Peripheral Conserve A few predictions: you like sleeves by Babs Santini. If you’re my age you’ll have spent a fair amount of time in obscure record stores and fairs staring at Nurse With Wound covers and wondering if it’s worth the 25 – 100 quid they were asking for the original vinyl. You’ll have grown to love those sleeves even if you didn’t shell out at the time. […]
Yearly archives: 2013
214 posts
LM Dupli-cation Bahriye Ciftetellisi is the fourth release on Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost(AKA A Hawk and a Hacksaw)’s new label LM Duplication, which is proving to be prolific considering it only gave birth to its first release a year ago. From the moment the percussion kicks in on the first track after Cüneyt Sepetçi’s clarinet solo “Bahriye Cif Ciftetellisi” proves to be an aggressive assault to the […]
Rocket Bloody hell lads. Bloody hell. So I’ve seen Teeth of the Sea a few times. First time a good four years ago when they were playing with Gnod and Thought Forms at a time when Gnod were, with due deference, about the best band in the country. So my memory of that night is a bit tinted in Gnod’s colours. TotS live, as I recall (this is […]
Corsica Studios London 29 September 2013 Ok, there was a lot of buzz on the internet about these shows. First it was the fact that this would be Mainliner’s first European tour for a long time, and second that it would not feature the original line up. But the more I thought about it the addition of Bo Ningen’s Kawabe Taigen wasn’t such massive leap into the realms […]
Bureau B I have to say I was ignorant of Asmus Tietchens until he played recently in Brighton at Spirit of Gravity (an experimental electronica night that’s very much worth your time if you’re in the area). A load of my mates who were of age in the ’80s speak in hushed, reverent tones of the man Tietchens. I have to confess, I’m often a bit sceptical of […]
FatCat Blurbgloss: Niger, cheap gear, poor part of the world. Seems like Tal National are more like a big band (shifting members) than a group/band per se. As with proper parts of the world with a decent live music culture (e.g., everywhere other than the UK), they play five hours sets most nights. It seems like they’ve been popular for a fair while and, as with a million […]
Bristol 27 September 2013 This trio were incredible! The noise flowing from them was full on, bouncing with a rip cord of incentive and bold colour. A lock-horned, tri-cornered combo of gristly riffs going off into wah-wah Hendrix hedonism. Drums becoming bass, guitar chiselling percussion; a bewildering soup of pure energy, blissfully heavy in the repetition department, spurring off into delicious landslides of angles and tempos. Just as […]
London 21 September 2013 It is a mild, early autumn Saturday night and Upper Street is the very picture of modern urban revelry. Outside the doorways of fashionable bars and clubs, the pavements are clotted with thick knots of drinkers and smokers, the ‘dun-tsch, dun-tsch, dun-tsch’ beat of anonymous dance music bleeding out from their dimly-lit interiors into the warm evening air. There is scarcely a free chair […]
London 18 September 2013 Zombie Zombie is an enigma. They are neither straight ahead progressive rock like near-namesake Zombi, nor either are they jazz or even space disco, but somehow an odd amalgamation of all three. Yes, they are a synth- and percussion-based band, but there is so much more in there. This was reflected in the audience that turned up tonight; there were prog rockers, synth nerds, […]
Dekorder On The Falling Rocket, sound sculptor Stephan Mathieu weaves a deft tapestry of astral drones, using a rather rudimentary array of Farfisa organ, mechanical gramophone and radio waves, all punched into a MAX/MSP patch and slurred up nicely. . So what is a drone? In music, it is a note or tone sustained continuously throughout a piece, and drone music is a minimalist musical style that emphasizes […]
Disco Gecko The moon is a strange mistress. She is the one object in the universe that controls more of what happens here on Earth than any other celestial body. She controls the tides on our planet and has been worshipped by many in the past and even still today. The remix of Toby Marks’ last album sings hymns to the lunar where the original album joyously chanted […]
London 14 September 2013 Loving this place, that subterranean cellar-like vibe; cobbles, cast iron pillars, oozes a Dickensian charm that no doubt Messers. Thrower and Knight approve of. On arrival, their musical wares are already set up on three tables, a tidy synth and keyboard sandwich a percussive jumble filling, the screen . There’s a long pre-show wait, having cut through London at a surprisingly swift pace. We […]
Normal Cookie A brushstroke painting of a cherry blossom landscape/ dance floor abandon = = > “i need a christmas tree” Will Long and Rie Mitsutake create a slice-of-life synth folk sound collage on their own label, Normal Cookie. With Oh, Yoko the pair were interested in exploring the openness of creativity in captured moments of a simple home and city life. Towards this goal, Long and Mitsutake […]
Touch If you have ever scanned the technical credits of television programmes as they glide slowly past in the wake of the action, chances are you will have seen the names of either Ken Morse or Chris Watson, or both. Morse is sometimes reckoned to be the most credited cameraman in history, so often have his rostrum camera skills contributed to the jewels that fall from the small […]
G-Wave/Cleopatra (North America) After reviewing the Hinotori single earlier this year I’ve been looking forward to the album release as the tracks on the EP blew me away. So it was with trepidation that I placed the CD into the player and pressed play. I certainly didn’t expect to be instantly transported to another galaxy. The album begins with an extended version of “Hinotori,” and from the opening […]
Sireena Surround Sound Evolution finds Mythos making music the size of planetariums, and this is an album filled with massive synths that take you on a tour of the universe. Following on from 2008’s Surround Sound Offensive, opening track “Surround Sound Passion” builds its layers of synths into a strong melody as electronic glitches add percussion beneath. The track feels like the opening titles of a sci-fi movie and […]
Spectrum Spools Unicorn Hard-On is a solo project of one Valerie Martino. She’s a great rhythm chaser, tugging those dry arithmetical presets in a piranha splattered synapse of pulsing inputs. Now, I’ve got to admit, I’m not the greatest dance music devotee, but Weird Universe is certainly throwing enough solid hooks and neon-splashed chameleons to satisfy my curiosity.
Roseland Theater Portland, Oregon 6 September 2013 The double-billing of noise guitar legends Gate, the solo project of Michael Morley of The Dead C, and the newly rejuvenated Godspeed You! Black Emperor on a Friday night at one of the United States’ largest music festivals was an act of bold and challenging programming that should further Musicfest NW‘s reputation not only as a world class music festival, but […]