Zamzarec This is a truly haunting experience; think Mazzy Star with a whisper of Shelleyan Orphan or Alison Shaw from Cranes, but softer, swollen in the ambiguous. Its language a diffusion of hues, suggestions for your mind to play with, backed by switchblades of horizon that pull at the frame, inverting the scenery in cycling hooks of guitar, droning key-lines, tumbling percussives.
Michael Rodham-Heaps
492 posts
Play Loud! Oozing an off-kilter chemistry, Guru Guru were full of escape plans and wormholing excess filled with a real “let’s see what these toys can do” verve. The first three tracks of their début album UFO (re-released at last on both black and turquoise vinyl by Play Loud!) hold court to a certain rock joie de vivre, a freeform adventure that surges at you both explosive and mesmerizing, […]
TRI This is the first 46,000 Fibres release in eleven years and it’s been well worth the wait. I first experienced The Fibres back in 1995, snapping up their début offering Emanates at a local record shop that has long since disappeared back into the anodyne dullness of town. A strange brew that exacted a curious pull – a joy of glinting directions and vascular honeycombs. Now, years later, […]
Bureau B Some lovely head-spheres to had here; Bureau B have a penchant for headphoned fayre and this gem of new production that gathers together three renowned Berlin guitarists certainly hits the mark. A tirade of Neubauten‘s Jochen Arbeit, Ziguri‘s Günter Schickert and Schneider TM‘s Dirk Dresselhaus that literally dissolves into one cohesive whole, their usual weapons of choice circuit bent into a necropolis of simmering silica in […]
Rocket On the back of last year’s Infinity Machines double comes this dinky three tracker, the traumatic jazz of yore siphoned into some gloriously sculpted discord – 36 minutes that are seriously pissed off. A notion that gathers momentum on the slinky low-slung beginnings of the opener – a Jah Wobble dub, all languid and wanting. “There’s too many faces in the mirror!”, exclaims Paddy. “I can’t decide […]
Ici D’Ailleurs It’s great to hear Semtex again and what a fizzing refresher of fortitude “Sleep” still is – a bastardised drum foray tied to a ugly slurry of overdriven noise. Yeahhhh, as first tracks go, this is a tight shiny driven thing, a dervishing centrifuge storming the brain in raw energy.
Edamame The sky is bright blue, adrift with white motherships of the imagination – an inbound vision on which the shimmering haze of this recent four-tracker from Lush glides. Blind Spot marks a welcome return to the fray after the tragic death of their drummer halted their desire to continue far too many years ago. Listening to this handsomely designed EP (something Chris Bigg of 4AD fame has […]
Village Underground, London 19 March 2016 The expectation was unbearable. The support act, Autrenoir (an alliance of Paul Régimbeau — AKA Mondkopf — and Greg Buffier of Selenites and Saáad), had finished half an hour ago and the Nurse With Wound contingent were assembled hirsute by the side of the stage.
Light In The Attic This Heat This Heat‘s self-titled 1979 début album is a document of three musicians finding their mojo in an abandoned meat locker. Although much of the LP was recorded elsewhere, it generally feels — for the most part — a very enclosed experience, as if (I like to think) you can hear the damp walls of those black’n’white promo-shots reverberating within the fibre of […]
The Alphabet Business Concern Musically, it’s a frantic fairground erupting cosily in your head – an aesthetic matched by the queasiness of Cardiacs‘ badly made-up faces. I remember their video for “R.E.S.” — the turtlenecks, nodding heads and punch’n’judy antics, beamed barmy from the offset. An eensy-weensy bit disturbing too; as your eyes filled with those fixed pearly grins and purple bruises — fffurrrrrrhhh — They were like […]
4AD More loveliness from the vaults of 4AD, and the label have pulled out all the stops on this one. A five-disc Lush retrospective housed in a glossy hardback book, surely destined to become an instant collector’s item. Not only are the historical releases Gala, Spooky, Split and Lovelife captured, there’s tons of session tracks, demos and previously unreleased miscellany appended to each disc too – in all […]
St John at Hackney, London 5 December 2015 It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas: illuminations strung across the lampposts of the capital, sparkling every night like twinkling stars; the inky darkness of the night already setting in by mid afternoon; overflowing trays of “luxury” mince pies everywhere you look. And – really – what says “Christmas” more than a Faust gig?
Young God (North America) / Mute (Rest of the world) Disc 1 — White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity After a disastrous flirtation with a major label on The Burning World, White Light From The Mouth of Infinity was a self-financed regaining of confidence for Michael Gira. The acoustic spirit of Burning World was still high on the agenda, but the lacklustre verve that cursed that LP was ditched […]
Troum and Yen Pox – Mnemonic Induction Transgredient This disc shows the collaborative strengths of the German bliss-mongers Troum coupled with the menacing ambience of America’s Yen Pox, originally released by Malignant Records in 2000 and remastered for this re-release on Transgredient. Mnemonic Induction is a 63 minute journey divided into quarters, each track eating the tail of the next to make essentially one continuous dronescape, the whole […]
The Spheres Swastikas For Noddy was my favourite of Current 93‘s work until Thunder Perfect Mind stole its glory some years later. It’s very much a family affair, a pulling of disparate threads directed by David Tibet chasing his hallucinogenic vision of a crucified Noddy.
Arrow Films Aleksei German‘s Hard To Be A God is sci-fi in the Tarkovsky tradition, very much a state of mind rather than flashy tech and shiny spaceship CGI. The film is based on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky‘s 1964 novel of the same name, and was completed after the director’s death by his son Aleksei German Jr. The back story is that a group of earth scientists (although […]
Editions Mego If one artist could embody epic, Thighpaulsandra would try to top it. Rumour has it his first solo record was so big he had to spread it across two releases and one of those was a double’s worth. Musically well travelled and mustering a mind-boggling proficiency of styles, he happily hopscotches from classical to avant electronic, proggy free jazz to full-on kraut and a whole of […]
Industrial That foetal thump propelling this is cavernous; and at high volume it’s huge. Dynamically churning up the digital silt as collapsing structures fall through in cacophonies of brokenness, shadowy vectors that smoulder in the arch of pulsing ambiguity. Yep, my favourite trio Carter Tutti Void are back with more post-industrial mutations to be savoured. The splintered majesty that started with Transverse (and I still can’t believe that […]