This came in, slipped under the door like a thin slice of cranial pie…

My favourite track on Please Let Me Back Into Your House, Ship Canal‘s debut on the non-label nano-nightmare that is 19F3, reminds me of her.

Fog (what is it with fog these days? I’m hearing fog everywhere) and shipwrecked audio and Lilith drones crossover and pulse and then this voice, this slurring, cracked voice appears, a man swallowing himself with language; a kind of absence with automatism, like an electronic divination, a table turning… it’s one of the best things I’ve heard all year; it just works in a way that lots of this kind of stuff just… doesn’t.

If it catches you as it caught me – 7 AM, wind, rain, mist – then this will speak to you. It’s dredged music, perhaps incomplete (I like the way some of the female siren sounds just kind of cut—— when you’d expect them to drift away) but powerful and quite… beautiful, in parts.

I’ve seen Ship Canal’s kit: ugly PCs, ugly-hack-kneed software, ugly cables… but he’s making a right Schwitters out of this slop, this detritus. He’s waving and drowning in these sounds. You could do a lot worse than piece together the crumbs that this little fellah will set you back.

-Loki-

In a media landscape where seemingly every mainstream early-evening crime drama routinely features grisly post-mortem footage of dissected cadavers and high-definition CGI renderings of the paths of wounds and injuries being inflicted as seen from inside the body, is it any wonder that artists such as Gnaw Their Tongues want to push the sonic envelope of morbidity? Just as slickly-sick splatterfests like the Saw and Hostel series give gorehounds and the censorious alike yet more fodder for their prurient schadenfreude/distaste (delete as applicable), so the extremes where orchestral music, metal, noise and soundscaping meet become progressively more and more immersively shocking.

There is much to the music which Gnaw Their Tongues inflict upon the world which stands comparison as the sonic equivalent of Jörg Buttgereit‘s evisceration of the staid, stylish, yet often vapid and essentially unthreatening late Eighties/early Nineties horror genre, taking it to new depths of believably twisted nastiness with his Nekromantik films. Mories does this by producing sounds which are overwhelming – and by any reasonable standard unpleasant to listen to – but from which some listeners cannot, will not, turn away. Listening to Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus is like being thrust into a black mass being celebrated in the middle of a raging hurricane, one where blastbeats collide with industrial sheet-metal, a rusty scrapyard klang batterie buttressing the BDSM orchestral ministrations of a demented composer utterly intent on assaulting, bastardising and otherwise ritually torturing the listener in a welter of misanthropic cacophony. The discordant soundclash can be as deliriously overpowering as would (to ponder a slightly different environmental metaphor for extremity for a moment) being tossed down a raging waterfall while a symphony orchestra is piped blindly by an idiot alien god through a giant stack of amplifiers the size of a ominous black monolith. That is the sort of level of immensity being aimed for on this record, and achieved.

Of course it’s just music; and naturally at its arrhythmic, foul heart its as much an entertainment as CSI: Hades would be, all red-eyed and darly-cowled Inquisitors extracting painful confessions in tastefully blood-spattered digital detail from the damned… so just keep repeating, it’s only a record, it’s only a dream; it will all end… soon.

-M. Maldoror-

With its pun title based on the Syd Barrett Pink Floyd album, the new Acid Mothers album seems to be one of their most scorching psychedelic yet, but in a very traditional way. The opening track “Chinese Flying Saucer” has Led Zepplin’s “A Whole Lotta Love” stamped all over it, from the opening riff to the faux Robert Plant vocals to the bizarre middle instrumental lead guitar work out. In a strange way it reminded me of a lot of bands who used to play at the Alice in Wonderland club in the Eighties and certainly would not have seemed out of place within their DJ set list. (Hmmmm, just what London could do with is a great psychedelic club again, are you out there Christian?) Bonham-esque military drum fills happen over Kawabata’s steady chunky guitar playing. The production sounds lost in the early ’70s and the track sounds better because of it. A good firm, solid and surprising opener.

