Label: Spunk! Format: CDS Trans Am must be the most versatile trio ever to call themselves a band. Who Do We Think You Are? is a terrific little six song showing of this as our boys slip slide right through thirty years worth of musical genres in less than an hour. A fast glance to the almighty (if slightly irritating) vocoder and little dips here and there in […]
Yearly archives: 1999
61 posts
Label: Force Inc. Format: 12″ The title track is something of a typical Techno Animal bass monster, with their characteristic funky breakbeats assuming the usual clattery position in relation to a rather pleasingly warbly bassline, shot through with some relatively restrained splatters of synthy knob-twiddling. As its Kevin Martin and Justin Broadrick at the controls, naturally everything tends to get taken into the extremes of dub delay and […]
Label: Chalice Format: CD, LP Coil have been on a long strange journey into a peculiarly English Pagan folk music, at once urban and ancient, Modern and eternal – and the recent addition of Thighpaulsandra to their collective (un)consciousness has only made things more intriguing. His main contribution to this latest mail-order only album shines through on the Ashra (or even Tangerine Dream…)-like electronic headtrip of the evocatively-titled […]
...long pieces of almost continuous splurges of distortion and dirtily-feeding back pickup-noise, amplifier hum, scuzz, detritus...
Label: Korm Plastics Format: CD Jonathan Coleclough has been a musical associate of such soundscrapers as Organum and Colin Potter, and Windlass is his first CD beyond a limited edition release on Robot Records. The album makes extensive use of Ambient drones to darkling effect, and has all the spectral hallmarks of the chilly wastes of post-Industrial head music. The welling bass tones lurk in murky, but warm, […]
Label: Warp Format: CD,LP Plone are apparently intent on creating timeless electronic melodies; it seems they might have succeeded. For Beginner Piano has ten such examples to offer for posterity, and the spread of influences from John Barry to Lee Perry via the chirping bleeps of their labelmates are evident from the opening tracks “On My Bus” and “Top And Low Rent” onwards. The charming little keyboard melody […]
Label: DHR Format: CD,2LP Lurking behind the Atari Teenage Riot pastiche cover and name is of course none other than Alec Empire, but in ever so strange a mood as to be simultaneously at his most inspired and deranged. Sourced entirely from the programmable music edition of a Gameboy, We Punk Einheit! takes the machine to its limits. Bleeping and blipping like a demented games console circa 1983, […]
Label: Staalplaat Format: CD Stepping to an appropriately martial, mechano-deconstructed beat, The Tape-beatles‘ Good Times weaves a mix of political speech snippets, training-film educational banalities delivered with the wooden certitude of a rigid economic concentration on accumulation of capital and the promotion of that greatest lie of all, free-market competition, into a sometimes thumping orchestral soundscape. Delay is the key, as fragments of a cultural canon splinters in […]
Label: M Records Format: CD,LP Ryan Moore‘s fifth solo album as Twilight Circus is billed as “Dub-Rock-Electronica,” which is about an accurate decription as needed – but with the emphasis as ever on the bass. Moore (who also plays bass with The Legendary Pink Dots, and is likely to batter audiences with inflatable hammers, while dressed in feather boas) has drawn a lot from the UK dub scene […]
Wormwood Live The Forum, London 19th July 1999 When The Residents put on a show, it’s something very special to see indeed; like Jesus Christ Superstar (surely one of the defining moments of pomp-pop-opera, and whose theme provides the opening fanfare as the curtain goes up on the monocular ones) taken beyond the realms of kitsch to a theatricality which defies satire and emerges resplendent as total genius […]
Label: Klangbad Format: CD,2LP The big Krautrock album of ’99? Well, it’s certainly caused a lot of excitement in those circles. Fresh from turning London’s Garage into a gas chamber and ejecting long-time figurehead Jean-Hervé Peron, Faust land in the recorded arena with Ravvivando – twelve tracks of uncompromising noise of vintage quality. Phew! Original members, Hans Joachim Irmler and Zappi Diermaier have assembled four cohorts to continue […]
Label: Go Beat Format: 12″,CDS Appearing in four differing takes from the album version, “Of” is a slippery little track in its “Version” form, with various sound-science vocal samples drifting across its fairly straight-ahead riff with accompanying synth squeals, blips and fallout to tingle the spine and drop down into the realms of pitch-bent fun. The “Remix” gets more jazzy in the bass department, with the drums dropped […]
Label: Output Format: 12″,CDS Opening with an astrological description of someone with their aspect in Mars, “Glasshead” soon makes it like the groovy number to be expected from Four Tet‘s post-Trip Rock excursions in the last year or so, only here magnified, intensified and refined. Sonorous virtualised brass, real-world breakbeats and the strangely fashionable glass-chimes make for a propulsive undercarriage, circled by progressively wayward sax honks, nut-string stroke […]
Label: WEA Format: CD,LP More Dub-based at heart than anything else, Bengali Bantam Youth Experience shows a musical development from Black Star Liner‘s début Yemen Cutta Connection which results in a more streamlined experience, with crisp production letting the bass reverberate around and under delicate keyboard tones, Bollywood strings and all manner of Eastern percussion. There’s some upbeat skanking beats on tracks like “Low BMW” and the laid-back […]
Label: Staalplaat Format: CD Originally released in 1993, The Grand Delusion takes as its themes the very idea of the American nation as a construct of media and cultural signifiers, especially as contextualised by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent events of the Gulf War. As a work of what The Tape-beatles mockingly trademark as Plagiarism®, the record also served as the soundtrack to their […]
Label: Asphodel Format: CD,LP The Heretic of Ether is one of those albums that comes out of the blue, hovers overhead and arond the ears and works its way into the subconscious. Seemingly a concept album concerning the life, death and re-birth of one Gashka Gavör, Moroccan Bedouin (or Badawi) heretic of the title, it makes a timeless quest romance in musical form which buzzes with passion and […]
Label: Silly Boy Lemon Format: CD Dave Brooks has had an interesting musical career, involving a court case taken against him by the local authorities over his playing his bagpipes on Hampstead Heath, a charge he defended by contesting that the pipes are a weapon of war, not a musical instrument. During the compromise which was reached in settlement, it was observed by the judge that bagapipes only […]
Label: Matador Format: CD I respect any album that contains references to Harry Harlow‘s somewhat cruel tests on Rhesus monkeys. The album is Quasi-Objects by Matmos, and the track is of course “Cloth Mother/Wire Mother”. You may not be surprised to find that the baby Rhesus monkeys preferred the cloth mother to the wire mother. What is more surprising is the fact that someone felt the need to […]