On September 21, UK shoegazer The Virgance will be releasing “Paradigm 3”, his third LP in a little over 18 months, on the El Vals del Conejo label. The Virgance is Nathan Smith, formerly guitarist with nineties UK indie band Ripley, which saw BBC Radio 1 and MTV Europe airplay, and co-producer of noughties electronica outfit Loveless. Smith's first solo LP as The Virgance was 'Lost Continent', which was released in February 2014, followed by the 'Hiko Shrine' LP in January 2015. Both received critical acclaim in the shoegaze community and blogosphere.

Drowned In Sound recently featured this second album in their shoegaze highlights of 2015, alongside Swervedriver, writing "Hiko Shrine is one of the most beautifully constructed albums to grace the stereo this year, combining elements of ambient post-rock with errant, effects-laden melodies". The Virgance also got his first airplay on BBC Radio 6 Music a few weeks ago courtesy of The Tom Robinson Show and now Adequacy.net is premiering the first single from this LP 'Down the River'.

'Paradigm 3" builds on the momentum gained from these first two releases, serving up a fresh cerebral road trip for shoegaze and post-rock fans to absorb. Smith demonstrates the strength of the album format as an art form and reminds us of the rewards of patient listening in this modern, digital age of instant gratification and short attention spans. This is perhaps the most balanced Virgance release so far, embracing the more emotional aspects of shoegaze while retaining some experimental rock attributes, as well as the aesthetics of both beautiful noise and ambient music.

As with his two previous albums, Smith’s distinctive, swirling guitar sound is at the forefront, in harmony, on all but one of these eight tracks, with synthesized, ethereal female vocal sounds and some of his most advanced drum work to date. Shauna McLarnon of celebrated dreampop duo Ummagma contributes some of these vocals, which meld into the texture of the first single 'Down The River'. There are radio edits for three of these tracks, two of which were created by Ummagma.

Colchester-born Smith currently resides in rural Suffolk, where he crafted all three Virgance albums. "Paradigm 3" will be available through Bandcamp, as well as iTunes and streaming through Spotify, Rdio, etc.

www.facebook.com/thevirgance?fref=ts

Brother & Bones are five men that write songs with the artistry of Folk troubadours, the energy of punks and the self-belief of stadium headliners. Hailing from Cornwall, their acoustic-led, alternative rock sound tips its hat to the likes of Pearl Jam and John Martyn.

Not only have the band been followed across UK and Europe on their own headline shows, they have also opened for BRIT Award winners Ben Howard + Bastille.

The autumn season looks set to be big for the powerhouse rock band with an exciting schedule of live dates confirmed and release of their debut album september. Recorded at the prestigious East West Studios in Los Angeles, California, the debut album is an eclectic sound clash of tribal drumming and crushing guitars, which comes highly anticipated by their multitude of loyal fans.

On 14th October the band is coming to Brussels at the Botanique.

Watch below the new single.

Bérangère Maximin makes spacious colorful music. A sonic sculptress of exception, she started out in an academic environment with an electroacoustic training, and has gradually incorporated the contribution of post-punk, dub and sound art experiments to develop a hyper-personal style, producing sensual, hypnotic, sultry pieces with immediate impact. BM moved from her native Reunion Island to France when she was fifteen, and studied with the musique concrète composer Denis Dufour (a member of the famous GRM and a pupil of Pierre Schaeffer). Her first album came out on John Zorn’s label Tzadik.

Bérangère naturally drew inspiration from composers such as François Bayle, Luc Ferrari, Eliane Radigue and has also listened to a lot of early electronica and glitch music. She went on to develop her own approach, both to studio recording and to live performance, taking in the experiences gathered in the course of her collaborations with the likes of Fennesz, Rhys Chatham, Richard Pinhas and Fred Frith (with whom she played several duet concerts).

Dangerous Orbits is Bérangère Maximin’s fourth album, and her first for Crammed Discs’ Made To Measure series.

Bérangère Maximin’s music engages the listener in considerations of space and textures. Her new album, Dangerous Orbits takes us in a constant sway between lightness and drama. Curving filigree voices, odd melodies, powerful sub-bass, spacious drones, oceanic vibrations and orchestral bursts flow with evident motricity into a world which is together multidimensional, effusive and raw.

A master manipulator of space and distance… that sounds like Maximin sucking the listener’s brain up through a straw. - Rock-A-Rolla.

Raised on the native land of her mother, a French overseas territory in the Indian Ocean with an active volcano surrounded by wild beaches, Bérangère Maximin moved from Reunion Island to the Metropolis when she was just fifteen. From that time, she’s kept a very special relationship with her environment which shows in prismatic plating of sounds she interperses with melodic rashes, her playing with laptops and midi controllers delivering what she likes to call her digital chimeras.

The electroacoustic composer has produced a very personal repertoire marked by encounters that have inspired her writing in various degrees. She studied under the musique concrète composer Denis Dufour and then came to the attention of John Zorn who released Tant Que Les Heures Passent on his label (2008). In the meantime she crossed paths with the Ukrainian artist Anton Yakutovych who contributed with conceiving her album sleeves and an evolutive series of portraits until his death last year. Taking inspiration from the New York improv scene and her European tour in solo and in duo with the likes of Fred Frith, Fennesz or Rhys Chatham, her work then developed towards live practice which then led her to compose No One Is An Island, the second and only collaborative album so far, a very different output to her debut and the confirmation of the respect Bérangère had started to get from established artists. 