“Shine on You Crazy Dynamite” begins with Syd-style guitar scrapings over the usual AMT space synths and an organ fugue. Here we are straight into Floyd Piper At The Gates Of Dawn territory. When the bass starts to play a steady note and the organ begins to swirl we are in “Interstellar Overdrive” mode. The only thing to distract from this is the vocals/voice that intones over the top of it all. Kawabata plays gliss guitar in true Barrett form. This would sound wonderful played live at a small venue with a proper late sixties liquid light show as the whole sound is quite convincingly ’67 psychedelia. And if you don’t touch the brown acid it could probably transport you back to the UFO Club during the summer of Sgt Pepper. The cosmic middle section is very spacey and rather than a pummelling lead guitar that would normally kick in by these points, the Mothers stay true to subtle echoed vistas of the early Floyd mixed with Electronic Meditation-era Tangerine Dream.

This is one of AMT’s finest excursions into pure ’67-style psychedelia with the feel and atmosphere of albums and performances of that period, a real mini-triumph for the band and certainly a different sound excursion than their last few releases. Now all they need is a UFO Club to perform this in entirety for the acid drenched throngs. Far out man…….

-Gary Parsons-

“Oansome” is a word coined by Russell Hoban, American author of the triumphantly bleak post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker, set in Kent after a nuclear war has ravaged the land and left the survivors scrabbling to survive and speaking in a language as changed by the Bomb as the landscape and people have been. Indicating a sense of despondent solitude, of being left abandoned and profoundly alone in a world ripped asunder, Oansome Orbits are Paul Gough‘s way of describing the microscopic sounds he has made live large on the eight tracks of the album, circling and reacting to each other in the void. Lonesome this album certainly is, drifting and sussurating on bowed and flexed metals and other substances, plucked and chopped digitally, arranged and stretched, shifted, uprooted and engrained with the results of processes and processing which is almost as much a part of the sound as the source material itself.

The Oansome Orbit is often beautiful to contemplate, in the same way that the Antarctic or the depths of space are – but Pimmon takes the listener right inside the cavernous, up close and frigid with the infinite. The sublime Gough offers up is one which might not be best encountered on a dark night in the nether regions of the soul, but there probably isn’t much choice offered in the matter at all that.

-Linus Tossio-

*(For a very different referencing of Riddley Walker, see also the Littl Shyning Man brand of electronica.)

Well, I don’t hear a “lost krautrock classic,” though that phrase seems to be cycling through the blogs and reviews like a Manuel Göttsching guitar loop (and not just for this album; it’s appearing more and more in all kinds of guises – pretty sure it’s leaked malevolently into some of my reviews, so clearly I’m not immune; it’s a nasty little word virus) but neither is this slender little release like you (now) expect Keith Fullerton Whitman to be.

-Loki-

“Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.”

Like the spaceship in Ray Bradbury’s book about to blast its cargo to Mars, Space Ritual have a constant feel of the summer, their music warming even the coldest of winters evenings. The sense of free festivals and long warm days hangs in the air and a mystical pan like reverie pervades.

“I was going to record and sample my farts for a track,” Nik Turner casually informs the throng in front of him; a cheer of Bacchanalian joy fills the room and the space ritual begins. Drums pound from the nether regions of the universe while the sax plays a symphony from Orion’s belt and synthesizers  swirl and bleep their way making the sound as if recoded from some NASA space probe. Guitars create black holes in the sky and the mother-ship pauses waiting to land.

Angel Flame dances wildly through a set of songs that include “Children of the Sun,” “Otherworld” and “Orgone Accumulator” with various different costume changes.  The song “Sonic Savages” sounds like a hymnal to the stars, one that I can’t shake out of my head for the next few days.  “Watching the Grass Grow” is a punked-up slab of space rock that has morphed into a larger song from the old Inner City Unit daze. And “Born to Go” still resonates with the power and wonder of the early ’70s when it was created and Nik was just beginning his blast off into the cosmos.

A horn section appears on stage and a flautist and suddenly its beginning to look very crowded and free form. The sound grows like the noise of the big bang and after two hours he band powerhouse their way to the end of their set. They leave Nik standing sentinel on stage playing the theme from the Pink Panther on his sax alone with the stars and the cold void of space.

