London 23 June 2013 There is a particularly caustic line in “Losing My Edge,” LCD Soundsystem’s scathing critique of changing musical fashion, that sums up perfectly much of what happened between the mid Nineties and the early Noughties: I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and […]
Monthly archives: June 2013
15 posts
Second Language Every now and then, when I need to kill sometime on the internet, I have a checklist of web sites that I’ll go through and have a peek at. The website of Cécile Schott’s project Colleen is one of them. From my sporadic infrequent checks I’d noticed that it had been […]
Important Mysterious Seattle collective Master Musicians Of Bukkake return to the fold after the conclusion of their highly regarded Totem trilogy. Comprising of largely Eastern-tinged soundscapes and ‘ritualised’ music, Totems One, Two and Three are albums that I repeatedly return to, such is the quality and diversity of sounds and […]
The Ex To say that Enormous Door is a classic Ex record, combined with a mighty Afrobeat brass section, would be accurate, but it would also be a copout. What, you might ask, comprises a classic Ex record? Well, one would expect furious, churning polyrhythms, courtesy of drum windmill Katherina […]
Rocket Girl I’m loving the sustained landscaping on this, those puckerings of melodious highlights and zithery arpeggios seemingly shivering out of a slowly clearing mist. That highly composed filmic vibe that transcends time, as if caught in the yearning crystallisation of the moment. A perpetual dawn with contemplative glints of […]
Important Where do I begin – with a simple statement perhaps? Like “this is one of the most important Krautrock albums made during the ’70s,” perhaps? It certainly stands singular amongst most of it contemporaries at the time (1974); it is unique and it’s difficult when reviewing it to find […]
A-Wave When I first slipped the disc into the player I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this collaboration between Japan’s psychedelic jam band Rovo and the wonderful blissful dance tunes of System 7, but it was certainly nothing quite like this. The opening track “Hinotori” (in its single […]
London 29 May 2013 Recently refurbished and nicely polished, the venue presents a fairly comfortable setting for seeing The Handsome Family. The audience is calm and collected, fairly covered in beards and almost certainly here straight from work. One gets into an involuntary beard comparison routine right away and my […]
Thrill Jockey The name of the band and the album gives the game away, as perhaps it should, and the cover image of two musicians walking away towards a line of telegraph poles near-hidden in a dustcloud certainly helps too. The music by Date Palms is immediately suggestive of the […]
Red Wharf Only listened to this twice so far, but I must say its miles more entertaining than the previous Graham Bowers collaboration Rupture. Gone are the studious symphonics, favourably replaced by liberating wonky oompha chip-chop that scatters the wares more psychsomatically without labouring any fixed point.. “Off to Hell […]
Thrill Jockey Phil Manley will already be known to fans of Total Music as a key member of the groups Trans Am and The Fucking Champs. To those of you who really keep your eye on the ball, you will also know that he released a solo album in 2011 […]
Exotic Pylon One year, for Christmas, due to extreme poverty, I had no choice but to make all my Christmas presents. I had finally got my hands on some rudimentary recording equipment, and set about making my friends homemade, heartfelt, brutal noise recordings. I made a CD-R of close-mic’ed electric […]
London 29 May 2013 It’s a Wednesday night in London’s hideously wanky Shoreditch, and we’re in an art gallery, and nobody’s really sure what to expect. Current music media darlings Savages and the achingly hip Bo Ningen have united to give us what they describe as a “sonic simultaneous poem”, […]
Nochexxx I could use Nochexxx to teach Freud and ambivalence. Everything I’ve heard seems to be gnashing against the groove, as if he’s almost willing to let fly and be techno, disco etc but there’s a thick seam of Super(fly)ego holding him back at the last moment and sending him […]
Cleopatra The sleeve of this release says: “After Listening to this Record, your friends may not know you anymore” and you can see what they meant, at least in 1971 when this was first released. Cleopatra seem Hell bent on making Brainticket a thing, re-releasing their classic albums, pushing them […]