Exotic Pylon Dark ambient music is particularly effective at evoking strange, surreal, subjective visions. Synthetic tones and natural field recordings, swathed in echo and cavernous reverb, are stripped of context, and freed from the brutal confines of Western tonality. It borrows a lot from cinematic sound design, particularly of a […]
Yearly archives: 2014
232 posts
Bristol 6 June 2014 Really enjoyed those colour-blind psychedelics Ramleh were plying, being partial to a bit of nihilistic zeal. All that top-heavy primary and scuzzy nail-throwing does you no end of good, run through with copious amount of feedback roughage, a storm of grainy monotonies stabbing your ears and […]
Portland, OR 16 May 2014 After several weeks of attending the vaunted interior of Mississippi Studios, it seem that the calendar had skipped from 1963 to 1968 or so. Maybe 1970. The flower power and idealism and utopia of bands like Acid Mothers Temple and Trans Am were replaced by […]
Versatile For my first few listens of Zombie Zombie‘s soundtrack to Narimane Mari‘s film Loubia Hamra, I very deliberately didn’t make any attempt to find what the film was about, so I could do an experiment with myself and see what images the album brought to mind. Turns out it’s […]
Second Home, London 21-23 March 2014 First off, a caveat: ever since I first heard Bernard Parmegiani‘s music, played across the speakers at the greatest and most idiosyncratic of London’s lost record shops, These Records, I have been completely hypnotised by and utterly in thrall to his strange, hypnotic sound […]
Peripheral Conserve én‘s op. 80530 needs loudness, craves it. Minimal wares that require you to be encased in its edifice, the window-shaking physicality of its dronial weathers, a humble servant to the stretching dramatics, that bare corridor eating into the shadows like some Lynchian neurosis. Feels for the majority like a […]
Bureau B Berlin loves airports. Or it loved airports. Mm, I think on reflection it probably still does love airports, even if it no longer has quite as many as it used to. From the über-Zentral elegance of the now-decommissioned Tempelhof (once amongst the 20 largest buildings on Earth and […]
Beta-lactam Ring It’s hard not to reference Popul Vuh while attempting to describe the effect of the opening moments of Kosmodynamos, but that’s no bad thing at all. The chime of bells, an evolving ripple of flute, Michel Leroy and Alberto Parra‘s cycling clean guitar strings which coalesce in a […]
DAC Hélène Breschand plays her harp in as wide a variety of ways as is possible to imagine (and some which might be less obvious), at times sounding like she is letting rip in an electric guitar, prepared piano, zither and effects pedals all simultaneously. What it doesn’t really sound […]
Hubro If there’s a defining quality to modern life – and hence to contemporary music – it’s perhaps hybridism. Everything which has come before has never been as accessible as it is now, and like those innumerable monkeys who’ve been toiling away at recreating the works of Shakespeare, humanity seems […]
London 18 May 2014 So the economy’s screwed, the world’s still on the brink of war, and far, far more of the people you admire are dead than alive, while everywhere you look there are more racists, fuckheads and idiots than it would be practical to Freepost shitty bricks to. […]
Southern Rudimentary Peni always seemed like a ticking clock of dystopias to me, a psychotic scaffold of tri-chords and drums, pyre-building a grinding axe of vocals, ranting at the greed miestering stink that (still) ruins, contaminates. Death Church, their first proper long player, spews out a gothika of crucifixes to […]
Young God (North America)/ Mute (Rest of the world) I always thought there was some kind of law, like a law of physics rather than one drafted for use in courtooms, like the Universal Speed Limit or something, that stated that it was physically impossible for a band to come back […]
Portland, OR 9 May 2014 A burly dude writhing on the oscillators wearing a plastic Viking helmet is pretty much what you hope to greet you on stage when attending a psych rock gig. Portland’s best and beardiest turned out to the barn cathedral interior of Mississippi Studios for a […]
Pan A slab of 12” electronic whoomph and wibble which brings forth the gloopy analogue joys of sequenced machinery bowing and scraping before the altar of the DJ booth. “Self-Perpetuating Fun Loop” does exactly as it says, whirling around a central set of repeated motifs with the terpsichorean energy of […]
Huta Artzine/Noisen/Zoharum Introduced by the shorter drones and electronic shimmers of “Alpha, “Beta” which rise up in a revenant scrawl of threat and ominous sounds (including some fine rabble-rousing samples which set the mood of the album as one slightly apart from the merely abstract and instrumental) the centrepiece of […]
With the annual festival of all things Europop upon the screens of a continent and beyond, Kev Nickells runs through the entries. Eurovision – a cherished institution. Writing this has been a bit of a nightmare, to be honest, because Europe’s a lot bigger than you think it is. Spreads […]
London 6 May 2014 I was hypnotized and I made a wish to be the slave of Satan. My desire was so strong that I could get easily persuaded… Let the conjurations begin! Or at the very least an evening of fine music. The steps down into the darkened caverns […]
Constellation A collaboration between David Bryant (of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Set Fire To Flames) and Kevin Doria from Growing, this is an exquisite 10-track drone tone, a weathered and majestic beauty with a slow burn of salted guitar whirring through the ruins. Shortwave Nights‘ woeful currents are superb, reflective, […]
Dekorder Love these guys. Just love them. This is a bubbly, ecstatic mess of an album, in every good way… It’s all over the place; a dig around a wet pit of transcendentalism, an overflowing tub of funny jelly. There’s moments where the Ghost Box almost appears (in fact a […]