The air outside the venue seems crisp, the leaving audience laugh and have acid type smiles across their faces. There is a feeling of warmth and for a second you could almost imagine a butterfly in a January sky in London town.

“The rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land…..”

-Gary Parsons-

This could have been. The idea behind Belgotronics is zeitgeist-tappingly brilliant; we need a Belgian version of those Congotronics tricks; that DIY ethic, those tumbling rhythms, those alien sounding timbres and treads, that otherness. Everything seems in place; the name – Hoquets references “hockets” (the technique used in Western medieval music, Africa, Bali and elsewhere of sharing a melody line between several voices or instruments) and “hoquets” (pronounced “OK”, and the French word for “hiccoughs”) – even the music itself, which rattles and slips like a woodworker’s shed sliding slowly downhill, but… the vocals ruin it for me. They are ‘off the wall’ but not convincing, crazeee not crazy; you don’t have to be mad to be in this band but – well, that’s it. That’s all. There’s an absence at its heart that I can’t get past.

I guess I’m especially down on this because the music is more or less fantastic. They’ve got sounds that need hearing; fairy-tale, woodchopper sounds, the rhythms a wolf hears before it gets beheaded. If Hoquets were an instrumental band they’d remind me of a more intense, more wired, less considered Clogs and that would be a thing of small beauty. Stop singing, guys.

-Loki-

Not long ago, in the relatively balmy days of early December, I found myself, as is my usual daily routine, strolling through the local cemetery, Abney Park, all overgrown and witch-haunted, broken angels and grasping stone hands. And that’s on a normal day. But this particular afternoon the region was visited by the harbinger of truly apocalyptic weather. About an hour earlier than was reasonable (and certainly earlier than would be considered polite by any civilised climatic system) the sun went dark, the wind picked up, and darkness descended across the land. The veil of the Temple may even have been rent in two, but I was nowhere near the bloody Temple, what with being on the other side of the world and all, so I couldn’t really tell you with any degree of accuracy whether that had happened. Mind you, I’m sure it would have showed up on the news somewhere, or at the very least on the internet.

SunnO)))’s low-end minimalism can seem counter-intuitive, until you start to consider the reading that, as they’ve said, they aren’t playing guitars – they’re playing amps. They’re just using guitars to play them, like you’d use a bow or a plectrum. It’s all in the resonances; the long, drawn-out riffs are just a means to an end. Or possibly to The End.

And then someone let Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter loose on the whole thing. In much the same way that SunnO))) don’t play guitars, Nurse With Wound don’t play music, not even in the most avant-garde sense of the word. Nurse With Wound play the human brain, they just use music to play it, like SunnO))) use instruments to play amps. They set up implications, drag up memories, draw loose connections, and let the whole resolve itself inside the head of the listener into a glorious web of harmonised thoughts, conceptual dischords. Like SunnO))), they give you a whole universe to explore, but just draw your attention to certain bits of it. Like SunnO))), properly listened to, no NWW album ever really sounds quite the same twice, because the real improvisational magic is taking place inside your head, where Stapleton’s busy wiring together hopes, fears and memories into a beautiful engine of catastrophe.

If you haven’t experienced either of these things before, then I suggest you do so. If you have, then try the new releases. As I say, if they sound the same as they did last time you heard them, then you’re doing it wrong.

-Deuteronemu 90210))) or a variation thereon-

NOTE – I should have got this review in earlier, so that people working in record shops could respond to queries about 00 Void by singing “The SunnO)))’ll come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be SunnO)))”… But I didn’t. So maybe next time.

I’m on a train a foggy winter afternoon, beats rocking me away into an unfamiliar yet known landscape. The steady beat accompanied by bass-noisy distorted guitar rhythms feeds to the familiarity of the sounds. Suddenly strange background screeching brakes hits, but without any effect on the speed, like the change of mood when entering a tunnel, but still continues when coming out of it, swirling through the narrow valley of winterly mountainous landscape. The feelings created by the first tracks on Dead Clubbing matches perfectly the dual sides of the experience of listening to the music, combined with the train ride I am on writing this. Almost like they where made for each other.

