Freq has been online in various forms since 1 April 1998; this iteration has been around as of 2010, with an archive of older material available.
...a gripping and unobtrusively intelligent thriller whose conflation of sublime drama and ridiculous comedy is a balancing act worthy of the New Hollywood greats to whom it brandishes its artistic and thematic debt like it’s an American Express card.
Although only coming in at a little under half an hour, their third album conjoins numerous guest vocalists from all around the world with generally rhythmic but extraordinarily varied musical soundscapes to produce a journey that never lets up.
...Some sounds just find themselves fitting a mood in combination with a moment and an environmental space. Which is perfectly okay, despite what less nuanced opinion holders might decree. Enter then, two albums that best fit the listening niche for Sunday mornings bathed in a blaze of autumn sunshine… which is handy given their close seasonally-aligned arrival.
..things haven’t changed much with the way the album is structured in relation to the band’s previous studio offerings. We have four shorter tracks on (the virtual in my case) side one, followed by a much longer track filling out side two. The album is supposedly themed on ghosts and things that seem to exist but don’t..
...weaving textural space-laden soundscapes from varied electronic means to concoct a series of pieces that describe journeys of vast distances, but experienced from some sense of womb-like calm.
In a moment of darkly comic madness, a primary school teacher gets so frustrated with the one endlessly disruptive pupil in her class that she decides to lock him up in her basement until either he calms down enough to learn, or they forge some kind of ersatz emotional bond.
Stitched together with lots of intricate instrumental details and vocal layers, The Counting Game generously reveals its shrewdly crafted strengths over successive spins, to make it one of Antietam’s most adventurous and most accessible go-to long-players.
In this hackneyed psychological thriller, a struggling writer (Dakota Johnson) is contracted to complete the latest novel by a reclusive bestselling author (Anne Hathaway) following her mysterious accident. But when she moves in, and gets sidetracked into researching her employer’s difficult family life, she finds far more than she bargained for.
...thanks to the enthusiasm of Rothko's Mark Beazley, a collection of the poems has been given suitable soundscape backings and with that the opportunity to escape back into the vibrant, grimy streets from whence the initial inspiration sprung.
An open marriage turns out to be more closed than its participants thought when a third wheel screws himself on to their conjoined chassis in this refreshingly sophisticated sex comedy. With gleefully heavy-handed metaphor, the plot is kicked into gear by a literal car crash that brings two couples together and flings their combined marital problems all over the highway.
After a long, hot year of Other Months, Spooptober is finally upon us, and what better way to celebrate this spoopiest of seasons than with season two of The Creep Tapes, which has just dropped on Blu-Ray from Shudder? (Other than repeatedly listening to "The Monster Mash", obviously).
Jessica Chastain plucks malevolently on her apron strings in a dual role as both goodie and baddie in this one-line pitch of a horror movie about a mother fighting off a supernatural being who competes for her young daughter’s attention by taking on her appearance.
Asylum Variations shows no retread of the previous album, but a full-on evolution of what was laid down before, that familiar disaffected voice strung between the splashy synthesis and pedal-pawed bite.
...patience reveals the record’s genuinely rewarding virtues via the divergent matrices of its aforementioned arrangements, even if its significance in the wider canon will take a little while longer to determine, principally through ever-enthralling live presentations.
Following the brilliant Barbarian and the even better Weapons, comedian-turned-filmmaker Zach Cregger completes a horror hat-trick by stamping his directorial personality all over this tense and surprisingly imaginative reboot of the barely-mourned franchise based on a popular computer game.
It is quite a brave thing to put together an eleven-piece ensemble for your first solo outing, but composer and accordionist Kirsten Symczycz has surrounded herself with a group of fine and sympathetic players that do great justice to her seven long and winding instrumental tales.
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...the artists behind the three new long-form releases and one archival set below draw their strength from such sonic æther funnelling, both consciously and subliminally.