The Digest for October 2026: New Music/Halloween Playlist/Archives
October 8, 2026
The Monthly Digest includes a clutch of accumulated new music reviews, this year’s Halloween Playlist selection, a piece from the Archives and jukebox selection of anniversary celebrating LPS.
Séismes ‘SeùlSeùl’
(Carton) 30th October 2026
Without upsetting anyone’s preferred pronouns, I’m assuming that its ok to state this is an all-female sextet working within – but very loosely – the free jazz and fourth world fields of experimentation and both magical and mysterious abstractions. And it shouldn’t be the case in 2026, but this is extremely rare.
Felt via healing balms of the near new age and exotic, and by passages of intensity, the Séismes (translates as “earthquakes”) lineup of Mélanie Loisel (on double bass), Tatiana Paris (guitar), Léa Ciechelski (saxophone, flute), Aline Bissey (also on flute), Yurie Hu (keyboard, viola) and Marine Flèche (drums) also all contribute vocals and electronic effects to an improvised recorded debut album that combines both European and Korean influences and cultural sources.
Encouraging the geographic, scenery and projections of dramatic introspection and bathos, the “alone” aspects of the SeùlSeùl album title describe both standing amongst the exotic foliage and moving in unison with the rhythms of nature: at peace and yet also animated and fidgety. The troupe’s scope of influences and improvised exploration draws (to these ears anyway) upon Jon Hassell, Roberto Musci, Nicole Mitchell, Laraaji, Alice Coltrane and Walter Smetek, but delves even further and broadly to conjure up some surprises along the way. In practice this means nature’s rustles, the air and breeze act as a backdrop to the group’s atonal wind and brass instrument huffs, chuffs, hinges, dreamy drifts and articulations; to the scratchy, textural, scrapes and chinks of the tin and metal percussion; and the flexed but also sensitive combination of scuttled stick rolling and more rhythmic drums. And then you have the electronic aspects – that’s various oscillations, generator like Fortean crackles and plastique resonance – and the voices, which can be either in a singing fashion or delivered through the duet of flutes and the saxophone – sometimes sounding very vocally cooed and at others like some odd cuckoos.
There’s much to pick out from this imaginative and stirring assemblage performance; the familiar recall of Max Andrejewski’s Hutte & Guests take on Robert Wyatt on the Nordic-sounded and deliciously blurry fresh look at the world ‘Glasses’, and the near Krautrock momentum built up on the plastic pipped and Metheny guitar harmonics tweeting, percussive shaking and intense climatic ‘Du Jaune’ (“yellow”). There’s a John Zorn dimension to the title-track, and a mix of Franco-Hawaii, the magically rural, and the Balkans on the vocoder-effected vocalised ‘Pasteque’ – the parting vocals sound very folksy, almost Celtic. And you could almost suggest a touch of Staraya Derevnya on the poetically abstract ‘Cheveux au Vent’ (“hair blowing in the wind”).
All in all, an impressive debut of the ecological vibed, the organic fused with the electronic pulses and generators of modernity and dreamy lofty aspirations of untethered free sonic, atonal and rhythmical experimentation. Deerhoof meets Tortoise and Sam Rivers in a hinterland balanced somewhere on the astral panes between France and South Korea. In other words: this is for those who wish to immerse themselves in new soundscapes and visions.