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Fruits de Mer
 Krautrock is a brilliantly meaningless term, full of meaning. Head Music attempts to show why. There’s motorik music (there’s some on here) which is often what people mean when they say krautrock (they mean it sounds like Neu! or the way Can’s drums flip over one another) and there’s the dense wiggy kosmische space music (which means it sounds like Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream). But a lot of krautrock is also a lot like heavy metal (in the sense that, say, Hawkwind, are heavy metal, with the emphasis on heavy rather than metal). You’ll hear the phrase ‘krautrock’ all over the place and it’ll mean nothing much. This compilation, this fantastic conceit, attempts to skew things further.
Most of these bands I’ve never heard
Continue reading Various Artists – Head Music [...]
Rune Grammofon
 Volcano The Bear have long done their best to confound the simplicities of classification; they’re not simple to sum up as an experimental or avant-garde project (whatever that might mean exactly), and on Golden Rhythm/Ink Music the range of emotions and auditory adventures they offer up is one which can easily – glibly even – be described as such, but which is also a case study in what it truly means to be different musically.
The constant thread of emergent cacophony of omnidirectional horns and fluttery noise recalls the heady nihilistic non-melodic urge to clatter and parp of Faust; another particular reference which is as unavoidable is This Heat, whose circling condensation of the post-punk DIY ethos with prog’s exploratory musicianship finds
Continue reading Volcano The Bear – Golden Rhythm/Ink Music [...]
Riot Season
 Once upon a time, some enterprising music writer came up with (or popularised it at least) the term “arsequake” to describe the sort of heavyweight sludgy rock which occasionally crawled out of Camden to force itself onto unsuspecting grunge audiences in the Nineties; usually talking about the sort of sounds which stepped very close to the definition of music, then trampled on it, bit off its head and relieved itself at great length over the very notions of “listenability” and “form.”
Shit And Shine make arsequake which fits that term like a glove. The charmingly-titled “Dinner With My Girlfriend” pulls its intestines out the difficult way using a gauntlet made of rusty scrap steel discarded by Faust from the floor of
Continue reading Shit And Shine – Jream Baby Jream [...]
Symbolic Insight
 This is a debut album by Colorado duo Sonolumina. The album mixes ambient music with world music and trance. Between the duo they play a mixture of traditional instrumentation such as flutes, violins and trumpets as well as Indian tablas. The whole comes together in a heady cocktail of Middle Eastern and Indian musics with one eye firmly fixed on the dance chill out scene as well.
“Fire” features drones and electronic percussion that sound like the beginning of a journey into foreign lands. “Sona” is bass-heavy and introduces ethnic percussion and distant wordless vocals as if crying from a rain forest at night. Acoustic guitars and traditional strings introduce “Hado” and we are immersed into the Arabian night for a track that could
Continue reading Sonolumina – Solar Logos [...]
Monty Maggot
 The Plague is Omenopus‘ sophomore album, a double disc worth of songs that takes us on a whirlwind of an emotional rollercoaster ride across its two silvery surfaces.
Disc one (or rather the first disc I placed into the machine, as I have the feeling you could play either disc first) contains the four part concept piece “The Plague.” This is a twenty minute opus that could be viewed as four individual motifs or as one whole masterwork, very much in the same way that bands such as Yes or ELP did in the mid-Seventies.
Dark brooding keyboards begin “Part One(Plague of Ten),” then come in Bridget Wishart’s nursery rhyme vocals as she counts down the plagues from ten to one. This begins to
Continue reading Omenopus – The Plague: Scars [...]
Neurot/Supernatural
 I was wondering, as I took my copy of Topographic Oceans off the turntable, why the dark overlords at Freq Towers felt that I should review the new Ufomammut concept album that will be released in two instalments this year. I scratched my chin a slid the CD from its case and pondered to myself about this. Hmmmmm………
Oro seems to be based around some sort alchemical magickal process that transmutes base elements, such as human fears, into gold. So this is less of a story concept such as The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, but more like the above-mentioned Topographic Oceans, a concept about ideology. First track “Empireum” is a slow-building predominately synth piece whose feels hit similar territory as some of Burzum’s
Continue reading Ufomammut – Oro: Opus Primum [...]
Noh Poetry
 Astralfish are Bridget Wishart and Don Falcone, who here create cosmic melodies with a whole host of special guests including Daevid Allen from Gong. With sixteen tracks across its shimmering disc we should venture forth into the beautiful beyond to tell you all what glories there are to behold.
The opening track “Far” includes Allen’s gliss guitars and has a other world feel similar to the Sacred Geometry releases and touching slightly on Eno’s Apollo soundtrack. “Lil Utburd” begins like an Indian raga but moves into some big Vaughn Williams-style chords that break down into a funky bass section which kicks in the drums. A lilting melody carries through the piece giving its busy beats an underlying feel of melancholy. “Pepper Sky” has glacial
Continue reading Astralfish- Far Corners [...]
Important
 Most bands when releasing a collection of otherwise placeless split vinyl album tracks and remixes end up with a selection of shorter pieces compiled into what often ends up as some sort of a grab-bag of odds and ends. Not so with Nadja, who fit just four tracks on each CD of this two-disc set of recordings from 2007-08, and who also manage to make a coherent whole in the process, if perhaps in part through long-form osmosis – but what a way to trickle down…
“Jornada del Muerto” and “Perichoresis,” which open disc 1, come from a pair of split LPs which also featured solo tracks from Leah Buckareff and Aidan Baker. Here together their summed bass, guitar and drums (synthetic or otherwise) lay out the
Continue reading Nadja – Excision [...]
