Mississippi Studios Portland, OR 25 April 2014 The ramifications of the loop, the power of the riff, the subdivision of the motorik beat. College, krautrock, and working for yr music festival. This jam-packed free-for-all in the barnlike interior of Mississippi Studios on a Thursday night illustrated exactly how far kosmische musik has come since Trans Am first released its seminal Futureworld on Thrill Jockey in 1999. When I […]
Monthly archives: April 2014
15 posts
Dekorder A hyper-collectible one-sided ‘hybrid vinyl’ you say? *strokes non-beard* What curious engine is this? *bug-eyed lunatic face / “Soylent Green is people!”* Well, it’s got meaty black vinyl on the audio side and the usual slack-jawed picture-disc vinyl on the other – AKA this is what Leibniz was referring to when he uttered under his wig “Die beste aller möglichen Welten” (“the best of all possible worlds”). […]
Slowfoot One Did has a Max Wall kind of rhythmic comedy about it, as if the instruments have taken a ministry of silly walks pill, a ganglia of legs skipping the hoots and jaggerations. You wouldn’t be surprised to know that former Stump bassist Kev Hopper is behind this gem. After having his fill of abstract, atmospheric electronica he’s back with a vengeance as Prescott, joined by former […]
Harbinger Sound Sleaford Mods, Nottingham’s self-styled purveyors of “electronic munt minimalist punk-hop for the working classes and under,” are back with Divide And Exit, the follow-up to their cult classic compilation Austerity Dogs; so brace for anger, scatology, moshing and swearing. If they were a publication they’d be a cross between Class War and Viz, but they’re not. They’re a band. And they’re fucking excellent. Frontman Jason Williamson […]
Portland, OR. 18 April 2014 The Evolution Of Bass Every time a band reunites, it raises the cynical question: is this mere nostalgia, a quick cash grab? Musicians with nothing new to say, relying on former glories to make a quick buck? Or is it merely that their time has come and people are in a place to finally hear and understand what they were going for in […]
Bureau B Walter Dahn (of Die Hornissen) and Tom Dokoupil (of The Wirtschaftswunder) met up for a single weekend back in ’81 and this 36 minute album was the kinetic fruit it bore. It’s a forgotten classic if you relish your post-punk Germanics as much as I do, and being quietly obsessed by anything Wirtschaftswunder related…well… resistance was futile. It sounds retro, but in a good way, a […]
Front & Follow In which Kemper Norton applies his spectral resonances to The Doomed Bird of Providence‘s “Mahina,” a standout track from their most recent album Blind Mouths Eat. The Doomed Bird of Providence explore the very darkest recesses of Australian history through their bleak sound constructions
London 11 April 2014 There’s probably an argument to be made that talking about Chrysta Bell in terms of David Lynch is lazy, but that’s what I’m going to do, at least at first. The reasons for this are threefold – first, having not only produced her album but co-written it with her, he casts a pretty long bequiffed shadow over the music. Second, at a gig plugged […]
Chrysta Bell‘s album This Train has finally been released officially in the UK (with extra tracks too) via QQ5 – read David Solomon‘s original review here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hozNfOuQwIw
Trendkill/7 Degrees/Shove (LP)/The Path Less Traveled (CD) It begins with “Walls that Breathe.” All that can be heard is the sound of raindrops pattering delicately on hard ground, punctuated occasionally by booming thundercracks that pierce the quiet night sky and reverberate out through the darkness. I cannot resist it. I cannot ignore it. There is something hard-wired deep inside the human brain that responds to an electrical storm, […]
Clouds Hill After the tragic death of their bassist Simon Wring in 2011, Gallon Drunk continued as a trio, releasing The Road Gets Darker From Here, a furious raw document of their stance at the time, almost a tribute to their own live appearances. After that, the band toured with Leo Kurunis on bass, and today the quartet has moved on even more, bringing also with them that […]
Editions Mego Through A Pre-Memory is an embrace of the titans; two behemoths of the dronederground, Mika Vainio of Pan Sonic and Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O)))/Khanate/KTL/Lotus Eaters and head of the Ideologic Organ label. While screeching black metal, doom, glitch, noise and dark ambient may not be the most obvious of bedfellows, they all share an interest in exploring the trans-human, using sundry technologies to evoke images […]
Touch & Go We are living in the era of re. Remakes, reissues, reunions and yes, remasters are becoming the staple of our cultural life. I for one have a tendency to resignedly sigh “oh, really?” when I hear of another bit of creative heritage being given a once over, a new lease of life – the defibrillator paddles being applied to the long cold corpse of something that […]
Sound of Cobra (LP)/Paradigms (CD) No-one would have believed that in the first years of the 21st century that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space… Easterfaust is The Cosmic Dead’s 12” vinyl, two track wig out to spiral galaxies via doses of Krautrock and good old space rock. The vinyl comes in glorious coloured loveliness with some artwork that wouldn’t have been out […]
Peripheral Conserve Absolutely loving this musique concrète mixer: its powertooled psych-o-delia of mis-shapes pleases me no end, quivers a satisfying kraut dot’n’dashes too. The overall sprawl is akin to a modern rework of The Faust Tapes, and well, I wouldn’t expect anything less, as The Wasp Boutique is one part Jean-Hervé Péron after all. This is rousing fare for sure, thrown into the light by Peter Strickland of […]