Riot Season This is full hippy in every good way. Hyperdrive hippy. Hippy in excelsis (not in Excel). Godz-driven, primal, ballistic-psychedelic, balls-to-the-wall, throttled/throttling. It’s the hippyish, proggy album that other people think they’ve made. There’s a massive meandering Alice Coltrane cover on here that sounds like it could be/should be terrible but works brilliantly. There’s devastating stoner stuff, and pushes into you. There’s awkward movements in just the […]
Monthly archives: July 2014
19 posts
Endtyme Blending shimmery blurs of electronics with West African-derived polyrhythmic loops and swerves, this taster from the forthcoming album from drum-loving noiseniks Gum Takes Tooth shimmies and shakes with a deftly-assured sway, ripples of synth and coasting vocal drones layered sparsely over and around the hypnotically-intertwining beats. If this is anything to judge by, then Mirrors Fold should be quite the LP to both satisfy the body and […]
Red Wharf It’s hard to get a handle on this word wise; I was really tempted to leave this as a three letter review – just “wow,” with maybe a few exclamation marks for good measure. Indeed I think this impression was cemented in the first two minutes and didn’t seem to waver in the slightest for ExcitoToxicity‘s whole duration. I know I’m incredibly biased towards Stapleton and […]
Recorded Fields Editions Subtitled Selected Pipe Organ Works 1983-2014, Robert Curgenven‘s LP finds him pushing the instrument (with the aid of a few others) in all kinds of intriguing directions. As Circle and Mamiffer ably demonstrated on their recent album for church organ, it’s quite amazing what sounds can be drawn from one in the right hands with a sense of adventure. Presented as four pieces over the […]
Exotic Pylon Bloodhounds is folk poetry. Paul Snowdon is reclaiming the machines of technology from the cultural elite, the bright and polished megastar DJs and superslick mnml producers, ensconced in their citadels of expensive outboard effects, to create a rural ritual evocation of a youth spent in northern England. Let’s look at that word: folk. As in, of the people. As in, opposed to academic or art-house music. […]
Sargent House Boris. Where does one start with Boris? Well, maybe with a water cannon to the face, the floppy-haired posh twat. Oh, not THAT Boris? OK, so which Boris, then? The sludgy stoner rock merchants of Absolutego fame? The spooky doom band behind that Sunn0))) collaboration? The magnificent rock band that gave us Heavy Rocks and Smile? Or the bizarre yet immaculate J-pop metal band behind New […]
Tompkins Square Right from its first publication in February 1911, the novel Fantômas was a phenomenon. In the words of post-modern New York über-poet John Ashberry it was “a work of fiction whose popularity cut across all social and cultural strata. Countesses and concierges; poets and proletarians; cubists, nascent Dadaists, soon-to-be Surrealists: Everyone who could read, and even those who could not, shivered at posters of a masked […]
Fourth Dimension When invited by Fourth Dimension man Richo to do something outside the ordinary, Richard Youngs accepted the challenge of making a dub album from the perspective of someone who doesn’t like reggae. So, with the aid of boxes of tricks borrowed from occasional collaborator Luke Fowler, he set off on an eight track odyssey into space echoes and spring reverberations to produce Primary Concrete Attack. The […]
Zoharum Dating back to a tape release in 1998 and a later CDr edition from 2005, Dreaming Muzak has now been given the deluxe re-release treatment by Zoharum and arrives in a lovingly-produced three-panel gatefold CD sleeve, remastered, like the recent Maeror Tri (which includes Troum‘s Martin Gitschel and Stefan Knappe as two of the trio) editions, by Łukasz Miernik. Sometimes oppressive in the extreme, if Part 1 […]
London 7 July 2014 Kev Nickells went to see Japanese kawaii-rockers Babymetal live in London, and loved it. Barnabas Y, however, offers a riposte to the popularity of the genre-bending phenomenon. Pictures by James Sting. The review You should probably be aware of Babymetal by now. I first came across them when “the hard man of Harsh Noise Wall” Clive Henry put a link up to it. It […]
Alphabet Business Concern Saw the Cardiacs back in the ’80s when music TV as a worthy proposition. A university challenge spotlight highlighting bruised and bloody faces like a visual rewrite of “Bohemian Rhapsody” oozing with insane carnival colours. The kind of memories that stick with you in crooked smiles and water-squirting lapel flowers, the music as arresting as the spectacle glaring with zombie-esque madness replete with jerky arthritic […]
More Than Human This latest transmission from Moebius finds him pushing further at the boundaries of an idiosyncratic take on electronic rhythm-based music which have often characterised his solo recordings and rummaging deeper into the swirling vortices of synthesized experimentalism that he helped pioneer in the ’70s as part of Cluster. “Inmedin” is the piece most resembling the former output, all twinkling electronic bells and chimes over a […]
Mute In a world inundated with live recordings and DJ mixes, what makes a release stand apart from the barbarous hordes? The fact alone that this is mnml mastermind Richie Hawtin‘s first record under his Plastikman guise in a decade, since 2003’s Closer, means that people will be paying attention, no matter what. The question is, does this record stand on its own merit, or does it flourish […]
Corsica Studios, London 12 July 2014 It was the day of the flying ants. The humidity in London was building and it felt like a storm was about to break any minute. Before hitting the venue I went to the local pub to have a beer and cool down after the heat of London transport. People who sat outside were being assailed by ants and for a brief […]
Oblique (vinyl)/Daymare (CD) Given how the ubiquitous comparisons to the American desert-scape were for Earth‘s classic Hex: Or Printing The Infernal Method, it’s a minor miracle that this is the first soundtrack for Earth’s main man, Dylan Carlson. Fittingly, it is a Western soundtrack for the movie Gold, released in 2013. Gold focuses on German prospectors that travel to the Yukon in 1898, at the height of the […]
Michael Rodham-Heaps tackles a trio of recorded documents from London’s Café Oto released for wider consumption on the ever-expanding Otoroku label… Decoy with Joe McPhee – Spontaneous Combustion This one grabs my attention first, the gritty screen-printed abstracts go well with first half of this tasty double, recorded back in twenty eleven. It’s a fragmented fermentation, loose dot-joining limbs avoiding the unusual scuffle cuffs jazzy improv seems to […]
Bureau B Negativland still keep me chortling to myself whenever they pop up on random play. In fact random play seems designed for Negativland, has given them a place in the canon that might otherwise have excluded them – I don’t remember playing their records that much before MP3, though I liked having them and was eternally glad that they were there, in the background, chipping away at […]
London 18 June 2014 Acid King are one of the few US bands to tour the UK/Europe every year, even when there is no new product to promote. Lori S, Joey Osbourne and Mark Lamb seem to get off on being on the road bringing their own brand of biker/doom/sludge to the ears of their followers where ever they may be. The Underworld is its usual dank self, […]