Mute After thirty years spent as Sonic Youth guitar wrangler, plus his intermittent and incredibly varied solo career of experimentation, collaboration and wild ideas, I thought I knew a little of what to expect from this latest release from Lee Ranaldo. The stark, contextless cover image of tyre marks on […]
Yearly archives: 2017
239 posts
Dais Intended as a psychedelic thoroughfare that cures you of time, if only for its duration, this was one of Coil‘s many crowning glories for me. Along with the Spring Equinox EP “Moon’s Milk”, it opened the floodgates towards a richness that is still sorely missed, even all these years […]
Stickman Papir are a young power trio from Copenhagen plying an expansive take on instrumental guitar music. Together since 2010, V is, as the Roman numeral suggests, their fifth album and squeezes just seven tracks onto two discs, lasting as a little over an hour and a half. Brevity is […]
Play Loud! After last year’s Gestrüpp, this intriguing artist is back with a compilation of teasing flavours. Trampelpfadnomainroad is a collection especially compiled to synchronise with her seventy-fifth birthday and an exhibition of her life’s work at Städtische Galerie Traunstein in September 2017.
MiG Made In Germany carries on its massive Klaus Schulze reissue programme with these two releases that have been unavailable for some time. Both come in lavish fold-old covers with a booklet containing notes about the making of the albums. Both are two disc sets containing nearly three hours of […]
Gizeh The French neo-classical collective Astrïd has been playing together for the best part of twenty years. Back in 2012/2013 after various e-mailed correspondence, they invited the pianist Rachel Grimes, most well known for her US-based collective Rachel’s, to attend a gathering in the French countryside and see what might […]
London 11 September 2017 Dark clouds were brooding all day before Coven’s first ever show in the UK. AS I left the tube station the heavens opened and a monsoon like shower sent everyone on the street running for cover. I braved the downpour and ran to the entrance of […]
Bureau B Sound architect Nikolai von Sallwitz and experimental artist Alsen Rau have been collaborating on various projects for the last fifteen years or so and for this mysterious duo of albums, the ever-reliable Bureau B have been chosen to release them. This time around, the duo have chosen the […]
Sargent House Boris. Boris are a hard band to describe, other than in purely factual terms — like “there’s three of them and they’re from Japan”. Which doesn’t really cut it.
Hubro Of the three recent Hubro releases that have come across my path, this Brutter album is the one that perhaps pushes experimentation with rhythm to its optimum limits.
Upset The Rhythm After being seriously impressed with a fantastically rhythmic and propulsive live set by the dynamic duo courtesy of the very lovely people at Upset The Rhythm
MiG Agitation Free is not the most mentioned band when I think about early krautrock, space rock or progressive music. I knew the name, but had yet to get a grip of what they put out, and how they sounded. So getting this box of lots of old stuff I […]
Cleopatra Entertainment Disney‘s Beauty And The Beast famously likes to call itself “a tale as old as time”, but traditional though a young girl marrying a lion may be in the circles YOU move in, I’d argue an older tale was that eternal staple of the cautionary tale, the tale […]
Distant Spore After luxuriating in the carnival like atmosphere of 2014’s full length Make It Look Like Nothing Happened and the head spinning smorgasbord of 2016’s Everything Is Magick, nobody could really second guess Impuritan‘s next move. The colours and textures employed in the previous releases made them a fantastic new […]
LCR After the excellent atmospherics of Medusa’s Bed, Ms Lunch returns, this time on the other side of the mixing desk for her second excursion with violinist and noise-maker Mia Zabelka. The mistress of the strands, Lydia’s pulling this baby round as producer and joint composer
Hubro In comparison to the light wash of our reality that accompanied the Håkon Stene and Kristine Tjøgersen‘s recent album for Hubro, The Third Script combines the talents of Norwegian bassist Jo Berger Myhre and Icelandic drummer Olafur Bjorn Olafsson and spends time constructing an alternate reality, something which takes reference […]
Ahead of the launch of Robert Sotelo‘s début album, Cusp, Iotar interviewed Sotelo while he was in Buenos Aires from his new abode in Graz, Austria. They talked about the drift away from a London-centred culture, the glorious meaninglessness of great pop and much more that is pertinent.
Cherry Red And with the coming of the seasons, lo a new Fall album. As ever, bastards to write about. You’ve probably established some sort of perspective on The Fall and, as I’m in my twentieth year of being a bit unwell about The Fall, I’m fairly sure that perspective […]
Rockosmos It’s always interesting to hear a band you have not heard of before, especially when the words “space rock” and “prog rock” are being attached to their name and they are getting a lot of press attention. So I slipped my disc into the player and was prepared to […]
Hubro Since 2009, the good people at Hubro have been diligently documenting the expanding Norwegian music scene that encapsulates jazz, improv, minimalism and whatever else lurks in the mysterious frozen spaces of that fascinating country.