For the "avant-doom graveyard metal" band, there is no hierarchy between the noisier improvisations and the more conventional - albeit loose - doom songs.

NZO's music is a joyous examination of fragmentation and continuity. Part of the joy and thrill of her album Come Alive is witnessing her to make continuous lines made up from differing, cut up sounds. She's teasingly asking you: how much fragmentation are you willing to tolerate?

The songs on Smerz's Big city life (on @eschoescho.bsky.social) all feel slightly unfinished, as if the diversions of the "big city life" made it impossible for the duo to concentrate enough to properly finish a song. This inability is embedded in the very structure of the music.

Rules are the problem. Either because they exist at all, stifling expression; or because they are hidden, not made explicit. caroline expands the song's expressive potential by working with these two approaches at the same time.

songsnotsongs.substack.com/p/negotiatin...

La Baracande don't simply interpret songs from the 19th Century, they reconstruct the world that served as the home for these songs.

songsnotsongs.substack.com/p/the-indivi...

Bridget Hayden's folk album proposes a concept of the song as the expression of individuality within the constraints of tradition, embodied as an unwavering, gentle, yet mournful drone.

songsnotsongs.substack.com/p/the-drone-...

Nazar's Demilitarize (Hyperdub) differs from the usual "deconstructed songs" approach. Instead of traditional forms erupting, we witness songs in the unfinished process of taking shape.

open.substack.com/pub/songsnot...

Jules Reidy's Ghost Spirit on @thrilljockey.bsky.social is "poppier" than before, yet the music is swirling, pulsating, moving in many different directions. But the chaos has an emotional center: the album is an allegory of deep personal transformation.

songsnotsongs.substack.com/p/the-song-a...

Daniel Blumberg's striking GUT (2023) is a record that is not just about the body, it gives voice to Body. Not only through the bodily noises, but - more subtly and more radically - through the interplay of the song form and the strange drumming.

I started a Substack called Songs Not Songs. It's about music questioning, probing, expanding the boundaries of the song form, seeking something that cannot be expressed in the confines of a song, or trying to expand its expressive potential.

songsnotsongs.substack.com

Kedvenc 2024-es zenéim, 43+1 szám bő 3 órában

recorder.blog.hu/2025/01/09/r...