Thrones & Dominions tl;dr – the sort of prog album that’ll tickle prog-fanciers silly, and the sort of album that . ANTA, née Snakes on a Plane, which I’m sure they’ll appreciate being reminded of. Second album, but they’re all been around Bristol and Bath for something like a thousand years in something like a million bands, many of which were brilliant but under-recognised (Loxondonta anyone? Thought not) I’m […]
Yearly archives: 2013
214 posts
Exotic Pylon/Zoharum These are separated by time and space (never separable, never suited) but are nevertheless kin – in Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color they would be pigs and people, skin-bonded, worm-tailed, consciousness-sharing. I guess they are both broadly branches of that jagged, never truly existing, tree called ‘dark ambient’ (a tree that confounds at every twist, that seemingly can’t die because it has roots in the infinite itself) […]
London 5 September 2013 In the lead up to the first London gig in thirteen years from Manuel Göttsching we have been treated to a certain amount of media nonsense situating him as a godfather of minimal techno.
Bureau B What an arresting cover, that alabaster face seemingly levitating, framed in a burn of auburn hair. I’m convinced that’s a gender messing Thomas Dinger caked in ghostly Clouzot cosmetics. The macabre blue of the lips, and the wing-like Bowie-isms of those scry-worthy eyes throwing everything forward whilst the background simultaneously envelops, giving over an eerie undulating quality to the stillness. Like a Buñuel freeze-frame, eternally tittering […]
Metropolis It’s hard to write about The Legendary Pink Dots. It’s hard on one level because they make music which tends to bypass the analytical centres of the brain and go straight for the bits that experience stuff. It’s hard in the same way that describing your dreams is hard, or trying to build a model of St Paul’s Cathedral from soup. But I’ll give it a shot, […]
Dublin 15 August 2013 There is a story. “It’s all made of stories, you know”. There is a story that back in 1980 David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) read an article in the music press about a band from England who were rewriting all the rules, who had discovered the new sound. Impressed by what he read, and based on the description of the music not the […]
Rural Isolation Project Quttinirpaaq‘s Matt Turner is condcucting a seance to summon the ’70s in a cement dirigible hangar. Coming from a long line of damaged Texan noise-punks like Roky Erickson, The Butthole Surfers and Pain Teens, Quttinirpaaq uses bad acid and bad horror movies as a gateway to a Dhalgren-limbo paradise, where Mario Bava‘s Demons dance the night away next to burning cars while Wolf Eyes and […]
25 August 2013 en-coun-ter (en-koun-ter): To come upon or meet with. (Origin: 1250–1300; Middle English encountren < Anglo-French enco ( u ) ntrer; Old French < Vulgar Latin *incontrāre, equivalent to in- in-1 + –contrāre, derivative of contrā against) Hynekian System of Classification: ‘Close encounter of the third kind’ – sighting of an animated being. ________________ On the August Bank Holiday 2013, the animated beings that comprise the […]
Exotic Pylon 8-bit razor blade. Bedsit basement dwellers. Darkness on the edge of town. Hoofus makes music from the Animal Collective unconscious, slimy grimy retroactive electronic improvisations from the wilds of rural Norfolk. Here’s a snappy soundbyte from the press release: Hoofus performs and records electronic improvisations from the undergrowth of rural Norfolk, using fuzzy analogue aesthetics and FM synthesized unease to create visceral ritual rhythms, smeared with […]
Raster-Noton The mechanics of funk On this newest offering from Raster-Noton head Frank Bretschneider, the man behind Komet, sets aside amorphous drones and textures to explore the basic principles of dance music: rhythm. Super.trigger is essentially a collection of studio improvisations made between 2012-2013, then edited and re-configured into nine tracks of taut, sparse machine rhythms. This is the sound of an artist at work, struggling to get […]
Recollection GRM De Natura Sonorum seems an impossibly private affair. It feels a little like spying on an old guy as his mind is going and he’s trying to make sense of his belongings, looking at them with old-new eyes, touching them and trying to match the creases, smiling faintly because maybe that person in that clipping might be someone he once new, had a muscle memory of, […]
18 May 2013 A rare London appearance from The Residents, stopping off at The Barbican on their Wonder of Weird 40th anniversary tour. The show is presented as a kind of unreliable ‘history of our band’, and begins with a short film, a collection of excerpts from old (and formidably strange) videos and live performances. This does a fine job of encapsulating their appeal and setting the scene, […]
Thrill Jockey Did you know, in this age of budget-slashing and diversion of science funds to the military, that America actually has a SECOND space programme? While Commander Hadfield‘s been channelling Bowie on the International Space Station, and that Japanese dude’s been trading witty bon mots with his robot (yeah, Google it, it’s true, and we DO live in the future), it’s been toiling away at its own […]
Sireena Sireena Records seem to be in the process of reissuing a lot of the old Sky Records release from their back catalogue. This is a lovely-looking edition with original artwork and a booklet with lots of pictures as well as the lyrics, plus a complete run down of all the beautiful old equipment used (which is great if you’re a bit of a synth nerd like myself), […]
Parallax Sounds I’ve seen Acid Mothers Temple numerous times and checked most of their incarnations: those skull-scribbled morays and splintered overlays leaving you blissfully skewed on their satisfaction guarantee; and I’m glad to say this latest offering continues the fun in a erotika of vintage sc-fi and vooming accents, twisting your melon in blurring hooks of vox.
Front & Follow You enter a dark theater. Yr not entirely sure where you are, or how you got there. You don’t know what’s going on. You walk into the flickering shadows, the interior of a theater swims into halflight, shadowy patrons whispering, pockets of activity in the corner. A young man beats a bone drum in a ceremonial dirge in the corner, a woman in blood is […]
Zoharum This is a classic slice of electro acoustika. A lovingly chaotic fusion of talents from Anthony Donovan, Matt Chilton, Will Connor – and joining forces for this release composer and audio hacker Schuyler Tsuda. The Latin title Sui Generis roughly translates to ‘of its own kind’ and the improvised clatterings and purrings here certainly don’t shy from the fact. The album’s , finger paint your head in […]
Trost Anyone who loves the sound of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, while understandably being put off by their repertoire should check out Steamboat Switzerland. I saw the group live a few years ago and was mightily impressed by the sheer power of their Hammond organ, bass and drums line-up. Possibly more like Egg than ELP to be fair, but also considerably more elemental than any of the UK […]