Cherry Red After the major retrospective of last year, Cherry Red have decided to treat us to reissue frenzy from Momus‘s back catalogue. Divided into two deluxe three-CD packages aptly entitled Procreate, the first of which gives you a lusty and languid taste of the 1980s via a trio of albums Nick Currie did for Alan McGee‘s Creation label.
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Upset The Rhythm The good people at Upset the Rhythm have very wisely taken the opportunity, on the strength of their return to play live dates, to reissue the first album Normil Hawaiians recorded and released back in 1982; and what an absolute gem of post-post-punk pioneering spirit it truly is.
Cherry Red / MVD Audio / New Ralph Too Twenty minutes into the future. Allow me a short digression: He’s the toast of the town (lightly buttered). He’s the non-fattening sugar substitute in your tea. He’s a bon vivant, a gaucho amigo, a goomba, a mensch, and the fifth musketeer. He’s the apple of your eye and aren’t you glad he’s here? Direct from a wax and shine at the […]
Consouling Sounds After years of collaborations and different labels, Jozef van Wissem‘s second album for Consouling Sounds finds him and his lute once more alone without outside assistance to deter him from this unique vision. Nobody Living Can Ever Make Me Turn Back is a glorious journey into time and space with only the lute and various electronics to guide us.
Atmosphere Autunna Et Sa Rose is a multimedia project that has been running for the best part of twenty years and is the brainchild of Saverio Tesolato. His desire to weave together various strands of art into a cohesive whole has taken him in many directions over the years, and now finds him attempting to translate two specific dreams into a web of musical poetry that sits with […]
Buried Treasure Kept underground by the Soviets for too many years, Yuri Morozov‘s legacy is finally spreading its wings and flying into your ears. His Inexplicable and Human Extinction albums house some of the most unhinged electronic experiences I’ve tasted for a long while, and this teasing compilation from Buried Treasure scoops a lot of the same, whilst getting fruity with the progressive tinkles.
Upset The Rhythm If you went ahead and read the lovely interview with Robert, published in this august journal, you will have already learnt a few intriguing things about this unique talent, one of which is that Sotelo is a pseudonym. A pseudonym under which it has been possible for the artist (I won’t name him as it doesn’t seem necessary, but you can find out if you […]
Southern Lord Retrospektïẁ I, II and III are the crown jewels of the Magma empire. You’ll get told elsewhere that those jewels are located in the 1970s studio albums by Magma. You will get told that by people who cannot tell you why Christian Vander waited until 1980 to bring the key players of Magma back together at Olympia to record “Theusz Hamthaak”. If you don’t understand why “Theusz […]
Versatile Zombie Zombie‘s fifth long player celebrates their tenth anniversary of recording for the Versatile label. Although the last album proper was 2012’s Rituels D’un Nouveau Monde, they have spent the intervening years scoring two movies and a contemporary circus show. I think that these extra-curricular activities have fed nicely into the sound world that has been created on Livity, (a Rastafarian spiritual concept based on the energy […]
Planet Mu Collecting together ten orphans and excursions from this year’s Bioprodukt LP, Ekoplekz‘s Cassettera is of course only available physically as a limited-edition cassette (but can be downloaded form the usual places too).
Ampbase Recordings The wonderful Amp have now been ploughing their particular furrow for the last twenty-five years or so. Having been birthed from the same fertile Bristol scene as Third Eye Foundation, Flying Saucer Attack, Movietone and Crescent, the band that finally coalesced around the duo of Karine Charff and Richard Amp have been regularly releasing the kind of drifting, transportative and adventurous albums that really take the […]
Out For me, Ut were the unsung heroes of that Noise New York scene and to see their essential work being re-issued can only be a good thing. Crawling from the same scene that spawned Swans, Sonic Youth, James Chance and Richard Hell, what made the band special was not that they were all women; this was a scene that had strong women like Kim Gordon, Lydia Lunch, Ann […]
Consouling Sounds Thighpaulsandra and Massimo Pupillo (of Zu) have conjured a lovely bit of ambience here as Uruk, heavy fruit rotten with cankerous rainbows. I Leave A Silver Trail Through Blackness is a dark joy best suited to making merry with the other side of the witching hour. Crank that dial to the right and sink into its dronic pleasures, a thirty-eight minute journey lit in tubular shackles and […]
Svart Finland’s instrumental hypno fourpiece Siinai are back with a standalone follow-up to 2014’s musing on consumerism Supermarket, and what a satisfying burst of cyclical, looping repetition it is.
Whip Angels The title sets you up. Death is Coming, cumming… come in; the water’s lovely. La petite mort, sex and death, and rebirth. This is an audio slice of an audio-visual feast, best savoured whole. It is music and it stands alone and proud, but it’s also part of a wider project
English Heretic This has a stately grace, which seems full of ghosts. A fifty year de-celebration of The Summer of Love and a fugue for a darkening isle (that book seems closer to reality than any of us would like). It reimagines and repurposes, taking obscure psychedelic tracks from that lost year, 1967
Svart Jess And The Ancient Ones are a enigma; their first album and EP were labelled under the occult rock genre alongside such bands as Jex Thoth and Blood Ceremony. This may have largely been due to the press releases saying that the songs were all about the band’s experiences with magick. Then came the second album, The Aquarius Tapes, which seemed to discuss the occult influence during […]
Rock Fuel Media / Cleopatra / MVD Visual Hard to believe Ritual De Lo Habitual is a quarter of a century old, but a quarter of a century old it is, and has taken its rightful place in the pantheon of classic albums. A high point for alternative rock music in the 1990s, which began so optimistically with Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against The Machine and Nirvana and […]