Alex Raworth

Mammal Hands / The Sound Basement / Spring — Issue 01
Photography: Tom Barrett
In 2014, Mammal Hands appeared in the industry with their debut album, ‘Animalia’. An LP that was recognised by the minuscule jazz community for its blending of melancholic and night-time tones with soft, almost electronic sounds, two resonances that have been revolving around each other since the birth of the common synthesizer by Harald Bode in 1959. However, there were no signs of electronics in ‘Animalia’. Inst...

Qujaku, the Hamamatsu based Japanese psychedelic group – previously known as The Piqnic, have announced that they are to release a self-titled LP via So I Buried Records. ‘Qajaku’, their first album release since 2015’s ‘ZyouK’, have since spent the three years releasing three EP’s (‘KEIREN’, ‘H’ and ‘S’), whilst touring heavily throughout the UK and Europe, performing at various major European festivals including Fat Out Fest, Focus Wales and Raw Power. Through sounds that reverberate Japane...

Caravela / The Sound Basement / Spring — Issue 01
“We started Caravela intending to shine a light on the communal and traditional music from Lusophone countries, drawing from their eclectic characteristics. The music from Portuguese countries is very diverse, lyrically complex, melodically rich and rhythmically intricate and it carries social and emotional elements from a long story of travelling, miscegenation and oppression.
Focusing on the music of Brazil and Cape Vert, we feel sorry to se...

“There aren’t any other bands like us” — Interview with Hibushibire
Alex Raworth sits down for a conversation with Japan’s Hibushibire about their new LP, Deep Purple and LSD after their recent show in Salford.
The Eagle Inn pub is situated in what is possibly the most Salford of Salford places — the industrial estate. It is in the middle of what is seemingly an urban-nowhere. Its owners are ‘straightedge’, or so I have heard. Its venue is quite possibly the smallest in Manchester. And it is,...

Baydog / The Sound Basement / Spring / Issue 01
Gone are the days when stereotypically Jazz would only appear as a love for those who are past the age of fifty or Howard Moon, who should now be somewhere in his late forties. As this magazine and its future issues should prove, this is not just limited to Mathew Halsall’s Gondwana Records, nor should it be limited to Giles Peterson’s Brownswood, despite them both being mentioned frequently throughout these thirty-six pages. Instead, the limit ...

Wata Igarashi / The Sound Basement / Spring / Issue 01
Techno, in this writers opinion, was made to be dark and sadistic, and if that is what one truly wants to find within their music then look no further than Wata Igarashi. His latest release, ‘Niskala’, which came out on February 1st via the popular Berlin electronic label, Midgar Records, features long, ambient and uncluttered acid trips which, not only entice and nipple twizzle the listener out of a migraine, but displays the talent and ...

Hiroshi Sato / The Sound Basement / Spring / Issue 01
The year is 2018. Ed Miliband, having fought off David Cameron in the 2015 general election — armed with nothing but a sock, a BT Landline Telephone and two rather odd-looking pieces of macaroni, in front of an audience of around fifty thousand middle-aged skinheads, accompanied by their archives of Heat magazines, has chosen to retire, aged twelve.
In this alternative universe, things are very different. Families are no longer broken by v...

Hany Mehanna / The Sound Basement / Spring / Issue 01
A long night researching the name Hany Mehanna on Google will result in failure, which looks like this: various Social-Media responses for the above name; a brief article by Ahram Online that refers to Mehanna’s imprisonment for refusing to pay a bank back, which escalated to fraud; they also misspelt his name in the process. Also, an unlimited number of questionable online stores that wish to sell as many copies of his 1973 release, but n...

Laraaji / The Sound Basement / Spring / Issue 01
Legend has it that the electronica-ambient legend, Brian Eno — in his self-interested and narcissistic state, was strolling through Washington Square Park, New York, in the late seventies when he found Edward Larry Gordon playing a series of therapeutic and meditation styled harmonies on a zither, so absorbed within his own music that his eyes were closed as if in a trance. Eno then left a note in Gordon’s instrument case, inviting him to his s...

The Lafayette Afro Rock Band / The Sound Basement / Spring / Issue 01
In essence, nearly everyone in the western hemisphere has heard at least five seconds of The Lafayette Afro Rock Band’s (once upon a time known as ICE) work, though most of those said people wouldn’t know that themselves. Given the sheer popularity of Hip-Hops Public Enemy’s track, ‘Show ’Em Watcha Got’, as well as Gorillaz’s hugely popular ‘Dirty Harry’, the proof is pretty much there, as those two songs, like many others,...

Arthur Verocai / The Sound Basement / Spring / Issue 01
In 1972, Brazil was going through its eighth year of the infamous, but unfamiliar to the common world, Placa Militar — Military Board in English. There was no violent transition to power when Castelo Branco took to the nations Presidential Office, instead, he found himself riding waves of support from those who considered themselves nationalist and those that had been misled from the Brazilian TV network, Rede Globo; which still to this ...

A brief subjective analysis on how Russian electronica, inspired by western musical influences, pose a threat to the totalitarian ideology of the Kremlin and the Russian administration.

Historically, Brazil’s slave plantations were mostly located along the northern seaboard, containing substantial amounts of the country’s main trade exports: coffee, sugar and the soybean. For the already tiny population of colonial Brazil’s overseers (the Portuguese) to fully exploit these agricultural sources, they’d need to draft in swathes of cheap manual labour. Like many newfound colonial states, Brazil imported slaves from west African ports in the area that is now modern-day Angola, a...

For many writers in top publications, not many enjoy jotting down their ‘Top Ten Best Albums’ of the year. The listicles may be entertaining to the readers, worthy of the vote, but in truth they are not what the journalist perceives as being, well, ‘Gold’.
Editors will always be there to fuck around, to refine the list to the demographic and the publications readership. That’s why, ashamedly, some of the more mainstream media publications are probably going to have both Liam and Noel Gallaghe...