Sumerian Palaye Royale have been climbing their way into our ears for a few years now, building a fiercely loyal fan base and quite a name for themselves, working with greats like Andy Black and Kellin Quinn of Sleeping With Sirens, all this without releasing an album.
Yearly archives: 2017
239 posts
Relapse During the 1980s, synthesizer soundtracks for horror and science fiction films were ubiquitous; most low-budget, straight to video movies had them. But during the nineties they began to fall out of favour. Fast forward a few years and a new breed of artists began to fall in love with […]
Avalanche (LP, CD, digital) / Hospital Productions (cassette) From the opening blasts and drum machine hurl of Post Self, it’s clear that Godflesh are in a very different musical space to 2014’s A World Lit Only by Fire. It’s not that the ire and scorn for seemingly pretty much everything […]
Transgredient Stretching from the Maeror Tri cassette years to the present day Troum incarnation, Drone Records founder Baraka[H] and Glit[S]ch have created some of the best drone work on the planet. First experienced their taste for the infinite through the excellent Tjukurrpa trilogy and have been partial to their wares ever […]
Witchfinder / Spinefarm Electric Wizard like Black Sabbath a lot, as do all right-thinking people, though I very much doubt the Wizard would like to be thought of as “right-thinking”. Calling your album Wizard Bloody Wizard is possibly the most blatant act of Sabbath-worship in an album title since The Rollins […]
Thrill Jockey Their second collaborative album finds The Body and Full Of Hell colliding into a molten lava field of brutality and raw emotional outpourings the like of which pulls teeth and punches metaphorical guts with nihilistic abandon.
The Null Corporation / Universal If you have been watching, or have already watched, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick‘s brilliant and harrowing documentary series The Vietnam War, you can’t have failed to notice its masterful use of music. Famously the first war to have its own soundtrack, they’ve used the […]
Imaginator After many years beavering away with King Missile, Bradford Reed‘s personal experiments feeding percussion through modular synths and playing around with the results has paid dividends on the release of the album Conduit by Ω▽ (pronounced Ohmslice), a band formed for this purpose.
Mute Marking four decades since Throbbing Gristle gave the world industrial music and a sharp shock to the system that made the punk rock scene exploding around them seem tame and backwards-looking by comparison, Mute are releasing anniversary editions of the band’s key albums. The Second Annual Report That splash […]
Nonplace Merging Burnt Friedman‘s distinctive electronic swirl with Mohammed Reza Mortazavi‘s deftly-played tombak rhythms, the Yek EP finds the Berlin-based duo in playful mode as they bounce musical sparks off each other.
6dimensions Sometimes, as Mick Jagger‘s character Turner observed in Nic Roeg‘s Performance, when going too far, it’s necessary to go further back and faster. This Steve Bicknell does on Awakening The Past by revisiting three tracks from his Lost Recordings days and concocting a fresh one for good measure to […]
6dimensions Impulse Model is Bobby James Pike‘s first release as Heartless, appearing on techno doyen Steve Bicknell‘s 6dimension label as a deeply delirious slice of modular groove. Bloopy and bleepy it may be, but it’s also full of twisting dancefloor passions that writhe as if alive
Important For the second collaborative release between the wonderfully wonky minimalist composer and toy lover Charlemagne Palestine and our very own Grumbling Fur Time Machine Orchestra, they have chosen to spread a 2016 live show at the Copenhagen Jazzhouse across three sides of beautiful aqua vinyl housed in a suitably […]
Substantia Innominata Deeply droney and rumbling, the mysterious tones of Sisters Oregon finds its source material at least in part drawn from recordings by Steven Wilson (of No-Man, Porcupine Tree and more) of a boy’s choir, though this is rarely made obvious. Other sound origins are even less identifiable, so perhaps […]
Bristol 30 October 2017 Motion in Bristol was home to two giants of the alternative music scene on the day before Halloween this year. The weather was clement, the venue opened on time and the mighty Godspeed You! Black Emperor had brought along friends and fellow sonic travellers Bardo Pond, […]
Aphelion Editions EP/64 is the band, a threesome of drums, electronics and vocal abstracts from Nick Janaway, Dan Johnson and Dali De Saint Paul. This tasty artefact documents some mighty fine live action, the date of which is betrayed by the Roman numerals of the title.
Artemisia Black metal has traditionally been the preserve of Satan, and the occasional Nazi; its blastbeats and shrieking were never going to be suited to tender love songs, after all. But in the quarter of a century since the infamous Norwegian black metal murders and church burnings, it has evolved […]
Tona Serenad Swedish composer Matti Bye has been producing music for twenty-five years now, much of which has been piano based. His early years spent improvising to moving pictures has brought an interesting aesthetic to his approaching his own music and this, his tenth LP, is a mysterious and ethereal […]
Sacred Bones I’ve just spent a few days driving down the south coast of England and then around the Devon countryside, listening to John Carpenter’s Anthology all the way. And the first thing to say about it is, it works. Overlaid on any landscape you’d care to imagine – a traffic-jammed […]
Fourth Dimension / Idioblast At times uncompromisingly brutal, Theme‘s Sacral Blood Warning barely lets up the pressure from the opening moments to its close what sometimes seems like a small aeon later. Along the way, they pummel and pound, rant and reverberate, shaking their groove as much as the walls.