The Garage, London 11 September 2010 Reanimated musical corpses aren’t much of a news story these days – after The Velvet Underground and Throbbing Gristle reformations, nothing comes as a surprise. I was shocked then to realise just how stunned I felt to hear that The Pop Group had got back together to allegedly “blow the dust off the old songs and pick up where we left off…” […]
Yearly archives: 2010
105 posts
Versatile Given a penchant for vintage analogue synthesis, Goblin and motorik drumming, and having named themselves after a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer game, it is not only appropriate, but almost de rigueur, that Zombie Zombie should find themselves tackling the oeuvre of a key progenitor of electronic cinema soundtracks. John Carpenter‘s themes and incidental music for the groundbreaking low-budget and high-thrills genre movies was pioneering, and hugely influential […]
Rooster When this album was released way back when, in 1996, it was at a moment when electronic music of all sorts was riding high in the charts and otherwise, and stoner rock riffage as produced by a hirsute quartet from Bristol somehow became buried in a slew of trip-hop releases which were apparently satisfying the attention-spans of dope-smokers everywhere. Meanwhile, guitar rock seemed to have been hijacked […]
Ad Hoc Every now and then you come across a product born of such radically alternative starting assumptions that it gets treated with near indifference by its potential audience, as though to even entertain the possibility of its existence could cause the tapestries of multiple musicotheologies to unravel. Infinity by K-Space is one such product: a CD that never plays the same music twice, intertwining ideas from disciplines […]
Ohm Resistance So. THE BLOOD OF HEROES. By THE BLOOD OF HEROES. Both times in caps-lock Billy Mays mode. None of this lower-case crap. That just wouldn’t suit THE BLOOD OF HEROES. I imagine by the time this review goes online it’ll be in bold as well. Which is as it should be. So who, or what, is or are THE BLOOD OF HEROES? What they are is […]
Samadhi Sound There are few musical instruments that are as conceptually pleasing as the no-input mixing board. It is part of a rich tradition in experimental music in which peripheral hardware and audio equipment are repositioned as musical instruments in their own right (turntables, effects pedals and tape recorders could be seen as other examples). It is a controller of sound without anything in the way of a […]
Dirty Water “… kind of record that gets played at the coolest party …where the keg ends up in the pool…” says the press release… I’ve seen that film, but truthfully, never been to a party with a keg, let alone a swimming pool. I do remember a particular glue-crazed house-wrecker where sofas were incinerated, windows smashed and roof squatted like a prison riot, complete with slate thrower. […]
Not The Sixties Improvised music is sometimes more interesting in principle than practice, which so often involves accomplished musicians demonstrating consummate skill or immaculate taste (but rarely both at the same time). The Little Princess Orchestra happily have no truck with such nonsense, approaching communal music creation with the same primal inquisitiveness that Neanderthals must have possessed when they first discovered the joy in banging two stones together. […]
Rune Grammofon What is Puma? This young Norwegian trio started out as a jazz trio, and they all studied at jazz conservatories. They also fit in numerous other projects, such as Jaga Jazzist, Bushman’s Revenge and Westerhus recently joined Nils Petter Molværs‘ new trio. As Intro winners (Norwegian award for young jazz muzicians) in 2006 they where also given oppportunities to go on tour with noise artist Lasse […]
Casa Nueva Strangely enough, the first thing that comes to mind when listening to Kevin Dunn is just how quintessentially English he sounds – Brian Eno, Wire, TV Personalities – that kind of English. What a surprise then to read the sleeve notes and find out that he actually comes from Atlanta, Georgia. Having known the name but somehow missed out on the music at the time, this […]
Conspiracy Ah, already after the first riffs of Wonder, I get a sense of “this is my kind of heavy metal”. Hard and the kind of old fashioned heavy feeling; that sort of heavy feeling from some of the the 80s bands like Dio, that made my body want to slow down, BUT with the speed and intensity of metal hardcore act Converge. As fresh as the Swiss […]
Munster Mid-Sixties garage rock seems in retrospect to have been a grassroots movement on a truly global scale. Forty-five years on, obsessive labels like Munster and QDK Media are still unearthing lost curios, originating from ever more remote and unlikely locations. Who’d have thought that healthy garage scenes thrived in Cambodia and Iran? In comparison, Peru is pretty mainstream by now, a number of compilations having documented the […]
Pica Disk From the Pica Disk website: “Cover by Hair Stylistics is the july edition of Jazkamer‘s ongoing 2010 monthly Compact Disc series. This month’s album finds Hegre and Marhaug joined by Iver Sandøy playing noisecore. Noisecore is a crossover between grindcore and noise music. One could call it improvised grindcore, as its emphasis is on short bursts of blastbeat drumming backed by screaming vocals and heavily distorted […]
PMag Plymouth’s Pocket Magnetic arrive all packaged in dayglo yellow warning signs – kind of Autobahn meets Computer World. The cover certainly holds a clue as to what to find inside, but there’s more to Pocket Magnetic than a low budget menschmaschine. More than Kraftwerk themselves, Pocket Magnetic remind me a bit of Karl Bartos’ 2003 solo album Communication, with which they seem to share at least a […]
LilBee The first part of the first track on Brooke Sharkey‘s A Taste Of Truth EP provides something of a conundrum for the monolingual reviewer, being in French. However, in some ways it’s a bonus- the backing is fairly traditional guitar-based stuff, though undeniably pleasant, and I have no idea what the lyrics are about, leaving my whole first impression entirely dependent on two things- the melody and […]
Paw Tracks Prince Rama‘s ecstatic mantra-core would have smacked of mere exoticism hailing from any other clime than the Florida Hare Krishna community where this trio met. What we hear in their Shadow Temple album, more so than any of their previous releases, is an expression of a domestic American syncretic Hinduism, which embraces a core Saivism that is at first glance at odds with the Vaishnava Krishna-bhakti […]
Critical Mass In Search of Hawkwind is a tribute album, whereby nine venerable old battle hymns originally cranked out by the veteran psychedelic cosmonauts are re-interpreted by younger, hipper bands, mostly from the US (at least I think so — I’m not actually hip enough to have heard of all of them). There have been other Hawkwind tributes, but they’ve tended to be low-budget releases featuring deservedly obscure […]
Drifting Falling London bliss-rockers Kontakte continue their journey into the outer reaches of motorik rhythms and chimingly elevated guitar work with an EP which works around the theme in differing ways. “Superbug” itself boils over with tightly-wound energy, surging from twinkly psychedelic guitar melodies which dive off into shoegaze metal territory on a bedrock of cascading, weighty beats and a buzzing undertow. It’s reminiscent of the way Bowery […]