Bérangère Maximin’s personality gives her a foundation for taking laptop music somewhere different, a meticulous producer with great resource and tenacity. The listener could get lost in minimalist backdrop and prominent bass, which I find really close to the spirit of the likes of King Tubby - The Quietus.

The minimal series Infinitesimal (2013) describes a slow transformation, a deep introspection far removed from the convention of the genre. She seems to be feeding her feelings directly into morphological sounds, suffocating bed of sighs, dub effects, metallic scrapings, very special imaginary areas where only matters the physicality of the moment. 

Slowly, Infinitesimal establishes internal logic, matching the way things make sense in your head even if you can’t explain them. - Pitchfork.

Working on this new project seemed to have opened a door, a new trajectory leading to even more unfamiliar and wider spaces. She carried on recording straight away, which was fueled by some inner necessity, ending with five pieces that keep this particular warm and organic feel with an obvious sense of detail and maturity, a place to really get lost in. 

No wonder Dangerous Orbits has found a home into Crammed Discs’ Made To Measure series among great hard to categorized characters as Jozef Van Wissem, Steven Brown, John Lurie, Arto Lindsay, Harold Budd, Brion Gysin, Aksak Maboul or Hector Zazou. 

Album Release 25 september, Crammed/[PIAS].

Release concert Botanique Bxl : 10 november.

In her new album Maïa Vidal offers a personal take on an eternal subject matter: the love story, with all its fluctuations and shifts, its ebb and flow: falling in lov e, being in love, falling out of love. Overflowing with her trademark, soaring melodies, this is the young American singer/songwriter/musician’s most accomplished album to date, an electronic pop opus which was brilliantly produced by Maïa herself, co-produced by Giuliano Cobelli, and mixed by Van Rivers (Glasser, Fever Ray, Matthew Dear).

Maïa played most of the instruments (keyboards, autoharp, violin, guitar, beat programming), with contributions by Giuliano Cobelli (trumpet, per cussion, beats). All these ingredients, alongside Maïa’s moving, humourous and distinctive lyrics, contribute to making You’re The Waves a unique, sensual and fresh album.

* about MAÏA VIDAL

Her debut album God Is My Bike came out in Europe in November 2011. It was nominated for the IMPALA Awards (the pan-European, Indie Album of the Year award), alongside albums by Sigur Ros, Little Dragon and Adele.

After successfully translating her verbal imagery into visuals in her self-directed videos for tracks such as Poison and Alphabet of my Phobias, Maïa collaborated with director Joana Colomar to create a stunning video for Follow Me, loosely based on a Brothers Grimm tale. The video was nominated for Best Pop Video at the UK Music Video Awards (alongside videos by Lana del Rey, Rihanna and Justice). The video and the fan audio uploads of the song Follow Me have now garnered over 1.5 million views on YouTube.

Multi-platinum selling, Grammy Award-winning recording artist Dave Gahan, along with musical partner Soulsavers, will release a new album October 23rd. Entitled ‘Angels & Ghosts’, this is the collaborators’ second album, following their critically-acclaimed 2012 release ‘The Light the Dead See’. The album will be released in digital, as well as physical CD and vinyl formats, worldwide on October 23rd through Columbia Records. The “utterly riveting” album boasts nine original tracks, all written by Dave Gahan & Soulsavers.

An evolution from their first album, ‘Angels & Ghosts’ proves to be a markedly stronger and more hard-hitting body of work. Listeners can expect to be led through an aural mix of dark, brooding sounds, elements inspired by gospel and blues, and the stark beauty that has become a signature of Dave and Soulsavers’ works. Dave Gahan’s emotionally powerful voice has never sounded better, and drives the album forward over a landscape of meticulously crafted instrumentation.

A transatlantic collaboration, the writing process started with Dave Gahan and Soulsavers’ Rich Machin exchanging demos and ideas from their respective studios in lower Manhattan and rural England. They then recorded the album with additional musicians in studios around the world, including classic locations such as Sunset Sound in Los Angeles and Electric Lady in New York. The end result is a vibrant, live-sounding album, and proof of the “instant and obvious fit” Machin felt writing with Gahan.

To fully showcase the powerful, live nature of the album, Dave Gahan & Soulsavers will bring the project to life in a series of six special shows in iconic, intimate venues across the US and Europe. Starting October 19th at the first show in Los Angeles, Dave Gahan & Soulsavers will perform as a ten-piece band, with shows in New York, London, Berlin, Paris and Milan to follow. Tickets for all shows will go on sale September 18th and select shows will be broadcast and streamed for fans worldwide. Full dates and venues are listed below.

 Dave Gahan & Soulsavers performance dates:

October 26th London, UK Shepherds Bush Empire

October 30th Berlin, DE Tempodrom

November 2nd Paris, FR La Cigale

November 4th Milan, IT Fabrique