Label: Planet Mu Format: 2×10″ (Vol. IV only), CD Updating the sound of Drum’n’Bass as he’s been rinsing it out since the early days, Bizzy B‘s Science EP Vols. III and IV CD doesn’t so much re-invent Junglist mania as restate it with extra oomph. There are no obvious surges into Grimey territory or cheap nods to Garage, but plenty of fun to be had from Bizzy B’s […]
album review
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– Does The Cosmic Shepherd Dream Of Electric Tapirs? Label: Space Age Format: CD – The Penultimate Glactic Bordello Also The World You Made Label: Dirter Promotions Format: 4CD With a band as prolific and expansive as the Acid Mothers Temple, it’s somewhat difficult to select a “typical” release to settle on, and perhaps (perhaps not) Does The Cosmic Shepherd Dream Of Electric Tapirs? is as good as […]
Label: Mute Format: 2CD Only a few weeks ago I was bemoaning my shortage of Laibach material – just a couple of albums’ worth out of a repertoire that spans well over two decades – so I was more than a little chuffed when this new retrospective landed on my lap. This is not really an album for Laibach fans of long standing, given its near-lack of new […]
Label: Mute Format: 2CD No question has ever divided the civilised world more than this one: “What did you think of Nocturama?” For every devotee willing to bask in the righteous glory that was “Bring It On”, there’s a hater who’s all too keen to remind you of the less-than-spectacular “Rock Of Gibraltar”. Me? Well, I liked it. Except for “Rock of Gibraltar”, obviously. That was shit. That […]
Label: Aalfang Format: CD Bit of a weird one, this – even by the usual standards. It consists of two tracks, the first (“Geschwärtzte Milch” – blackened milk) lasting four minutes long and sounding a bit like late Swans in strummy guitar instrumental mode, and the second (the title track) being three quarters of an hour long and comprising a textbook example of Surrealistic klang-honk-tinkle-“boo!” Electroacoustic tomfoolery in […]
Label: CTI Format: CD Based on Cosey Fanni Tutti‘s inital live Selflessness action at Disneyland in California in May 2002, EAR Four aims to transmit her feelings of disorientation and being placed apart from of time the resort engendered. Remixed mainly from recordings made on site and and then broadcast precisely one year later on Resonance FM in London, the CD has had four minutes of unaltered environmental […]
Label: Locus Solus Format: CD Charles Hayward‘s unique observations on the grimness and greatness of human existence are usually slightly off to one side of the general flow of music and song, and Abracadabra Information is decidedly at a tangent to, but entirely redolent of the pains and pleasures of 21st Century living. Flickering on, flourescent tube style, with “Toytown” and it’s straight in to an entropic hymn […]
Label: Mute Format: CD Mute have reissued Einstürzende Neubauten‘s 1993 album Tabula Rasa along with the singles that were released at the time. These include the French, Japanese, and English versions of “Blume”. Anita Lane provides the vocals on the English version. Its a smart album full of lyrical games and riddles. Up there as a personal favourite, along with Haus Der Luge, Tabula Rasa is a turning point […]
Label: The Grey Area of Mute Format: 2CD Ah, Industrial music before the word Industrial became synonymous with Heavy Metal! Earlier/Later is the second album of Richard H Kirk‘s archive tracks from The Grey Area of Mute, the first being Digital lifeforms Redux in his Sandoz guise. As with that album’s second disc, this compilation contains previously unreleased material, including a cover of Can‘s “I Want More” which […]
Label: The Grey Area of Mute Format: 2CD Digital Lifeforms Redux is a reissue of work originally available on Touch from Richard H Kirk, the electronic half of Cabaret Voltaire. Unlike the Early/Later compilation simultaneously released by The Grey Area, this album represents a specific moment in time: the years 92-93. It is less representative of his work in Cabaret Voltaire, not that an Richard H Kirk album […]
Label: Staubgold/Klangbad format: CD It would be difficult to predict the outcome of a collaboration between two such disparate musical outfits as these. I mean Hip-Hop and Krautrock, or whatever category Faust‘s music falls into these days, don’t suggest themselves immediately as likely partners. Or perhaps that’s just my perception. Whatever preconceptions I may have had the resultant recording has blown them away, this really is a natural […]
Label: FatCat Format: CD Creature Comforts is a drifting album of instruments and electronics, where rhythm and tune merge and mutate into one another. New sounds growing out of old ones. An epic psychedelic jam at points like listening alien conversation, or elsewhere like a chorus of demented narcotic Hawaiian guitars. Citing contemporaries such as Sonic Youth does little to define Creature Comforts. It at once sounds very […]
Label: 130701 Format: CD Richter’s work follows the releases by Set Fire To Flames and Sylvian Chauveau on FatCat’s 130701 imprint. In addition to the carefully wrought instrumental arrangements, he has chosen to use words sparsely. The work of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz is integrated, along with parts of Kafka’s text The Blue Octavo Notebooks, into the dreamlike landscapes he constructs. These words are read quietly and fairly unobtrusively […]
Label: 13th Moon Format: CD There is something at once comfortingly ordinary and outrageously Other about Alien Sex Fiend – the extraordinary seems such a part of the Fiends’ image that they wear it to the point of blending into the landscape of the musical landscape. Nik Fiend has always delivered his barbed couplets and blokish paranoia with the deadpan conviction of the geezer down the pub who […]
Label: Rehab Format: CD So. Imagine the guy from Electric Six has managed to spend all your money, pump you full of drugs and take you to a gay bar, gay bar, gay bar. And the first thing you hear is a pumping Electro version of the Stooges‘ “I Wanna Be Your Dog”. No, not Alec Empire‘s “Addicted To You“, which took the same riff and straped it […]
Label: Paw Tracks Format: CD,LP From the acid-drenched woodland scenes of the band members lurking in a mirror wilderness on the cover to the music itself, Here Comes The Indian screams and drones and scrawls with psychedelic brightness and insanity. The Animal Collective yell and chant, whip up frenzied percussive grooves from nothing then let them rip into splashes of unhinged harmonious melody – the lysergic force is […]
Label: Mute Format: 2CD Diamanda Galás has never been timid about exploring the darkness and horror of her chosen territories. She’s been doing it for some years and these latest recordings are no exception. Defixiones, Will and Testament is rooted in Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides carried out by Turkey between 1914 and 1923. To construct this exploration she has borrowed texts from a variety of sources as […]
Label: Soleilmoon Format: CD This is Nigel Ayers‘ twenty-fifth Nocturnal Emissions CD since 1979, and here he chooses to sample, loop and mutilate chunks of Indie guitar music and slam them up against the music of the Third World, old and new. The results are certainly funky, rolling on heavyweight grooves and beats with a deliberate Fourth World flavour, delving deep into the synthesis of Western Pop with […]