Striate Cortex
Striate Cortex seems to have gone, in just a few years, from another ‘yet another’ label putting out tiny editions of unheard of artists (or ‘no-audience underground’ as radiofreemidwich have it) to having a pretty heavy catalogue of exquisitely-packaged things. I can’t claim to be a completist but I’m seeing a lot of names on their discography of bands and people who are making great sounds – Plurals (whose SC release, I’m assured, is their best record to date), Bambikill, Petals, Dead Wood, joinedbywire, the sadly missed Joey Chainsaw…
I think there’s a great caprice around these records – when they came in the post, I almost didn’t want to listen to them. The packaging is just so entirely gorgeous. A response to record industry atrophy, perhaps – no-budget labels can’t compete with the big guns but they
Continue reading Striate Cortex roundup (Part 1) – Jan M Iversen/On The Wrong Planet/Petals/Sleepwalking/Star Turbine [...]
The Borderline, London 23 March 2012
The Deviants blasted out of the underground psychedelic scene in 1967. While Syd Barrett was taking the Pink Floyd into outer space and Jimi Hendrix was making his guitar wail to all the ‘foxy ladies,’ Mick Farren’s gang of urchins were singing the hymns of squat-land. With albums such as Ptoof!, Disposable and 3, the troubadours of Notting Hill sang proto-punk anthems while down the road bands such as Quintessence sang about “Jesus and Buddha.” While on a tour of the States the band imploded and became The Pink Fairies, leaving Farren out in the cold to become fist-waving conscience of the International Times and other underground tomes of the times. Intermittently over the last 40 years the Deviants have regrouped and have gone back out on the road and into the studio to
Continue reading The Deviants (live at The Borderline) [...]
Thrill Jockey
 Let’s talk about SPACE, baby, let’s talk about you and me. As Salt’n’Pepa didn’t actually sing, but should have done. Let’s talk about all the BIG things and the LOUD things. Yeah. And like that.
Space is many things to many people. To Lovecraft, for example, it was a constant source of terror. But then, so were most things. Poor guy. To Douglas Adams, it was full of all manner of potential wonder, but its chief characteristic was that it was HUGE. To Hawkwind and Michael Moorcock, it’s too many things to list here (at least without essentially just plagiarising), but we’ll go with DEEP. And to Sun Ra, it was the plaice. Though that may have just been hallucinations
Continue reading White Hills – Frying On This Rock [...]
Earache
A-side – “You suffer…”
 FDR stands for full dynamic range. Remember that, I’ll come back to it in a minute.
This is one of those records that I’ve had a million conversations about. Heavy crust/grind/metal/metalcore peeps will claim various things about it – it’s not the best/ it’s the best/ it’s not the first/ it’s the first/ Carcass did it better/it’s better with triggered drums/ it’s better without triggered drums/ it’s old/ it’s new/ they’re from Birmingham (good)/ they’re from Birmingham (bad). To answer each in turn: don’t care, fuck off/ don’t care, fuck off/ fuck off, don’t care/ fuck off don’t care/ meh – why not fuck off?/ fuck off you sexless geek/ fuck off you sexless geek/ fuck off/ fuck off/ Birmingham is AWESOME/ Birmingham is AWESOME, fuck off.
Continue reading Napalm Death – Scum (Full Dynamic Range 2012 Edition) [...]
Mute
 Breath was bated at this, apparently, but not mine. I mostly dislike collaborations, even when I try to like them, even when I love the collaborators. Collaborations regress towards the mean, like motionless wrestling or mutual strangulations in the back of army trucks (a personal joke, one intended only for my future self to smirk about; sorry). I blame everyone: Mike Paradinas and Richard James as Mike and Rich on the Expert Knob Twiddlers LP (the clue’s in the title,if you substitute ‘expert’ with ‘half-arsed’); the recent Burial and Four Tet releases (two singular visions transposed into some death-dull murk); Whitehouse with Nurse With Wound (smugly bad, the worst of both worlds) – I won’t go on, you can insert your unfaves here. There are inevitable exceptions (answers on a postcard
Continue reading Carter Tutti Void – Transverse [...]
Terp
 It’s got text in Amharic on the sleeve! I assume! It’s about single length! It uses exclamation marks to describe itself, and this seems awesome! Because the music is awesome!
… I remember when I first heard drum n’ bass, on Peel, sometime in the 90s. It was weird and scary and made me feel a little bit sexy when being sexy was a weird feeling but was also a little bit intimidating. This record’s a bit like that. It’s nothing like D’n’B though. It’s some great shuffly Ethiopian rhythms that make me want to travel around Africa drinking too much with amazing people who don’t seem to mind that I dance like I’m being controlled by particularly dense insects. It’s also got basslines that are straight out of the Mark
Continue reading Ililta! – New Ethiopian Dance Music [...]
Spezialmaterial
 From the opening drone and chiming guitar trills of “Lovelight,” it’s evident that Zurich’s Hard Coming Love are big, big fans of West Coast psych, Spacemen 3, and among others, of course, The United States of America, the second track of whose similarly self-titled album provided the band’s (slightly embarrassing) name. Where the former had drums and bass to pin down Jason Spaceman and Sonic Boom‘s interlocking internecine guitar strumming, HCL have no fewer than four guitars and/or basses making up their own wall of sound, plus keys – so maybe a little bit more on the Spiritualized size of band, maybe.
The album sifts and stumbles gently through back-masked passages, wanders down floating avenues of feedback, fuzzes into gasping strata of refulgent rock’n’roll coasting – in short, everything a good psychedelic
Continue reading Hard Coming Love – Hard Coming Love [...]
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