Crammed Discs The Aksask Maboul story is an interesting one. Formed on 1977 by Crammed Discs supremo Marc Hollander and Vincent Kenis, they recorded two experimental and now hard-to-find LPs, covering all sorts of genres, before merging with the Belgian band Honeymoon Killers and releasing another couple of diverse albums in the ’80s.
album review
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Cooking Vinyl With its cover and title looking and sounding like a Crass record from the eighties, this is very different Orb than the cosmic warriors that bought us The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld all those years ago. Abolition Of The Royal Familia has a message in its notes of Extinction Rebellion‘s fight to save the planet; a worthy theme, and certainly one worth shouting about.
Thrill Jockey The photograph of Jim White and Marisa Anderson in the studio that adorns the inside sleeve of The Quickening says a lot of what you need to know about this album. The pair face one another, playing in real time, but they are intent on their instruments.
Happy Robots The trio who comprise Mood Taeg are the musical arm of a wider artistic collective that includes video and graffiti artists, DJs, photographers and painters. Over the course of the thirty-odd minutes contained on their debut LP Exophora, you feel an obvious love for all things motorik and German-influenced, but reflected in a modern and rather charmingly effervescent style that brims with repetitive joy.
Tenor-Vossa (CD) / 1972 (vinyl) Given the deluxe gatefold treatment, Breathless’s 1986 debut LP The Glass Bead Game is being plucked out of relative obscurity to shine once again.
Nahal The Ondes Martenot is one of those instruments that’s absolutely lovely, but has struggled to find an identity for itself. It’s in the realm of early electronic instruments, and it’s consistently used for swoopy spacey things and occasionally in the work of Olivier Messiaen.
Thrill Jockey As Ripley Johnson strips away colleagues and friends, going from the four-piece Wooden Shjips to the two-piece Moon Duo and finally to the solo Rose City Band, so the enjoyment factor seems to increase as if, in reality, this is what he would choose to do.
Elli Because who doesn’t want to have a record that’s recorded largely with scraping chairs on a floor? No-one, that’s who.
Discus Article XI was originally convened by Discus regular Anton Hunter of Beck Hunters, amongst others, for a Manchester Jazz Festival commission in 2014. Drawing friends to investigate the possibilities of large ensemble improvisation, they recorded a live set in 2014 which was released in 2018. Following the interest in this disc, they have now released a further live set, record in Newcastle in 2017.
Potomak It’s been twelve years since the last, proper, Einstürzende Neubauten album, whatever that means. They’ve been detached from the music industry for a while now, pioneering some kind of multiple fan feedback mechanism, which I guess predated crowd-sourcing and kept them away from the supposed struggles associated with label imperatives and the pressure to relate (to the public, to their fans, to themselves).
Upset The Rhythm (UK) / Antifade (Australia) It is great to see that Upset The Rhythm have squeezed another album out of Australian fun-lovers Primo! With their feel good blend of simple C86 / Sarah Records-inspired tunes and low-key but charming vocalising, they are a perfect antidote to the doom and gloom surrounding the current world situation.
Nonclassical With Pink Nothing, electronic musician and hardware constructor Tom Richards has pursued ideas on Daphne Oram‘s Oramics synthesizer and re-imagined it for a modern world, constructing his own and using it for these four lengthy and meditative, if somewhat unsettling, minimalist masterpieces.
Tapete The Monochrome Set were a unique band in the first throes of the post-punk scene. They took the energy of punk’s initial rush and used it for their own effervescent purposes.
Silver Rocket / Lokal Rekorc E, the collaborative project between Thalia Zedek, Gavin McCarthy and Jason Sanford, is perhaps the purest form of musical collaboration, with each member bringing equal input to their intriguing and fiery — but at times slightly sinister — brand of melodic, post hardcore guitar music. All three have done their time in the indie rock scene, with Thalia in Come and Live Skull, […]
Rune Grammofon Trondheim trio I Like To Sleep have found a fantastic sound, combining a questing, bass-heavy rhythm section of real earthmoving power with the shimmering dream of a vibraphone. It is an extraordinary discovery that brings to mind some of Tortoise‘s experiments, but with much more muscle and even more experimentation.
Eyeless Well, well, well. Look what these cats dragged in. There’s a witticism of Simon Munnery‘s that’s springs to mindd with this record: “Shakespeare says, ‘brevity is the soul of wit’. I say ‘Bum’. Thus, I win”. In Threads‘ schtick, such as it is, lies in vignettes of skittery improvisation, offering .
Discus Once again, Discus give us a musical body swerve with the latest release from improv monster The Geordie Approach. Shields, their first album in eight years, is made up of two monolithic slabs of rumbling noise that evoke fooling around in an abandoned railway yard.
Odin The latest album from Norwegian drum powerhouse Gard Nilssen involves sixteen players, so it is not for nothing that the band is called the Supersonic Orchestra. If You Listen Carefully The Music Is Yours is a veritable feast for lovers of the Scandinavian jazz scene; but perhaps best of all, there are three drummers and three bass players, so although it mines elements of jazz, there is […]