The Barbican, London 27 June 2015 88 cymbal beaters, five drummers, four bassists, four guitarists and one EYƎ, an ensemble that literally dwarfed the stage bathed in super-real colours. Right from the start this felt more like a ritual than a show — an invocation even. From its early referential whisperings it held you in its meditative grip, then flung your expectations wide open on colossal tidal pulls, […]
Monthly archives: June 2015
19 posts
London 24 June 2015 I’m shuffling through the Wembley sand, but my head’s in Mississippi. It’s been a long time since I was last at Wembley Arena. Twenty-two years ago this month, in fact, lured like a Hamelin rat by the strange and, ultimately, ill-fated second coming of The Velvet Underground (Reed and Cale needing to spend more time together in order to remember exactly why it was […]
Sulatron Kick out the jams and get your freak flag flying with two new releases from Sulatron. Zone Six are a mindbending mixture of members of Electric Moon, Modulfix and The Pancakes (who also get together under the name Krautzone) playing spiralling hypnotic psychedelic madness in free-form jams that have been condensed down to these four blistering tracks. Komet Lulu’s bass kicks us into the title track, its […]
4AD Nobody ever sounded like the Cocteau Twins, a band so startlingly original that they spurred a lot of imitators; they took the jangle of indie to a whole different level, an otherworldly soak that no doubt inspiring the shoegrazery verve that would follow in their wake. By 1985 they already had three albums under their belts, but their sound was still evolving to ever-more luscious territories, concocting […]
Rocket Sprawling its way across three sides of vinyl and two CDs, Infinity Machines is Gnod at their most epic. There’s a lot of it and can feel initially daunting to step into it as you realise the weight of expectation, and the fact that your brain has to disseminate so much music, creep up on you. So I’m going try my best at reviewing such a large […]
RVNG Intl. The slow evolutions of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (AKA Lichens) and Ariel Kalma are curling my head to perfection, all long sustains and modular gurgles mingling gently with the environmental ambience of aviary tweets, bubbling brooks the call of the wild. The saxophonics climbing through most tracks like a waking body stretching in span-like evocations, coupled with the blissful smoothness of simple melodies that would make […]
London 16 June 2015 There is a German proverb which reads, “Jede Leiter fängt mit der untersten Sprosse an und nach der obersten kommt nur noch freier Fall.” We might possibly translate this as, ‘Every ladder begins at the lowest rung, but after the highest the only way is down’. Tonight, the capacity audience packed into a summer-heated Cafe Oto are treated to evidence that miraculously both confirms, […]
Haunter Source of Uncertainty is one of those records which pushes the boundaries of expectation quite a bit further than a cursory glance at the list of influences might suggest. So maybe there is techno, electro, Detroit and Berlin-style electronic music in here, and certainly a sense of experiment that is worthy of the term; but Giovanni Napoli’s second Haunter Records release as SOMEC follows on the heels […]
London 10 June 2015 It is good to remember why you came. How the reverberation of the bass through every cell is like the lift of a wave that carries you. How each staccato re-teaches your heart to beat. Percussion is life, rhythm is the first language and with it we make sense. Every sentence you’ve ever read and truly felt has had its own cadence to keep […]
The Jazz Café, London 30 May 2015 A couple of years ago I had the very great pleasure of interviewing New Model Army‘s angry yet affable front man Justin Sullivan for this esteemed organ (matron!), and we got to talking about venue sizes. “All of us”, said he, “when we go to see our favourite bands, we want to see them in the old Marquee, or in some […]
Bristol 6 June 2015 Henry Collins’ — formerly known as Shitmat — Morris Meets the Bikers (after the ZX Spectrum arcade game?) were up first. They were having so much fun that they were oblivious to the fact that only five people were actually watching, which was a shame for they were really bonkers. Billed as a DJ set, this was more a performance than just spinning tunes. […]
Cardinal Fuzz (Europe)/Captcha (North America) White Manna’s previous album Come Down Safari was an almost lilting psychedelic trip to the outer reaches, like a 1968 Nepalese bhang shop of lysergic loveliness that wasn’t a million miles a way from bands like Lamp Of The Universe in its recreation of bedroom Ganges travelling. What White Manna have delivered with Pan, though, is a totally different beast. If Come Down […]
Rural Isolation Project What’s often advertised as noise-rock tends to be just noisy rock. It’s usually very straight forward and just a noisy use of instruments. Lovely as this can be, I find it refreshing when Austin noise-punks Quttinirpaaq‘s third Rural Isolation Project LP is said to be “bleeding-noise industrial electronic rock”. This is the solo project of Matt Turner, who also joins forces with King Coffey from […]
Software Recorded over the space of ten years up until the early part of the current century, The Baltika Years gathers together a selection of recordings that Ben Zimmerman made almost entirely from samples he manipulated using software running on the now long-defunct Tandy DeskMate computer operating system. Working around and within the limitations of the music software available on DeskMate (such as 22 kHz 8-bit audio), Zimmerman recorded […]
Bureau B Dub is the very beating heart of music made with electric bass and drums, the low end and rhythm pared back to bare essentials as the bedrock of form, then modified with various levels of drenching in echo and other effects. It’s no wonder that a technique developed most prominently in Jamaica in the 1970s went on to enhance and then pretty much take over huge […]
Karl Gently grooving guitars weave in and out of focus, playful in their interaction and sporadic dialogues with each other. At times they align, generating a collective groove that rolls along with the free spirit of Krautrock. In other moments they separate, creating backdrops for each other casting light and shadows, or providing minute detailed explorations of sonic material, until once again, they reunite and take on a […]
Pica Disk Jim O’Rourke has released albums of jazz, noise, electronica and rock music. He has collaborated with artists such as Thurston Moore, Derek Bailey, Mats Gustafsson, Merzbow, Nurse with Wound and Fennesz, just to name a few, and has produced albums by artists such as Sonic Youth, Wilco, Stereolab, Faust, Tony Conrad, The Red Krayola, Joanna Newsom and US Maple. He mixed Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album […]
4AD Punk had vaporised into a new beast by the tail end of the Seventies, ripping out of its tri-chord skin into something altogether sleeker and weirder. Luckily for us pleasure-seekers, a then-unknown inquisitor going by the name of Ivo Watts-Russell was scouting around for talent for his fresh-faced label 4AD, mopping up all the post-punk verve he could get his hands on. In retrospect, he had a […]