The beats continue to rock’n’roll me into a rhythm that possibly could make me want to dance, but as it is here and now; music perfect for travelling or driving, or sitting in a cart behind an old diesel engine on rails, looking out the window at the wintery snow-filled murky forest of pines, expecting trolls to appear any minute. Soundscapes filled with mysteries, moving left and right in my ears, back and forth of my head, but still with that hectic rhythmic beat.

-Ronny Wærnes-

Oh, caveats. They’re buggers right? Yeah. Well, here’s one anyway – without wanting to get into the ‘how do ‘we the west’ appropriate non-Western music?’, there’s always a massive problem writing about this sort of thing. I’d not suggest that my lack of knowledge of Carnatic/ Hindustani music is in any way an impediment to enjoying/ talking about Indian classical music, but I always get this feeling that it’d take me 20 years to get near putting this in some sort of context. Ustad Abdul Karim Khan has a phenomenal tone, lovely range, the ornaments to the rags are phenomenally delivered, the recording has been re-mastered brilliantly considering it sounds like one mic in a dusty room some point before the 2^nd World War (!). But I’m taking it as read that he has the reputation he does in India for good reason – I’ve heard a bit of this stuff, and this is great, but mostly my appreciation comes from a sort of awe/ reverence for the complexity of the music rather than being able to distinguish Khan from Rajesh Patel who plays in the local café.

ANYWAY. This is a great record. I imagine that it’d go down well with a lot of people into Indian stuff (which should be you, otherwise I’m not your friend any more), it’ll tick the Folkways box, it’s a lush recording and a great introduction to a massively complex area. All the songs clock in around four minutes or so, which I’m guessing is due to the recording limits of the time. Which is a bit of a shame – there’s a sense in several of the songs that he’s just getting warmed up, rather than getting into the full on ecstatic reveries that come with a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan‘s CDs. (NB – I’m not even entirely clear if that’s a fair comparison, given my dearth of knowledge from this area of music). These miniatures (and what I know of this area suggests that even 20 minute versions are incomplete versions of the live event) are a great showcase for Ustad’s tactile dexterity and subtlety around a mode. The liner notes are pretty good, giving a fair amount of biographical detail and pics – perhaps a bit lacking in musicological context though.

So yeah – caveats (and disabused similes) aside, there’s no reason not to recommend this record. A great historic thing, and a lush/ baffling document of a world that I’d like a second life to get to know properly.

 -Kev Nickells-

Appearing as part of a series of DVDs from Blast First Petite unearthing performances on legendary German TV music show Rockpalast (see also Kevin Coyne in 1978) comes a rare broadcast featuring John Fahey from March 1978. Remastered from the original video tapes, this is a rare opportunity to see footage of Fahey on stage, and the results are captivating.

Essential for anyone with an interest in Fahey’s ever-expanding legacy in the possibilities still open to the solo acoustic guitar, Live at Audimax Hamburg is both a superlative historic document and thoroughly enjoyable in its own right.

-Richard Fontenoy-

Sweeping in on modernist orchestrations, Rupture is a very different kind of Nurse With Wound collaboration, though there is plenty which harks back to Steve Stapleton‘s tape-loop manipulations of orchestral music both in Nursey guise and with Current 93‘s earlier harshly overbearing recordings in the pre-Apocalyptic Folk days. Here there is an explicit theme hinted at in the title, as the ensemble attempt to envisage musically what it might feel like to undergo a severe brain embolism – and who better for sculptor and composer Graham Bowers to work with on such a project than Messrs. Stapleton, Liles, Waldron and Potter?

The religiose cacophony of the likes of C93′s Dog’s Blood Rising and Bowers’ own compositional method (which he terms sound theatre) bubbles up through the mire on synthetic strings and sampled roadworks, a symphony of multimedia detritus emergent as the brain begins to recurse upon itself, then shatter under the strain of catastrophic failure. The stumbling, slurred incoherence of a stroke sufferer comes via the poor abused piano once again and shivery strands of synthesis, smeared and traumatised by tape manipulations in the throes of Modernist spasms and bilious chorales.

