Crammed Discs Imagine sitting in a bar and engaging with a tan, weathered stranger who starts showing you photographs of places you are never likely to visit; some vibrant, some serene, a group of faces here, a glorious sunset, buildings, oceans.
Yearly archives: 2017
239 posts
Temporary Residence Coalescing at the smoothed-out jazz hinterlands of dub, post-rock and psychedelic spaciousness, Grails‘ latest opus – the first for six years – finds their instrumental horizons expanded as far as their minds had ever been hitherto, drifting far out
Bureau B Conrad Schnitzler, early member of both Tangerine Dream and Kluster, must have found both of those oppressive bands too formulaic and stifling. By 1975, he had struck out on his own, producing music for films that had yet to be released or even made.
Mottomotto Right from the electro-slapped rub of the opener to the insistent burn of guitar that seals the deal, this baby kicks winter grumpiness out into the far reaches like its predecessor Innard Listeningestion did. Its glinty beams and squelchy piranhas are the perfect panacea to the prevailing gloom, smoothed in plenty of harmonic warmth.
Southern Lord Ten minutes and ten seconds of stoner riffs that some waited some sixteen years to arrive since the last hazy wafts of Sleep‘s 1998 LP Dopesmoker faded out, “The Clarity” finds Al Cisneros and Matt Pike joined by Jason Roeder of Neurosis on drums. Originally released as a digital single in 2014, it now gets the full Southern Lord vinyl treatment
Sulatron /Deep Distance “It was an evening in summer upon the placid temperate planet Mars. Up and down green wine canals, boats as delicate as bronze flowers drifted. In the long and endless dwellings that curved like tranquil snakes across the hills, lovers lay idly whispering in cool night beds” – Ray Bradbury, The Silver Locusts
Gizeh Back in 1931, FW Murnau, director of the Expressionist classics Nosferatu and Faust amongst others was directing a docu-drama in the South Sea Islands about forbidden love between two young islanders. After filming and just before the preview, he died in a vehicle accident and the film, although winning an Oscar, was lost to the sands of time.
London 25 January 2017 Charles Bullen of This Heat fame was up first, ricocheting a rich stream of bubbling metallics from a specially adapted lap-steel contraption. A set of gamboling percussives and deep Balinese-like bounces drawn through a shanty town of effects. All very fragmented, his sparse trajectories sped off in doubling harmonics with the odd bit of accidental mobile phone surreally spluttering through.
Accretions The Argonauts are a four-piece underground supergroup of sorts, surfing out of Japan with this high octane album of instrumental jams that shows all the players, guitar, bass, drums and keyboards to be in excellent form.
Umor Rex Bringing together odds and ends, remixes and new studio work, Radiations takes it title from a track originally included on 2016’s Colliding Contours. While at first it might seem odd to repeat the track on a new record, the appearance of Shackleton‘s remix of the track on Side A means that it all makes sense. In its original form, “Radiations” itself is a slow motion slab […]
Confront It’s a truism that free jazz and all manner of improv is best appreciate live, rather than on record, as it is when in front of an audience that a quartet such as Akode really come into their own. North And South therefore comes from that other great tradition of such music by being an oustanding record of one such outing, captured at Café OTO in London in […]
Consouling Sounds Packing a lot into its two sides of vinyl (or one track on the CD edition), Forever And A Day finds Mathieu Vandekerckhove (Amenra, Kingdom and Sembler Deah) in a musical meditation on his relationship with his father, and the sculpture that he made for his son around the time of his birth. This bronze torso and head appears in close-up detail on the LP sleeve […]
Consouling Sounds Werl documents a supercharged powerhouse in action, one that came from the meeting of the guitars and FX of Aidan Baker (of Nadja and also Hypnodrone Ensemble, Caudal, etc) with the heavyweight percussion of Tomas Järmyr (from Zu, Barchan and Yodok in various forms). The album stretches to over an hour and half of music across eight tracks on two CDs, allowing the duo plenty of […]
Gizeh (CD) / Pleasance (Vinyl) The title track pins you early on in fuzzy cushions and muted percussion, this elastic line of rhythm stitching the goods as vaporous panthers prowl the collaterals. Claire Brentnall‘s vocals make a brilliant foil to Aidan Baker‘s shoegazery sensibilities and pedal prowess.
Bureau B “Allons enfants de la Patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé.” When the musical “Marseillaise” is sung, there can surely be no more fitting embodiment of Gallic savoir faire than Richard Pinhas. Philosopher, guitarist, innovator, electronic music pioneer – his visage is perfectly placed to flutter aloft on the bloody banners raised above the barricades.
Touch Sometimes, the press releases just absolutely nail it and I hate it when they do. This latest release from the band that fell from the belly of The Amal Gamal Ensemble came with a description that’s clearly trying to ruin my review before it’s even got going.
Round 2 Oriental Sunshine‘s sole album, Dedicated To The Bird We Love is one of those treats that come along rarely in our musical travels. A psychedelic folk album recorded in Norway in 1969 with a surprising Eastern influence, it received a release from Philips back in the day but sold poorly and sadly, the band spilt not long after, releasing nothing more.
Every Contact Leaves A Trace It seems like only a few weeks ago that I was reviewing the last batch of ECLAT releases (and that was largely due to my tardiness), yet here we are in 2017 with another pair of releases. I gather that these were released fairly late in the day of 2016 because label-mogul Seth Cooke wanted to get them out that side of the new […]