Honest, in-depth album reviews by KLOF Mag – championing and curating intelligent, uncompromising voices in contemporary and experimental music since 2004.
Albums
by Bob Fish
Hannah Frances’s Nested in Tangles is a brave and demanding listen. The album’s complex layers reflect the messy, contrary nature of existence, shifting between chaotic brass, gentle folk, and soft jazz. Frances confronts difficult truths about family, loss, and self-appraisal, creating a piece of music that is challenging, unpredictable, and ultimately rewarding in its unflinching honesty and musical ambition.
Swiss-Portuguese guitarist Tiago Almeida releases “Rivages,” an artistic exploration of Portuguese fado reimagined for the classical guitar. The album is a masterful blend of tradition and innovation, drawing on influences from jazz, classical, and even electronic music. Exploring profound themes of migration and identity, “Rivages” promises to be a significant and unique addition to the contemporary classical guitar repertoire.
In his latest release, Archipelago of Shadows, Belgian composer Lieven Martens presents a work of profound gravity. The album, a five-track suite of field recordings and electronics, is directly shaped by his experience as a humanitarian aid worker in eastern Congo, where he interviewed survivors of sexual violence—a practice deliberately used as a weapon of war to shatter communities.
by Thomas Blake
Cerys Hafana’s relationship to the Welsh language is defined by deep-rooted knowledge and appreciation of Welsh folklore, and it’s this immersive attitude to culture, music, language and myth that gives her new album, Angel, its eerie, swooning, dreamlike quality.
Melvin Gibbs’s new album, Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2, drops October 14, 2025, via Hausu Mountain. This avant-jazz odyssey channels the spirit of Miles Davis’s ’70s fusion, blending recordings across two decades with collaborators like Greg Fox and the late Pete Cosey. Gibbs’s ‘amalgam of ideas transcend genre and categorization.’
by Thomas Blake
On The Dwarfs Of East Agouza’s “Sasquatch Landslide”, there are instrumental wails and squalls, bits of melody careen into the middle distance, an electronic soup bubbles away, and a thick buzz underpins everything. While it sounds like it could be messy, it’s not; it’s more like the semi-organised bustle of a busy souk, with its tension between chaos and order, where every sound has its meaning and its place.
by Mike Davies
Centred on themes of dreams and the supernatural, with their vintage guitars accompanied by just Jon Thorne on double bass, Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage’s fifth album, The Strangers’ Share, sees a return to the single microphone intimacy of their debut. A captivating reminder of how, especially in the hands of this duo, less can so often be more. The album is indeed a shared pleasure.
By no means overshadowing Blue Lake’s previous album, Weft, The Animal instead provides further proof of Jason Dungan’s ambition and ability as a musician and now bandleader. A record celebrating human collaboration and the beauty of life and nature, The Animal sees Blue Lake push its sound into new realms, once again surprising and delighting—a wonderful, uplifting instrumental album.
Bergamo-based guitarist Buck Curran’s Far Driven Sun is an intensely musical, layered set celebrating his reunion with a 1990 Stefan Sobell ‘Butterfly’ acoustic guitar. From the intimate “Vignettes” to the subtly dynamic “Bells” and the buoyant “Unicorn Song,” it showcases Buck’s exquisite touch as a player and recording artist. It’s a highly accomplished album, made with love and performed with the utmost skill and intricate musicianship.
Mason Lindahl’s meticulous dual-release presents a captivating study of ambient texture and place. Recorded in California (Joshua) and Iceland (Same Day Walking), the albums’ distinct sonic palettes—one “woolier and warmer,” the other starker—are inseparable from their locales. Lindahl’s singular nylon string guitar style, with its complex picking and judicious synth/organ touches, finds both intimacy and an otherworldly feel in an album of outstanding guitar music.