Twenty-three years and more of Freq; none of this would have been possible without all the writers, photographers, contributors, family and friends who have helped keep it going this long. Freq has been online in various forms since 1 April 1998; this iteration has been around as of 2010, with […]
Mute Like Phew‘s first album, this collaborative jewel was recorded in Conny Plank‘s legendary studio in Cologne. For the occasion, Chrislo Haas of Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft fame gathered a few like minds to soundscape the surrounds. Alexander Hacke (Einstürzende Neubauten) on guitar, Thomas Stern (Crime And The City Solution) on bass […]
Upset The Rhythm This is frantic, fibrous, a Kat Bjelland-like vocal blender. All hot potato vowel action, roller-coasting a gnarly pickle of a backing. A Meredith Monk cave painting of multi-erupting misrule, spitting feathers and glutinous jelly tangling up and clawing on old school Arto Lindsay-like fret lunacy and buck-a-roo […]
Discus Family Band‘s latest (and self-titled) release, their third since forming in 2015, finds them further exploring their interactions as a quartet and how personal ideas form, and then coalesce when presented to a democracy fully at ease with one another and anxious to express the diversity that jazz welcomes […]
GOD Laibach have been on a winning form since 2017’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, that oozing dark matter and gravelly gravitas of yore gloriously reconfigured, later thrown around on the sonically saturated Wir Sind Das Volk. Now this latest offering, Sketches Of The Red Districts, sees them returning to the conflict-ridden […]
Discus The three members of Shiver like nothing better than to collaborate separately and are involved in numerous projects. The trio itself has been quiet recently recording wise, but the chance to hook up with Yorkshire-based pianist Matthew Bourne at his house was too good an opportunity to turn down […]
Efpi The Beats & Pieces Big Band has been together in one form or another since 2008 and is doing its best to breathe new life into classic big band jazz. The dancefloor filler of its time, moved the head and the heart, and was filled with a sweeping sense […]
Universal In the depths of a bleak January such as this, one might very well find oneself tramping across sodden fields, beneath sullen grey skies, breath forming clouds in the cold and clods of mud clinging to your boots, crows wheeling and calling overhead and a line of skeletal trees […]
Magma / NEWS Belgian four-piece Tukan come at their interpretation of kinetic rock music as if some of them have spent a proportion of their time lost in the intense sweep of post-rave dance music. The drifting synths and Balearic keyboard motifs welded to live drums and bass make for […]
Buried Treasure The slick satin soft-back cover – a sense of luxury housed in a warm bakelite grey, that Festival of Britain motif fanning out in ’50s spirographics. This is a beautiful artefact, a labour of love from Alan Gubby’s Buried Treasure label, an ode to those pioneering pre-digital days […]
Naïve LA-based Bryan Senti has already placed his debut album Manu online, a post-classical string trio treatise that places minimal Western leanings within a fresh narrative which borrows from the indigenous sounds of his Latin American roots. Finally it is receiving a vinyl release and well deserving of this honour […]
In which Iotar looks back at his year in music for 2022. There’s been so much excellent new music this year that I’m going to break this roundup into regional and thematic sections for ease of reading.
Psychic Hotline Tim Bernardes, one third of Brazilian indie-tropicalia band O Terno, chose the start of 2020 to regroup and focus once again on a solo album that took him from the touring treadmill and allowed him to concentrate once again on crafting something that was entirely his own. The […]
Discus The second album from Bo Meson this year finds his focus reverting to his own unstructured universe, taking the final opportunity to work with cellist Sarah Palmer before she departs these shores. That impetus finds Bo and the assembled players taking one long improvised run at the assorted material, […]
Upset The Rhythm Shake Chain are a confusing and disturbing car crash of semi-danceable proportions. Their Snake Chain album opens with the sound of a post-punk band idly observing some horrifying local disturbance and it kind of grown battier from there.
Constellation “Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs eternally.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes […]
Bureau B The mid- to late nineties was a pretty purple patch for German electronica and it coincided with a similar flurry of genre-less electronic based bands arriving from the States. The beauty of the German acts, like those that preceded them, was the lack of obvious Western tradition and […]
Jazzland Not content with the numerous collaborative activities which he has undertaken recently, Norwegian pianist Bugge Wesseltoft and German producer Henrik Schwarz have chosen to release a second chapter in their duo format, the initial one having been released back in 2011. Their interaction of post minimal piano and electronic […]
Nuclear Blast In which Kev Nickells (right) and Harmony Parker (left) listen to Cradle Of Filth‘s 2021 album Existence Is Futile at the same time and share their thoughts and/or review the record by direct message:
Discus Martin Pyne‘s idea behind Ripples, that of duets between his vibraphone and David Beebee‘s Fender Rhodes, had me hooked immediately. The gauzy, shimmering haze of the vibes let loose from formal shackles and allowed to wander at will is accompanied by the sympathetic shiver of the Rhodes, and sounds […]
Coming to Repeater Radio on 21 December 2022 from 11:00 GMT / UTC will be a rewind and more of the Live and Indirect Sessions co-curated by Freq and Drift of Signifieds so far this year, plus a few extras such as ekslusive Ekoclef and Ekoplekz live sets too. Discord link for […]