Sedna Chronicles Sedna Chronicles is a travel guide to the occult, unusual and downright eerie. English Heretic’s Andy Sharp and The Hare & The Moon’s Grey Malkin attempt to channel the weird energies trapped within their favourite Scottish haunts, and to be honestly they do a great job, the accompanying fold-out guide enhancing the experience.
Michael Rodham-Heaps
492 posts
Rocket This re-visit to The Utopia Strong sound-world is a meditative one, full of sketched atmospherics, where splintered notes seem to levitate, shimmer to symbiotically smile. A chemistry lesson whose individual tracks blur into a sensory whole, subtly pulled three ways, but still sparking a hypnotic unity.
Zam Zam What an arresting cover, the naked singer holding up the ace of hearts and the inevitable ace of spades, “the most powerful cards in the deck”, as weathered metaphors for the prismed verve contained therein, compass points for the emotional minefield of first love, first heartbreak and the limbo between.
HomAleph As much as I still enjoy the ‘”ded ded ded” years and esoteric tsunamis of yore, the warm melancholia of this latest offering is melting firmly in there, clawing a cottoned reflective that’s the perfect late night accompaniment to some moonlit Bordeaux. The butterflying bleed of the opening “If A City…”, a sombre sway pinned in stilted piano. Sparse keys striding between David Tibet’s words which weave […]
Metropolis The storyteller returns, sardonically sniping at the last two years, its imagery vultured from the four-walled mirrors of the pandemic and the continuing sorry state of things. 2019’s Angel In The Detail was certainly a high point and this is definitely a continuation of that success, as the poppy enclave of “This Is The Museum” swims in a divine sing-along-ability, its musical backdrop prodding and poking a […]
Bristol 30 April 2022 There is a definite aura of devotion around The Trinity this evening. The old church is hosting a band that boasts a devoted following, some attendees having trekked around after them since their first appearance in the UK back in 1994. While undertaking their world tour, Low have chosen to invite friends and young firebrands Divide And Dissolve as support, which is a homecoming […]
Zam Zam The solo project of Bristol-based artist Christelle Atenstaedt, Orryx’s ethereal pull is undeniable, the guitar-scapes of her earlier EP now enriched with beats and keyboard kinetics, and of course that beguiling voice which glues the package together.
Dais Closely following the success of Coil‘s first volume of Musick To Play In the Dark came this second helping, a thematic continuum that surfed further out there, saw the group collapsing back with the departure of Drew McDowall to a trinity of players, a fact which made for a tighter, more personally focused beast, on a collection where hindsight haunts your every listen.
Blue Tapes Those prolific Ashtray Navigations have more lo-fi on your hi-fi – a ten-track odyssey that leaves your brain a fizzin’. The diode-soaked bag-piping of the first takes no prisoners, brings back that glittery glutton of “Bird’s Beak”, oozy with a plunge-pool of sticky sauce celebratories. Meditatives you tune into, adjust your antennas towards and the slippery eels of “The Tactic” make it far easier to disgust.
Bristol 10 March 2022 The acoustic charms of Stroud-based Maja Lena are first up, a songbird sweetness of voice attached to a fingerpicking deftness, that ’60s Yamaha neck dwarfing her fingers, her vocals skipping like wind-blown grass to gentle tonal shifts, then leaping unexpectedly in joyous abandon. The slumbering reflections of her Christmas-themed song reverbing to those silent quilted fields, the matted mulch of morning leaves.
Cooking Vinyl Back in the distant ’80s, Loop’s heavy sound was a breath of fresh air. A hazy comfort blanket surfing a scissored sustain that a few years later and three albums in simply imploded, its nucleus split straight down the middle and slung-shot out into various new distractions. As if success had become a catalyst for change, Robert Hampson ditched his guitar for the seriously cerebral electronics […]
Erototox Decodings On the shirt tails of Zappi Diermaier’s recent solo project Monobeat Original comes this exciting take on faust. A primal purr that, I suspect, seeped into the series of rough mixes that Zappi, along with Schneider TM’s Dirk Dresselhaus and FaUSt’s Elke Drapatz produced, then sent out to the a host of Berlin-based collaborators to re-furnish.
ZamZam / Adaadat Hermetic mysticism, alchemy, and past-life regressions bend into this, with the recent birth of a new life further elevating the esoteric thematics. You could say this a labour of love, obsessively circling in tangled narrative and a brooding piano that empathically scaffolds. An instrumental centrifuge that percussively pearls your attention, ebbs the enigmatic itch of Mark Wagner’s words and their slipping meanings.
Bristol, 21 January 2022 This is a pairing of contrasting acts, both enterprising bastions of electronica, one coming from a cinematic sensibility, the other skewing the dance equation.
Southern Lord (CD & US vinyl) / Pomperipossa (vinyl in Europe) Recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival back in 2018, this is a powerful testament to the Anna von Hausswolff live experience. She eases you in gently with the lilting latitudes of “The Truth, The Glow, The Fall’, a folksy saturation pinning you back, a black magic love awash with swelling orchestration, that voice resining the architecture – […]
Southern Lord An improvised uprooting of their Pyroclast and Life Metal albums — or epic exorcism — suitably broadcast on Samhain of 2019, these three tracks catch SunnO))) at the end of their world tour, emotionally expanding the raw material, giving the BBC 6Music listeners a monumental feast.
Bedevil Fermenting for over six years, Scapa Foolscap began as a series of rough sketches initially inspired by the shipwreck-strewn waters of Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, understated soundscapes that gave Pumajaw’s vocalist Pinkie Maclure plenty of space to explore as it slowly evolved into the duo’s eighth album.
Abrams Now I’ve been a Throbbing Gristle fanboy for most of my adult life, became an avid follower of the many splinters that branched from its demise, a host of alienated sounds I felt a positive connection with — Coil, Chris and Cosey and of course Psychic TV. Yeah, PTV’s pre-acidhaus days really struck a chord back then, although I was very sceptical about Thee Temple Ov Psychick […]