The Borderline, London 29 April 2012 It had been raining solid for 24 hours. The streets of London were filled with a babbling brook of water that the sodden masses had to navigate to stop them from getting drenched further and all the while more fell from the sky to dampen peoples Saturday night. As I entered The Borderline the place was already beginning to fill out early. […]
Monthly archives: April 2012
15 posts
Hydra Head Twenty plus years and albums into the long strange trip that is Circle, Manner confirms that they are still a seriously out there band, whose œuvre can encompass punky noise and proggish metal with equal dexterity, a group who are never less than tight and whose playfulness is as convincing as their steely-eyed commitment to the very meaning of rock. This is the band who spearheaded […]
The Tate Modern, London 14 April 2012 In the days following the Laibach “We Come in Peace” show at The Tate Modern it is Mina Špiler’s singing of “Across the Universe” that stays on permanent replay in my head. Such a beautiful nearly acapella lullaby she made of the ominous lyrics, both promise and threat that nothing is ever going to change in this or any universe. ; […]
Fire The hardest working little man in show-business is back. Inventor of the Continuous Ca$h Flow System™, Anti-Christ, appliqué kitten fan, Chicago’s finest Juedo-Christian edutainer, Bobby Conn has, since his first album in 1997, taken more sobriquets for a walk than Tom Cruise has made turgid sequels to Mission Impossible. In a career with ludicrous highlights such as the original video for “Never Get Ahead” (eye-shadowed Bobby in […]
Bureau B This probably isn’t the D.A.F. you’re thinking of. The lines aren’t clean, the electronics are sort of around but incidental and hidden in shards of guitar noise and (real) drum bashing. This isn’t even the D.A.F. of the “Kebab Traume” track on the C81 compilation which was a gateway drug of a track I fell in love with and which set me on a path to […]
DFA Picture a disillusioned man – still barely 40 yet struggling with a spirit crushed by professional failure and a heart broken by disastrous marriages – reaching a point of exhausted resignation and moving in with his aunt. Withdrawing from life, in a few years time he will be dead. That man was Dr Hans Prinzhorn, a German psychiatrist, who earlier, in the course of his short and […]
Fruits de Mer Krautrock is a brilliantly meaningless term, full of meaning. Head Music attempts to show why. There’s motorik music (there’s some on here) which is often what people mean when they say krautrock (they mean it sounds like Neu! or the way Can’s drums flip over one another) and there’s the dense wiggy kosmische space music (which means it sounds like Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream). […]
Rune Grammofon Volcano The Bear have long done their best to confound the simplicities of classification; they’re not simple to sum up as an experimental or avant-garde project (whatever that might mean exactly), and on Golden Rhythm/Ink Music the range of emotions and auditory adventures they offer up is one which can easily – glibly even – be described as such, but which is also a case study […]
Riot Season Once upon a time, some enterprising music writer came up with (or popularised at least) the term “arsequake” to describe the sort of heavyweight sludgy rock which occasionally crawled out of Camden to force itself onto unsuspecting grunge audiences in the Nineties; usually talking about the sort of sounds which stepped very close to the definition of music, then trampled on it, bit off its head […]
Symbolic Insight This is a debut album by Colorado duo Sonolumina. The album mixes ambient music with world music and trance. Between the duo they play a mixture of traditional instrumentation such as flutes, violins and trumpets as well as Indian tablas. The whole comes together in as well. “Fire” features drones and electronic percussion that sound like the beginning of a journey into foreign lands. “Sona” is […]
Monty Maggot The Plague is [post=omenopus-time-flies text=”Omenopus”]‘ sophomore album, a double disc worth of songs that takes us on a whirlwind of an emotional rollercoaster ride across its two silvery surfaces. Disc one (or rather the first disc I placed into the machine, as I have the feeling you could play either disc first) contains the four part concept piece “The Plague.” This is a twenty minute opus […]
Neurot/Supernatural I was wondering, as I took my copy of Topographic Oceans off the turntable, why the dark overlords at Freq Towers felt that I should review the new Ufomammut concept album that will be released in two instalments this year. I scratched my chin a slid the CD from its case and pondered to myself about this. Hmmmmm……… Oro seems to be based around some sort alchemical […]
Noh Poetry Astralfish are Bridget Wishart and Don Falcone, who here create cosmic melodies with a whole host of special guests including Daevid Allen from Gong. With sixteen tracks across its shimmering disc we should venture forth into the beautiful beyond to tell you all what glories there are to behold. The opening track “Far” includes Allen’s gliss guitars and has a other world feel similar to the […]
Important Most bands when releasing a collection of otherwise placeless split vinyl album tracks and remixes end up with a selection of shorter pieces compiled into what often ends up as some sort of a grab-bag of odds and ends. Not so with Nadja, who fit just four tracks on each CD of this two-disc set of recordings from 2007-08, and who also manage to make a coherent […]
Striate Cortex Striate Cortex seems to have gone, in just a few years, from another ‘yet another’ label putting out tiny editions of unheard of artists (or ‘no-audience underground’ as radiofreemidwich have it) to having a pretty heavy catalogue of exquisitely-packaged things. I can’t claim to be a completist but I’m seeing a lot of names on their discography of bands and people who are making great sounds […]