Clouds Hill Bosnian Rainbows is the recently-formed group of Omar Rodriguez-López from The Mars Volta, and supposedly a more pop-like approach to music than he did before. I haven’t encountered Bosnian Rainbows’ studio versions yet, so I was curious to what to expect of this live recording from a series of 10” vinyl documents by Clouds Hill studios in Hamburg. What did I immediately hear? A record of […]
Yearly archives: 2013
214 posts
Ryan Moore has been hard at work on a remaster of his classic 1999 Twilight Circus album Horsie, and it’s a lovingly-tweaked and toned new version, available alongside the entire TC back catalogue here. Below is the original Freq review of the album, which still stands (though sadly hand-crayoned covers don’t translate to digital format quite as easily): Ryan Moore‘s fifth solo album as Twilight Circus is billed […]
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mike Gangloff‘s solo record Poplar Hollow (Blackest Rainbow) – here appearing on swirl-patterned vinyl wrapped up in a gloriously psychedelic sleeve, following on from an earlier self-released edition – bridges the sounds of the two groups he is best-known for. Opening with the plaintive violin round “Queen of the Earth,” it’s easy to hear within Gangloff’s deep attachment to and knowledge of the mountain music of […]
Northern Spy (North America)/ReR (Europe) I was determined not to like this album. I’d signed up to review it in advance of The Necks’ sold out three-night stand at Café OTO in early November – new album review, live gig write-up, . I’ve always like symmetry, me. Yet the album never showed up from the USA. And it kept on not showing up. Eventually, Freq’s estimable editor had […]
Endtyme Having played together at the Supersonic festival and with one joint CDr already under their collective (metal-studded?) belts, Zeni Geva‘s mainman KK Null and post-tuba drone duo Ore slip out this double A-side 7” vinyl single as a little extra, perhaps and hopefully prefacing more joint efforts yet to come. While “Components of Circulation” is as doomy and droney as might be expected (and that’s not meant […]
Lotushouse Is it a joke, disguised as a New Age record? Or a cosmic drone record, masquerading as a joke? In July 2005, a small package was delivered to an address in Stamford Hill, London for the attention of Mr Otto Amon and Mr Solomon Kirchner. The gentlemen who received the package have never revealed who sent it to them or what was inside it but a body […]
(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 moans. Then moments later it’s jumping out of the fire extinguisher smoke going headlong into a percussive jumble […]
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. That said, there’s still hints, around the corners, in not especially dark places, under stones, inside the wind. […]
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 concrete and red-bricked Victoriana, dower, depressing as the flaking magnolia, or the raggedy plastic bag spectres barb wire […]
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 studio. Wandering curiously around this acoustic playground the bright little buttons innocently scrape away at violins, pluck at […]
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. We’ve entered the real rainy season in the City Of Roses, but it was clear and frosty night. […]
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. . Dewey Mahood has been constructing homespun new age guitar meditations since 2008, leaving his native northern California […]
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 ill fated Deviants gig a few months earlier so it was good to see the place heaving with […]
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 three locking horns superbly , notching up quite a temperature, gnawing on each other’s shrapnel-filled halos in screeching […]
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 drums go off like depth charges, and it suddenly occurs to you how badly you’ve missed rock ‘n […]
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. So its only now, two albums and two EPs into their career, that they are hitting British shores […]
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 to have a very distinct filmic language of their own. Here nudity and extreme sadistic violence would take […]
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 quartet moves through a cycle of compositional styles from diatonic tonal material, to atonal, lyrical writing, to twelve-tone, […]