Opa Loka Philippe Petit‘s double-CD album Do Humans Dream Of Electronic Ships is all over the place, exhaling a sci-fi softness the type Louis and Bebe Barron sculpted back in the ’50s. A gouging cello bursting in somersaulting capillaries, chased by an errant black’n’decker rub that casts some scary shadows. A patchwork bounce of . The nostalgic blur of copulating shapes owling on the tap of empty skipping […]
Michael Rodham-Heaps
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Bureau B Loving the way that Felix Kubin and Hubert Zemler instinctively dovetail here as CEL, manage to claw out something so addictive, full of dissonant directions.
Play Loud! Play Loud! proudly presents Tapetopia, a series of vinyl releases documenting East Germany’s underground tape culture of the ’80s. The first two volumes are a window on the vibrancy of this subculture
London 29 February 2020 ChopChop’s music snakes round its orator like a slippery thing, cymbals replaced by the clatter of hubcaps on toms, cutlery-jammed guitars – there’s an itchy jazzy vibe to the melodics, fuelled by a fertile imagination full of bruised shapes and punkish angles.
three:four / Meakusma A beautiful lullaby-esque soundscape, this. The soothing French vocals a paper boat floating out on a lilting tide of gentle disquiet, instrumentals that subtly blur boundaries. Something that’s especially true of “L’inexploré”’s panoramas, with an avant classical verve where the fragments of narration ease you elsewheres. Dora’s invited lots of like-minded musicians to help her sculpt this recording
Cardinal Fuzz (Europe) / Man Hand (North America) Haven’t heard from these guys in a while, then suddenly this pops onto the 2020 radar in ultra-limited quantities. It’s been an age, the last official Sunburned Hand Of The Man release must have been the one on Ecstatic Peace back in 2010, but as always they’ve been peppering the intervening years with a steady flow of hard-to-get-your-hands-on CDrs and […]
Disciples Another archival trip into His Name Is Alive‘s formative years, and a follow up to last year’s excellent All The Mirrors In The House, Return To Never is an altogether darker/noiser joy, that (as on the previous LP) spreads out as a whole, although segmented into individual tracks.
4AD The moment that twisted discord gives way to the first tune “Way The World Is”, the Pale Saints‘ The Comforts Of Madness album has you hanging on a massive wave of daggering sound. That piranha(ing) energy slamming around you, Ian Masters‘ dreamy voice thistled by melodic splashes and restless propellants, his vocals bleeding existential bluntness buttered in flaming ascents and cross-cut dynamics. As first tracks go it’s […]
Upset The Rhythm Waiting there patiently for over thirty years, Normil Hawaiians‘ third album Return Of The Ranters finally got the airing it deserved in late 2015, thanks to Upset The Rhythm. An act that kick started a re-issue campaign to get all their recordings back into print, finally re-addressing the group’s bad luck story with a vengeance.
Blue Tapes Stuart Chalmers has created a lot of interesting soundscapes with minimal means. Live he’s a walkman wizard, dealing out an aesthetically beautiful seance of strange and slippery shapes, tangling up dialogue with wah-scarred short-wave.
Bristol 11 November 2019 “My vagina’s really angry”, goes the walkie-talkie on the table, crackling in flick-knifed distortion and abrupt statics. DJ Ductape has a few people scattered about outside the venue, supplying miscellaneous inputs to her show — one random conservationist, the other drumming railings and yet another going Mozart with random Casio melodies.
(self-released) A re-visit to one of my favourite Legendary Pink Dots albums, Asylum Relaspe re-shapes the patients’ mood, and propels its themes with new perspectives. Some tracks are obvious nods to Asylum’s original content, but others are more slippery with context, wiggling out of the woodwork, adding to the fun as Patrick Q Wright’s musical nous excites the eleven tracks therein, his fevered violin playing and voice spinning […]
Editions Mego Back in the late nineties, in an attempt to distract myself from the drilling sounds whilst waiting to be seen by the dentist, I flicked though this lad mag (I forget the name of it). Amongst the usual antics I spot this review for The Elbow Is Taboo, worlds removed from the normal chart-friendly preferences of the publication,
Bristol 25 October 2019 Well, we may have missed The Jesuits, but Bristol’s Perverts more than made up for any disappointment. The charismatic leader was decked out in a silver jumpsuit, Elvis musical staves stitched to his legs and noddy-eared headgear completing the look. He danced the stage like a demented Tellytubby with this peculiar bent-knee jig as the music behind him jutted like a no-wave convention of […]
Young God / Mute Michael Gira has never shied away from the bareness of the bulb’s inspection – his narrative always gnaws at the fragmented prism of the self, right from the sweaty simplicity of their beginnings to the sophisticated diatribes of the later years, even including the physical force of Swans‘ recent rebirth.
Bristol 6 October 2019 Getting to finally see the Circle offshoot Pharaoh Overlord is a real treat, a melodic spattered-smorgasbord of kraut-inspired groovesomness. Theirs is a full-on sound, juttering in multiples, holding a riff perfectly, mulling it round in daggering dynamics, then throwing it to a glittering horizon that combines with the strobe lighting to just eat into your head.
London 14 September 2019 After a tortuous journey through London and around the building site that is Hackney Wick at the moment, we find ourselves standing outside Studio 9294, one of the many curious venues that Baba Yaga’s Hut uses for its shows. Steel shuttered doors and a street art facade lead us into the concrete bunker that is serving the three bands tonight.
Rocket Composed of British-Iranian musician and composer Kavus Torabi (of Knifeworld, Guapo, Gong and Cardiacs fame), Coil and Téléplasmiste’s Michael J York, and Steve Davis (yes, snooker’s number one of yore, now fully bewitched by all things modular), The Utopia Strong‘s self-titled debut LP is a light and airy piece of work.