Editions Mego On the back of last year’s double LP début comes this teasing taste of UUUU‘s expanding soundworld, a two-track twelve inch that steeps your ear in some mighty fine sonics as your eye is creeped out by the grainy black and white of the cover.
Michael Rodham-Heaps
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Beggars Arkive On the heels of The Frenz Experiment came this curve ball for The Fall’s eleventh (or maybe thirteenth) album. Who could have foreseen a ballet soundtrack was in the offing? Yeah, it was quite a surprise
Bristol 6 October 2018 Great to be back at the Colston Hall again, the stairs and upper foyer looked down on a stage that bustled with analogue and hi-tech loveliness, a crowd were perched against the glass railings in anticipation, a great vantage point for later
Bristol 4 October 2018 First up at The Thunderbolt were Dead Space Chamber Music, offering up a crafted dronescape of e-bowed pickups and cylindered frets from Tom Bush and a witchy, spiralling sonic topped off with choral gasps and murmuring abstractions from Ellen Southern. Even without their cellist (who couldn’t make it), this was still whorling and wondrous
Newhaven Fort, East Sussex 22 September 2018 Ahhh, that relentless rain! After a blazing summer it’s great to get back to some genuine English weather, isn’t it? And boy, it rained all day, meaning a lot of the improv parade ground goodness at Fort Process‘s 2018 edition got secreted away, upping the happen-upon expectation to rise that bit higher.
4AD The first track on Pixies‘ début release Come on Pilgrim takes a dump in your mind with its bad Samaritans and shamanic shears. Thirty years on, it’s still gnawing at you like a raggedy chihuahua as you stumble through the wreckage of a house party’s aftermath. Those heavy drums of David Lovering‘s really feel like there being clambered over, that slow thaw of salivary guitar eating at you as
Antifrost Drawing on an ancient word for witches across German-speaking Europe in the Middle Ages, Lukas Feigelfeld‘s film Hagazussa is a gloomy feast for the imagination where plague and paranoia paint an atmospheric treasure-trove of unease. A gothic feast for the eyes
Om Kult Another unsettling listen from the master of extreme – Rudolf Eb.er, Om Kult Volume I is a cerebral feast that cancers the comfortable with needlepoint clarity. The carrion flies that dart between your hemispheres, those dirt dragging paws. It’s a focused feast that predators a pulse, shadow-plays a closely mic(ed) drama
Bristol 8 September 2018 Luckily zero nightmares on the parking front meant we only missed a small portion of Microdeform’s set, a colour-washed dronescape, needled by fractured dissidence. These tasty elasticated hues pulling you into a kaleidoscope of blistered sunsets, spreading out in grainy after-images
Self-released God’s Teeth And The Interstellar Tropics are a psychedelic improv threesome hailing from Brighton. Suitably mysterious, extra details are scant, but I’m liking the airy acrobatics on this, their third release, GNASH.
Fish Of Milk (Australia and New Zealand) / ReR Megacorp (Europe and Japan) / Northern Spy (Americas) This newbie from Australian improv giants The Necks plays a Charlemagne Palestine-like long game (or it appears so) in a snakes and ladders of subtle tone shifts and erosions. A deceptively simple premise that sleekly seduces, seeps in there, tingles in the fragmentary unison of a trickling piano and scattered percussives.
Karlrecords A Philosophy Warping, Little By Little That Way Lies A Quagmire documents the second collaboration between Konstrukt and the Japanese avant-garde / noise icon Keiji Haino. This live manifestation, captured at SalonIKSY back in December last year, (and confusingly carrying the same title as its studio sister) is a meaty two-track beast that makes you envious you missed out on witnessing it in the flesh.
Màgia Roja/ BFE Unlike the seemingly endless crop of darkwavers with weird keyboard characters for names, Silvia Konstance Costan and her partner in Dame Area, the Catalan underground veteran Victor Hurtado, stab at something less generic
London 22 July 2018 With a backdrop of toy robots, Rodney Cromwell were first up to ply their wares. A solid three-piece with a rather special take on synth-led indie, they breeze through their upbeat and groovesome set.
Ici d’Ailleurs Based on one of the final works of Carl Jung where the alchemical informed psychology, Uruk’s second outing is another psychological pleasure for the headphonically inclined.
Bristol 10 July 2018 Opening act Pip Blom shambled on to a very warm response from an already two-thirds full O2 Academy Bristol. One singing guitarist and one drummer share the stage with a fluffy bassist and a manic guitarist looking like a young Jerry Harrison. The rhythm section were taut and focussed, allowing the singing guitarist to throw the sweet but rather ramshackle songs out into the […]
Front And Follow Filled with a Grouper-esque love of shimmered atmospheres, this (for the most part) psychedelically coruscates in gentle vaporous curls attached to simplest of melodics, the odd percussive clank here and there. The first solo track from Jodie Lowther welds this Lynchian sway, a cipher dance replete with a Julee Cruise-like little girl lost
House Of Mythology When asked about this latest collaboration with the Italian band Zu, David Tibet says they “made something very beautiful and very powerful for me to skip into”, and the surrounds certainly hold his words in a perfect tension.