The Scratch Club The Scala, London 25th March 1999 First of all, the venue; once upon a time, The Scala was both the worst and best of London’s independent cinemas – terrible seats, ropey sound and a generally scuzzy atmosphere, saved by the murals, the cat and a programming selection which included all-night shod of the lowest possible taste, saved by the occasional hard-to-see gem. Then came the […]
Monthly archives: March 1999
7 posts
Label: Warp Format: 12″,CDS A curiously accessible mire of vocal samples splutter and waft from and electronic soup from almost the first moment of “Windowlicker”, before Richard James applies some customarily deep-fried production to what could otherwise have been a languorous bass and kickdrum smoocher. Instead, linearity gets a darned good rogering, the various melodic lines pulped, smeared and bloated at the still-strange knobs and faders of one […]
The Peel Sessions Live Queen Elizabeth Hall,The South Bank Centre, London 19th March 1999 John Peel‘s here! John fucking Peel’s here! And he’s still the coolest old guy in England! For his Peel Sessions Live gigs, he’s chosen to host a Digital Hardcore Night! AT THE QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL! How the fuck does that work? It’s all seated, y’see, as are we all when Christoph de Babalon does his extended noise track. […]
Label: 4AD Format: CD Mid-’80s effusive journalism alert! I mean, for fuck’s sake, they’re on 4AD, the tracks range from ’81 to ’85, and one of them (“No Motion”) is produced with the aid of Robin Guthrie, creator of the “swirling sonic cathedrals” (see what I mean?) The Cocteau Twins hung out in being all elegant and ethereal and giving it some with the “Frou-Frou Foxes”. It has to be ethereal (see, it’s that word again; […]
Label: Warp Format: 12″,CDS One of the scarier tracks from his Organism album, “Year Of The Apocalypse” finds Jimi Tenor deploying the kind of sub-funky sounds and sequences which give swingbeaty house such a bad name and such a loose-limbed grotesqueness. That the subject is making love and partying hard in the face of Millennial doom is only to be expected, and engenders a certain amount of choral interludes and pitch-bent oscillators at […]
Label: MDZ Format: 12″ Oh my, 29 and then some minutes of one song. Well. They are thorough. “Gelbphase” in all five versions is a nice little sample of what the Oh. boys can do, complete with evidence of their love of the analogue and a healthy influence of 1970s video games. Oh’s own remix-Elektronauten, and the Metamatic Remix are not unlike a ear blast stroll through a […]
Label: Kranky (CD)/Constellation (Vinyl) Format: CDS,12″ Perhaps the criminally overused expression “intense” can be used with justification, just this once, to describe the sound of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The mysterious Canadian nine-piece roll out another of those accelerative weighty soundscapes that we’d always hoped Glenn Branca would produce. Discipline and a telepathic, egoless sense of control push the multilayered epic “Moya” into peaks and troughs similar in […]