The Institute for Contemporary Arts, London 30 January 2008
Here is my ATP festival experience. I always seem to miss the bands that I wind up liking the most. So, having missed Fuck Buttons at The Nightmare Before Christmas I wasn’t going to miss them again when they came to Ithe CA, and they more than lived up to my expectations.
First on was fellow ATP label mate Alexander Tucker, who built up a goodly wall of avant-folk loops. Tucker is always worth seeing and didn’t disappoint on this occasion. Playing a solo set, he built up his loops using a cello, acoustic guitar, mandolin, and voice. He lulled the audience
Continue reading Fuck Buttons/Alexander Tucker (live) [...]
Before Sunn O))) there was Burning Witch, formed in the mid ’90s by Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, although none of their recordings actually features Anderson who had started Goatsnake by that time. Crippled Lucifer is a reissue of their 1996 Towers… and 1997 Rift.Canyon.Dreams releases – two discs of fabulous doom. This release of Crippled Lucifer is expanded from the 1998 Southern Lord edition (subtitled Seven Psalms For Our Lord Of Light), which only featured seven tracks. It now has ten and an enormously thick booklet filled with gorgeous artwork … but don’t expect a novel charting the brief history of Burning Witch.
Listening to Burning Witch I can hear where Sunn0))) come from, but they aren’t
Blind Eye Sees All is a true classic of the live music video genre, and now receives a long-awaited DVD release via those thoroughly hardworking people at Music Video Distribution. So why is it essential? Apart from featuring the world’s most wigged-out, demented and occasionally evilly silly band back in the days when they were busy redefining Psychedelic music from the bottom up, the film combines some of the best live footage of a gig around with some lysrgically weird interviews pretty much guaranteed to leave the viewer in head-scratching mode for years while simultaneously offending any passing parental figures along the way.