to the ground. The music can be a little hit and miss, a lot of it isn’t great but every now and again you’ll come across a gem, however it’s always interesting particularly if you just want to listen to something a bit different. All of the tracks featured on the blog every month are available as a free legal download as a single zip file. You should be able to find the blog if you search for Music Alliance Pact but you can also find it at sedesplease.com and the guardian’s website.

Gil Scott-Heron – I’m New Here

Gil Scott-Heron was a proto-rap pioneer of the early 1970s, a beat poet with a penchant for bongo drums and weed. He was an artist with more influence than record sales and even with that his influence wasn’t that great (his only song that you may recognise is The Revolution Will Not Be Televised). I’m New Here was Scott-Heron’s come back album of sorts after years in the musical wilderness surviving drug problems and imprisonment. It finds him reflecting on his early life, his childhood in Tennessee and his grandmother who raised him. The sound of the album reminded me of the Rick Rubin produced final albums of Johnny Cash albeit with a more electro feel. It also shares those albums' poignancy considering Scott-Heron passed away last year. The standout tracks are Me And The Devil on which he sounds like a futuristic black Tom Waits and New York Is Killing Me with its simple hand clapped beat…9/10