(self-released) Starts in a dawn chorus of cymbal scrapes and reverbatory metals, rebounding some abandoned factory walls, dust bars of light catching the . A mild introduction that opens to the raspy slaps of “Grey Meat,” a curmudgeon that clumsily knocks into drawers full of cutlery franked by Gnostic monk […]
Monthly archives: November 2013
16 posts
Editions Mego This’ll be the second Freq review where I start with “I miss Coil” but I do miss them, they felt necessary, at least in my bubble. They didn’t seem in the least contingent and thus neither of them being here – still – is vaguely preposterous, almost illogical. […]
The Island, Bristol 22 November 2013 The venue’s an abandoned police station, now converted into an arts centre/studio space. The grim nature of the place gets more pronounced as you step deeper into the building, those institutional hues greying against the eerie wipe-clean gloss of the white tiling. The cold […]
Exotic Pylon There is a television advertisement for Cow and Gate infant food supplement currently doing the rounds (at this juncture it is more or less obligatory to state that “Other baby and toddler nutritional products are available”), which shows a gang of little nippers unleashed in a spacious recording […]
Portland, Oregon 19 November 2013 Portland was at it’s finest on Tuesday night, for this sold-out performance of Dirty Three guitarist Mick Turner and indie staple Bill Callahan, who used to make music under the Smog moniker before returning to his given name for a series of well received albums. […]
Thrill Jockey On Drifter’s Temple, Plankton Wat takes us on a vision quest through a dream of America’s West Coast. The ghosts of deadheads and time-travelling Rainbow Family gather in ancient sylvan redwood groves, playing the endless groove, while immortal orange-clad Boddhisatvas hold down the pedal note on a tambura. […]
London 15 November 2013 After some mix up on the door where I had to admit to being me twice (not sure why anyone would want or even pretend to be me), I make my way down a crowded staircase into a packed Borderline. I’d not been here since the […]
Trost Full of throat-throttling goodness, this powerhaus trio carves quite a ruckus that effectively fills that massive void of a stage depicted on the cover. Right from the offing Caspar Brötzmann and Marino Pliakas‘s hexagonal arcs seem to leer, goading the somersaulting percussions and hypothermic cymbals of Michael Wertmüller. All […]
Captured Tracks To The Happy Few, the new album from seminal So.Cal. shoegaze/noise pop act Medicine, is like being submerged in a lake of amniotic glycerine, and watching the sky. Guitars like outboard motors disturb the stillness, making waves, while chanteuse Beth Thompson lulls you towards the depths. Jim Goodall‘s […]
London 9 November 2013 The Black Heart is filled to capacity to witness Jex Thoth’s first ever London date. I’ve been waiting and wanting to see this band live since the release of the first album, but for some reason every time they planned to tour here it fell through. […]
De Wolfe Music Library 1968 was the year that British horror films began to turn away from the cosy gothic perennials of Dracula and Frankenstein and move into the unknown territory of heathenism and the darkness of the English woodland. These new tales of secret rites and pagan communities had […]
Ex Cathedra / Words+Dreams …so there’s a thing with a lot of musical vaguely designated as ‘classical’ where the descriptions don’t per se tell you a great deal. ‘Pounding kraut vibes’ tells you most of what you need to know about a record but “ a palindromic movement structure, the […]
Ektro (CD)/SIGE (vinyl) Enharmonic Intervals (for Paschen Organ) emanates rousingly from that sharply-scrawled nonplace where Magma meets Khanate, where touches of doomy martial pomp worthy of Coil at their most mordantly impressive march alongside the scuttling electrical signals of cables jumbling in decay and the dusty, keening grandeur of Dead […]
Raster-Noton Ryoji Ikeda is perhaps best known for his mastery of the ultra-minimal, for harnessing digital drones, glimmers and glitches to make unfolding sounds take seemingly apparent form in glacial patterns of space-filling lightness, of sounds so subtle as to only be noticeable when they have gone. When placed in […]
LM Duplication This music is presented to the world via the extremely productive LM Duplication label, the LM standing for ‘Living Music’, which couldn’t be a more appropriate association for the music recorded here. Life is full of grit and dirt, no matter how much we in the west try […]
Enraptured The future could be what it used to be. Are you disappointed in the lack of flying cars and chrome cities? Disappointed in the lack of robot maids? Miffed at the persistence of pesky inconveniences like war and famine? Retro-futurism is the idea of the future in the past, […]