A dizzying descent into malfunction on the most personal of levels, Rupture marks a return to gelatinous surrealistic pillow music from NWW in one of those fortuitous collaborations which was just waiting for the right circumstances to happen.

-Linus Tossio-

Please scroll down and on for the most recent reviews; the archives index for 1998-2009 is here while there is an A-Z index here of everything posted so far.

The bulk of the record reviews 1998-2008 are in the following pages:

• Archived reviews: A
• Archived reviews: B
• Archived reviews: C
• Archived reviews: D
• Archived reviews: E
• Archived reviews: F
• Archived reviews: G
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• Archived reviews: I
• Archived reviews: J
• Archived reviews: K
• Archived reviews: L
• Archived reviews: M
• Archived reviews: N
• Archived reviews: O
• Archived reviews: P
• Archived reviews: Q
• Archived reviews: R
• Archived reviews: S
• Archived reviews: T
• Archived reviews: U
• Archived reviews: V
• Archived reviews: Various artists
• Archived reviews: W
• Archived reviews: X
• Archived reviews: Y
• Archived reviews: Z

Brixton is a place that has changed a lot over the past twenty odd years. It feels very different now then when I lived (well squatted) there in the late eighties, at that time the riots had calmed down but there was still a sense of unease . It now feels less tense and has quite up-market café culture and some of the old dodgy pubs now seemed to have gone. But scratch the surface of the place and its past is still there just under its shiny new veneer. Somehow it seem quite apt that The Levellers would be celebrating twenty years of their album Levelling the Land here.

I was looking forward to seeing Dreadzone play and their set contained many of their classic songs. However, it was soon obvious that whoever was doing their mixing that night left no real bottom end on the front of house speakers. So here we have a great band who play dub with no bass. I moved further back in case I was too near the front to get the aural assault in full, but unfortunately the Academy’s acoustics meant that some of the power of the songs was lost in a swirl of echo, which is a real shame as the musicianship was faultless. I hope to see them again at a venue that appreciates their sound more.

Levelling the Land album came out at important social time in Britain’s counter-cultural history. After Thatcher and the Conservative government smashing of the alternative culture at Stonehenge in 85 and The Criminal Justice Act being bought in to destroy and close down free festivals and raves, it felt like the state militia was gunning for anyone living an alternative lifestyle and to make criminals of them for the way they looked. Travellers and others disgusted with the system were beginning to re-group by the early 90s and many became anti-road activists and campaigners and a rebirth of the ‘fuck you’ spirit of punk mixed with the earth mother politics of the hippies once again began to flower. Levelling the Land was one of the most important albums of this movement as its anthems struck a chord with a disenfranchised generation.

The last track of the evening was “Beautiful Day” which hd the crowd chanting before they shuffled out into the cold night air. Tonight The Levellers crossed that line between past and present to show how events from that past are still affecting things today and are still just as relevant and important. And the atmosphere of the past and present of Brixton seemed a little changed on my way back that night.

-Gary Parsons-

The winter solstice machine rolls on for Hawkwind and I now can’t imagine a yuletide period without their tour of shows. Whereas last year Dave Brock was stood over to one side of the stage tonight he is dead centre, the captain taking command of his crew again. Last year the set was made up with quite a few tracks from their new Blood of the Earth album; this year’s set is back to Hawkwind classics.

“You Better Believe It” crackles with energy and kicks the show off in the right direction. In the first few songs the vocals seem a bit loud in the mix but this is soon sorted out as spaceship Hawkwind start to take us higher. “Angels of Death” is a powerful slab of heavy space metal and “Magnu” is the soundtrack to a Michael Moorcock fantasy novel come to life. For me though, the highlight of the evening was an incredible performance of “Hassan I Sabbah” which mixed space rock with ambient trance and techno together in a wonderful elongated middle section that felt truly psychedelic. The set ends with roaring versions of “Psychedelic Warlords” and the now-obligatory “Spirit of the Age.”