Misery Guts Music OK, quick history lesson. A hundred years and a couple of months ago, someone shot Franz Ferdinand (not the band) and the whole world descended into madness (also not the band). What followed was essentially a human meat grinder, millions of young lives fed into one end and coming out the other as the sausages of empire. Such extremity of experience gave birth to some […]
Monthly archives: October 2014
24 posts
Tigertrap Rhythm is probably the earliest organizing factor of music, going back to when humanity were beating on rocks and picking up sticks. The rhythm defines what kind of music something is, whether it’s a romantic rockabilly ballad or a classical scherzo; or an aimless ambient drift in its absence. Rhythm is of a piece. With the proliferation of digital recording and the prevalence of pre-recorded loops, there […]
Avalanche Gigantic oxygen-snatching riffery, scorched parabolic vocals… Godflesh are back, as strong as ever. 2000’s Hymns seems in comparison a mild precursor to an all together heavier rebirth, something that June’s Decline And Fall EP hinted at. This is an unbelievably loud album even by Godflesh standards, a holy trinity of bass, guitar and drum machine whose energy is always pushing against its own thresholds without caring what […]
Pingipung “Are you chicken, bone or soup?” asks Jo Zimmermann at the start of the title track of his latest electronic oddity using the Schlammpeitziger identity. “Are you a castle, tone or group?” he wonders, offering “Are you sentence, word or dot… button, box or cock?” and sundry other suggestions before pleading in an almost comically louche tone, “What’s fruit?” An idiosyncratic sense of humour has always been […]
Faber and Faber Back in 1986, some real waves were made by the publication of The Audit of War, a bitter and excoriating account of Britain’s strategic socio-economic decision-making during the first ten years after World War Two. The work was written by revisionist (military) historian Correlli Barnett, who critiqued – unfavourably and controversially – the ethos that guided Britain through its immediate decade of post-war reconstruction.
Editions Mego Recorded across two continents and one island not exactly in between, as well as in various environments on tour in Europe, BJ Nilsen (AKA Hazard), Stilluppsteypa and Anla Courtis (from Reynols) each bring their own particularities to the jump-cuts and drone-fades of Golden Circle Afternoon. Of course, it’s often difficult to determine who might be responsible for what – some pass notes are offered up, but […]