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 […]
Yearly archives: 2014
232 posts
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Baskaru Inspired by the tuning up of an orchestra prior to a performance, Rutger Zuydervelt (AKA Machinefabriek) assembled Stay Tuned first as an installation in Canada and then the Netherlands in 2013. Using 153 musicians from the worldwide avant-garde to each provide a drone in A (or a vocal warm-up), […]
Organized Music From Thessaloniki Another tiny offering from Seth Cooke, the man behind Pneuma‘s panoramas. He certainly has a talent for pulling surprising stuff from unusual places — who’d have thought pneumatic drills could sound so exotic? This latest offering on the intriguingly-titled Organized Music From Thessaloniki label is no […]
ATP Even though the members of Eaux have been making music together since 2006, originally as the post-rock band the Sian Alice Group, Plastics seems entirely of the moment, firmly rooted in the present, in its anachronism. That’s not to say Eaux are bandwagon-hopping, rather that they are an example […]
Gonzo Multimedia F Scott Fitzgerald famously once declared that American lives had no second act. Thankfully, Don van Vliet, throughout his career an exception in so many ways, was one exempted from this rule. For, following the musical big bang of 1976, Beefheart – truculent, dissonant, and decidedly not a […]
Electrowerkz, London 21 June 2014 This was something I never dreamt I would ever see. I stare at the ticket in my hand and still can’t quite believe what the lettering says: “Chrome – doors open 7pm.” I would have been less surprised to have found myself standing atop the […]
Avalanche So I defrosted my fridge yesterday. Inches thick in ice, it was. Had to take a hairdryer to it in the end. Scalding hot air. Huge expanses of frozen water. A lot of wrenching, smashing and cries of frustration. All in all, it was a lot like the new […]
Idioblast There’s a cryptic, arcane nature to the goods Theme offer up here; which strike me as Coil-like in a lot of ways — that corkscrew of dualities, those discordant magicks, the word-choked secretes, repeat ectoplasms weaving dissident truths. “Enough is Never – Parts 1,2 & 3” begins in a […]
London 13 June 14 It is summertime and in Britain the early morning mist drifts across fields and clings to the roots of trees. Tents are erected and the dowdy colours of winter are a thing of the past as the children of the rainbow appear from forests and their […]
Damnably Shonen Knife tend to massively divide opinion. And, contrary to what you may have been told by the well-meaning, there ARE opinions which are right and opinions which are wrong and worthy of no respect. Some people find their Ramones-drenched girlpop infuriatingly twee- these people have the WRONG opinion, […]
Northern Spy (N. America)/Ponderosa (Europe) I sort of lost touch with Arto Lindsay‘s work after Mundo Civilizado, the second album in which he swapped his usual oblique guitar trademarks for the sweet whispering of sensual nothings into your ear. A Brazilian-focused crooning wrapped in a spicy salsa of re-circuitry and […]
Brixton Electric London 27 May 2014 Since reforming – or, perhaps more accurately, reincarnating – in 2010, Swans have rapidly become one of the most extraordinary musical entities of our age. Their comeback album, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, was a fine release, and […]
Software I’ve heard it said that for art to truly succeed, it needs to run the risk of failure. If there is no antagonism, if everything is completely predictable, it glides right off of you without making an impression. Compare Tropic Of Cancer to drugstores full of pulp romance, for […]
Editions Mego In the past couple of years or so there has been a resurgence in synthesizer music, with more and more titles being released every month by various labels. Most of the work I have heard has been of a high quality and is generally packaged well. Many of […]
London 4 June 2014 “In case of sonic attack,” warned Hawkwind, “follow these rules,” before advocating such crazy measures as “try to get as far from the sonic source as possible.” One assumes, therefore, that the combined onslaught of Loop and Godflesh doesn’t technically count as an “attack,” what with […]
Bureau B Kreidler’s latest album continues their post-kraut-rock meets techno melange — a kind of bastard love child of Neu! and Carl Craig — which emerged on their 2012 album Den. ABC is a genre-bending and -blending collection of tracks built around consistently strong keyboard and guitar riffs with driving […]