Faber and Faber tl;dr – you probably need this book if you’re a fan of Can. You probably need it if you’re a fan of well-written things about music.
Monthly archives: April 2018
19 posts
London 24 April 2018 Back in 1982, in one week I went to both Tangerine Dream and the final concert by Japan, all within a couple of days of each other. Fast forward just over thirty-five years, and here I am sat at The Union Chapel about to soak in the atmospheres of the Dream again, this time supported by Japan’s wonderful keyboard player Richard Barbieri.
Grönland After Robert Görl and Gabi Delgado spilt up DAF back in 1982, for one reason or another, Robert lost all interest in music. He travelled to New York intent on taking up acting, but was required to leave after his visa expired. Once back in Germany, he was detained due to having missed military service and escaped by the skin of his teeth to Paris on a […]
London 21 April 2018 A rather windswept Mark Pilkington (head honcho of Strange Attractor and one half of the esoteric surfing Téléplasmiste) is up first, treating us to a rare solo performance under guise of The Asterism. Getting jiggy with the interwebs reveals an asterism to be a pattern of stars or an optical starburst in gemstones, a somewhat apt title for the opalescent parade that follows.
Zoharum (CD) / Sonic Meditations (LP/CS) Originally released as mini CDrs on different labels in 2009, Expo 70‘s Justin Wright was joined for these two lengthy sessions by Matt Hill from Umberto on both bass guitar and at the drum machine controls. And what flights of psychedelic fantasy they are, drifting and floating on ever-flowing waves of looped guitar and recursive effect pedal washes that uncurl, largely in homage to […]
Cyclic Law You can never rely on the bloody British weather. Given that until last week April had been unseasonably cold and damp – a fifteen-minute walk from Brockley Station felt more like battling against the January elements than revelling in the joyous unfolding of spring – I was hoping that a small silver lining to such a meteorological cloud might be the right atmospheric conditions .
Feeding Tube / Public House Daniel Wilson, who operates under the nom de plume Meadow House, is one of the great English eccentrics. As well as being part of improv quartet Oscillatorial Binnage, releasing the intriguing Radionics Radio and acting as Resonance FM‘s composer-in-residence for 2014, he has operated a mediadropping scheme for the last twenty years.
Tonometer Music Christian Skjødt‘s Illumination LP was commissioned for an installation of the same name he constructed at the Botanical Garden of the University of Latvia in Riga in 2014. Released on 10″ clear vinyl and digitally, each side is exactly twelve minutes long, and captures a slice in time from the ten solar-powered analogue circuits which he had installed to resonate around the dome of an eighteenth century […]
Trace It is clear from the title of the album, the tone of the cover imagery and some of the track titles that Mark Beazley and Michael Donnelly may not be treating us to another blissful series of plangent, bass heavy soundscapes. Blurred images of police lines and war shots offset by high-class partying are set against a blood-red sky.
Schoolkids / Scrawny After thirty years of playing together with the odd break here and there, Buffalo Tom seem to convene every five years or so to throw down another bid for supremacy over the few bands that are left from their post-hardcore brethren.
London 23 March 2018 “Andrew O’Neill was living at my house, and he was doing a show about British industry in the nineteenth century and he said ‘why don’t we write some songs and we can do them as a support act for the show?’”
London 7 April 8018 The Netfix TV series Stranger Things has been the go-to visual experience for all things retro 80s in the last couple of years. Set in the town of Hawkins, various supernatural and sci-fi events set off the young protagonists in the search for the truth.
Stolen Body After being fortunate enough to catch The Evil Usses‘ barnstorming set at last year’s Bristol Psychfest and being thrilled and bewildered in equal measure by their previous three releases, including the loose as a goose cassette Giblets, I was really looking forward to seeing what these Dartington alumni had to offer, and in which direction it would boldly spring.
Bureau B There’s not enough trumpet in music nowadays, something the brilliance of the opening track firmly re-adjusts. “Le Coeur Léger, Le Sentiment D’un Travail Bien Fait” is a collaborative with FaUSt that gets Jean-Hervé Péron giving it the Reeves and Mortimer pub singer swerve to some trilobiting tendrils of tuneage.
Buried Treasure It’s taken me a while to process this. I’m still processing it. I’ve watched this right the way through three times and jumped around in it (you will go into it, if you bother to go at all) a few more; selecting little movements, trying to find ways to explain what it is.
Bank A merry dance of yin and yang that finds Drew McDowall draping the canvas with his trademark shadowplay , slumberous contours for Hiro Kone to throw over her modular light and broken trinkets as both scoop at a secret melodic heart.
Bristol 1 April 2018 Ireland’s David Colohan (of United Bible Studies / Agitated Radio Pilot) and company start things off with a few vocal improvisations. Tales full of ancient ways, chalk and bones, lost histories and weathered stone, crow-picked carrion and curses to the universal robber-time.
Front & Follow Paul Snowden (AKA Time Attendant) and Maybury capture the surreal sensuality of Penny Slinger‘s story in shuttering drone and distempered decay. The merest sense of rhythm lurking in a marginalised menagerie of modular synapse and scissored sizzle.