Grönland Holger Czukay is a name with which any self-respecting music fan will be only too familiar. With a career that started in 1960 with the introduction of the Holger Schuring Quintet, through time spent as a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, on through the years spent honing Can into the extraordinary machine that […]
Yearly archives: 2018
232 posts
VMS Columbine are a group of rappers from Rennes who have captured the spirit of French adolescence. They have recently released their third album, Adieu Bientôt, and are blooming into a rather well-known band. They describe themselves as “absurd, naive and deep” and their music mixes synths and guitars to create […]
Brutture Moderne The mysterious GDG Modern Trio is a band about which I knew nothing and the album that arrived with its Soviet-influenced modernist cover art sits there on the desk looking inscrutable. It transpires that the album was recorded in Ravenna and consists of three members of Italy’s burgeoning […]
Brighton 18 October 2018 After Iglooghost’s live show I was sat up in bed, unable to sleep, furiously making notes and trying to find out exactly why I found this show so brilliant, significant and ground breaking. I still haven’t got to the bottom of it, and I have a […]
Svart When Throat‘s latest album and their first for Svart arrived, I must confess I was a little put of by the sticker on the cover proclaiming them to be “The princes of Finnish Rock”. I guess I had a certain image in my head, which thankfully was completely eradicated […]
Consouling Sounds Thisquietarmy have been seriously prolific over the last ten years, scattering a good thirty or so albums into the musical universe across an array of different labels. However, this latest via Consouling Sounds is the first to find Eric Quach expanding TQA into a three-piece. The inclusion of Charles Bussieres and Marc-Olivier […]
Stolen Body Doom now covers so many differing styles of heavy music that it encompasses a multitude of different bands. There are those who faithfully tread the path of Sabbath, those that make monolithic noise and those that take more of their ideas from the sounds of bands from the […]
London 5 December 2018 The good people at Upset The Rhythm have been trading for fifteen years now and the calibre of artists that they have to play seems to improve with every year. It feels as though they made their home at The Islington and tonight’s treats for the […]
New Heavy Sounds BlackLab are a Japanese duo that use the mighty fuzz pedal to create some epic doom and Under The Strawberry Moon 2.0 is their début album. A wall of crushing fuzz snarls in “Black Moon” as it crashes its way into its big chord sequence. Echoed vocals […]
London 1 December 2018 It’s Saturday night. It’s Oxford Street. It’s nearly Christmas. It’s fucking horrible, is what it is. And what a relief to get into The 100 Club which, while packed, is still somehow less claustrophobic than the street outside. And the reason it’s packed is because everyone’s […]
4AD It’ll End In Tears Being the kind of guy to gravitate towards the melancholic, there’s certain records that stay with you, speak an (un)comfortable truth, live far beyond the era they were created in. Dreampop supergroup This Mortal Coil‘s It’ll End In Tears is such a jewel, a timeless beauty whose cover […]
Cleopatra Well deck my balls with holly and call me The Saviour, bugger me if it isn’t nearly Christmas. So get the tinsel up, dangle some dongles from a tree and slap Die Hard on the telly. Oh, and at this holiest time of year, have you considered inviting William […]
Cavaillon 28 November 2018 Theatrical ensemble BOT have been presenting their Ramkoers (Collision Course) production around Europe for the last few years, frequently performing in disused factories and other spaces that allow them to bring their post-industrial cabaret to venues appropriate to their subject matter.
Dry Cough I’m not sure if it splits cleanly down the middle, but I tend to think there’s two types of heavy music — music that sounds like the smell of melted plastic, warped doorframes and scattered glass of a burnt-out building, and stuff that’s clean. Happily, this falls into […]
Mute Laibach doing The Sound of Music. If those words hold any meaning for you, you’ve pretty much already heard this album. You’re probably already aware that this is a bunch of studio recordings inspired by a performance they did in DPRK.
Lo Recordings Lo Recordings have been going for over twenty years now. An often overlooked but important arbiter of modern electronic based music, they have chosen this moment to release a compilation of material that they see as exploring the connections, overlaps and roots of that oft over-used term ambient. […]
Leaving / Stones Throw To: Monsieur F., France London, Nov. 22nd __18. It is just after midnight, and as I write these words, weak and weary, my hand scarce possesses enough strength to hold the pen. I am in a wretched condition. I cannot rest. No sleep will come to me. […]
Beggars Arkive For me, one of the best things about Bauhaus was that they managed to cover so much groundover a relatively short career and for each album to be a rapid progression from the previous. After the dark dealings of In The Flat Field and the esoteric spirituality of Mask, […]
Tiny Global Productions Forty years young, The Nightingales are back with a storming album. Perish The Thought is a sharp and saturated beast wrapped in a lush baroque of a cover full of rich flora, that if you stare hard enough is a garden full of death, subtly strangled in barb […]
Adaadat Sound artist Joel Cahen initially designed this album to be listened to in a submerged state, ie in a body of still water like a swimming pool or large baths. Apparently, when sound travels through water it moves four times as quickly as through air and also affects our […]