Dur Et Doux As your brain tries to get a grip on the multi-perspectives of the MC Escher-like arts, you’re pummelled by the intensity of the vibes on Ni‘s Pantophobie (the fear of everything) LP. I don’t know much about Ni, but I like the souped-up King Crimson metal-headed math rock surprise they are welding here. Pantophobie is a head-banger’s dream of accented angulars and jigsaw shifts, the […]
Michael Rodham-Heaps
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Silken Tofu An improvised collision between W (James Welburn) and V (Juliana Venter), the first side of which (“Concave”) goes straight in there with vocal exorcism. A cathartic off-the-bone presentation that has Juliana Venter shrieking satisfyingly into the void.
One Little Indian The beats might be more machine tooled than salvaged these days, but Test Dept still haven’t lost any of that rage or taste for addressing injustice. This return to form is snarling at the usual subjects, the dirty end of capitalism and its bankrupt ideologies.
4AD Sadly, I wasn’t old enough to see Rema-Rema in the flesh — it was only as a result of being an avid 4AD label nut that I spied this curio in the mail-order catalogue back in the early 1990s, an EP that almost instantly became one of my treasured finds. A squealing black heart of a surprise that I can now some forty years later finally sample […]
Editions Mego Thighpaulsandra‘s voice is all over this one, words full of shady vampirics and sliding context, your imagination stitching the suggestion as they suck in the scenery around them. He’s a great story-teller too (I reckon he has a lucrative future in audiobooks for sure), fleshy and descriptive, the narratives noir-flowering a certain flamboyance
Conspiracy International Sonically, Cosey Fanni Tutti‘s Tutti LP surfs in there with smeary cornet across tight electronic zip-wires. The canvas is full of Torvill and Dean ice slides and squishy purcussive skids, ingredients that send your brain in prism(ing)multiples.
three:four A rusty gate harmonica to vocals crazy paving the interlocking elastics. Loving the wonky symmetry of Orgue Agnès‘s debut LP release A Une Gorge, a perfumery of geometric criss-cross and percussive prowl bristling your bonce.
Important Éliane Radigue‘s Geelriandre / Arthesis loves time, luxuriates in it. Its frequencies gradually slip its grasp, or your perception, in that slow luxuriating bend to the goods that eats into your consciousness, subliminally cuts, the eerie exponentials creeping up on you like the textural dance of a Max Ernst painting. Solemn, solar, tumouring an odd timbre that percussively curls on tight jewels of Cageian prepared-ness
4AD It’ll End In Tears Being the kind of guy to gravitate towards the melancholic, there’s certain records that stay with you, speak an (un)comfortable truth, live far beyond the era they were created in. Dreampop supergroup This Mortal Coil‘s It’ll End In Tears is such a jewel, a timeless beauty whose cover versions went beyond mere homage, opened up lots of extra-curricular exploration
Tiny Global Productions Forty years young, The Nightingales are back with a storming album. Perish The Thought is a sharp and saturated beast wrapped in a lush baroque of a cover full of rich flora, that if you stare hard enough is a garden full of death, subtly strangled in barb wire. The Crass-like eye-popping photo-montage of the inlaytoo (is that Elvis floating above tenements?)
Bristol 13 November 2018 Deep in the building’s basement, illuminated by flashing red strobes, Copper Sounds totally seduced with their ritualistic roast of belt-driven bicycle wheels and contact mic(ed) boulders. The undulating mechanism murmured like an arthritic after-shadow in the PA as the calcium rub of the stoney surfaces was effect-fed, bent across grainy percussives in a parade of pendulum-painting pennies
Front And Follow Kick-starting Front and Follow‘s new series celebrating the past and present of some of the label’s regular contributors, the Sone Institute (after a six year hiatus) takes Ex Post Facto by the horns, presenting new work, along with a bonus download album of retrospective highlights and unreleased secrets from their archives. The new work is brilliant
[PIAS] As a long-time fan, I found Dead Can Dance’s comeback album Anastasis a tad disappointing – that mesmerising sheen of old seemed oddly suppressed, and I don’t think the use of machined percussives helped matters either. Anyways, hearing Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry had a new album out, I thought I’d give them another try — and I’m so glad I did
Upset The Rhythm Well, this baby smacks you in the face with its furnace-like enthusiasm in an impenetrable feast of guitar, drums and yelling from the Leeds duo Guttersnipe. If you’ve seen them live, you’ll be happy to hear that that self-same ferocity is bleeding out of this release unimpeded.
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.
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