Buried Treasure Kept underground by the Soviets for too many years, Yuri Morozov‘s legacy is finally spreading its wings and flying into your ears. His Inexplicable and Human Extinction albums house some of the most unhinged electronic experiences I’ve tasted for a long while, and this teasing compilation from Buried Treasure scoops a […]
Yearly archives: 2017
239 posts
Upset The Rhythm If you went ahead and read the lovely interview with Robert, published in this august journal, you will have already learnt a few intriguing things about this unique talent, one of which is that Sotelo is a pseudonym. A pseudonym under which it has been possible for […]
Southern Lord Retrospektïẁ I, II and III are the crown jewels of the Magma empire. You’ll get told elsewhere that those jewels are located in the 1970s studio albums by Magma. You will get told that by people who cannot tell you why Christian Vander waited until 1980 to bring […]
Versatile Zombie Zombie‘s fifth long player celebrates their tenth anniversary of recording for the Versatile label. Although the last album proper was 2012’s Rituels D’un Nouveau Monde, they have spent the intervening years scoring two movies and a contemporary circus show. I think that these extra-curricular activities have fed nicely […]
Planet Mu Collecting together ten orphans and excursions from this year’s Bioprodukt LP, Ekoplekz‘s Cassettera is of course only available physically as a limited-edition cassette (but can be downloaded form the usual places too).
Ampbase Recordings The wonderful Amp have now been ploughing their particular furrow for the last twenty-five years or so. Having been birthed from the same fertile Bristol scene as Third Eye Foundation, Flying Saucer Attack, Movietone and Crescent, the band that finally coalesced around the duo of Karine Charff and […]
Bristol 10 December 2017 I wake to blizzard conditions, and a transport system buckling under a four-inch surprise of snow and ice. The UK has the worst coping strategies when it comes to sudden changes in weather, it really does; so I decide against my usual journey down the M4 […]
Out For me, Ut were the unsung heroes of that Noise New York scene and to see their essential work being re-issued can only be a good thing. Crawling from the same scene that spawned Swans, Sonic Youth, James Chance and Richard Hell, what made the band special was not that […]
London 30 November 2017 By the time I get to Heaven, Aluk Todolo are already on stage, kicking out a fine racket. I have no idea what to expect from them, but as I enter the venue I’m thinking “Neurosis”. And for the next few minutes, yes, they do sound […]
Consouling Sounds Thighpaulsandra and Massimo Pupillo (of Zu) have conjured a lovely bit of ambience here as Uruk, heavy fruit rotten with cankerous rainbows. I Leave A Silver Trail Through Blackness is a dark joy best suited to making merry with the other side of the witching hour. Crank that dial […]
Svart Finland’s instrumental hypno fourpiece Siinai are back with a standalone follow-up to 2014’s musing on consumerism Supermarket, and what a satisfying burst of cyclical, looping repetition it is.
London 21 November 2017 Over the last couple of years, Blues Pills have toured tirelessly and worked hard to become a big crowd-pulling concert act filling out large venues across Europe. So it was a bit of a surprise when they announced a rather intimate show at the small Jazz Café in […]
Whip Angels The title sets you up. Death is Coming, cumming… come in; the water’s lovely. La petite mort, sex and death, and rebirth. This is an audio slice of an audio-visual feast, best savoured whole. It is music and it stands alone and proud, but it’s also part of […]
Bristol 1 December 2017 Tucked in to the stage edges, Modulus III were a threesome of dual synthesizer drums and the rub of a cello, they cruised through some lovely motorik hypnotics. Musically siphoning their inspiration from a multitude of ports, but safely jutting out of entrapment, they notched up […]
English Heretic This has a stately grace, which seems full of ghosts. A fifty year de-celebration of The Summer of Love and a fugue for a darkening isle (that book seems closer to reality than any of us would like). It reimagines and repurposes, taking obscure psychedelic tracks from that […]
Svart Jess And The Ancient Ones are a enigma; their first album and EP were labelled under the occult rock genre alongside such bands as Jex Thoth and Blood Ceremony. This may have largely been due to the press releases saying that the songs were all about the band’s experiences […]
London 23 November 2017 “Dunkel. Dunkel ist die Nacht“.i It is most certainly dark tonight, the evenings now well and truly drawn. The winter solstice approaches. And, as is customary for such astronomical phenomena, we are gathering together tonight to celebrate by watching the rise of the strange, intense sun […]
Rock Fuel Media / Cleopatra / MVD Visual Hard to believe Ritual De Lo Habitual is a quarter of a century old, but a quarter of a century old it is, and has taken its rightful place in the pantheon of classic albums. A high point for alternative rock music […]
Bristol 23 November 2017 Drastically redefining notions of jazz, Bristol-based Calcine Quartet were a textural pleasure. Dominic Lash‘s double bass shovelling, Matthew Grigg‘s crumbled fret skutters sending the speakers into spasms. A gravelly diesel chug, breaking ranks in a ping of overspilling metal melded to the rusty hinged squeal from Rebecca […]
Riot Season The fifth album (as the title indicates) from Perhaps credits no fewer than eleven members of the group, comes wrapped up in a mind-altering sleeve — all jagged reds and blues with a eyeball-in-hand motif that shrieks LSD ahoy — and consists of two parts of vinyl to […]