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 wire. The Crass-like eye-popping photo-montage of the inlaytoo (is that Elvis floating above tenements?)
Yearly archives: 2018
232 posts
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 bodies more noticeably than when we are on land.
London 17 November 2018 My, what a strange day. Going to an afternoon concert is a rare enough event these days anyway, but when the bill of fare involves a jazz ensemble led by a bona fide Hollywood film star, who then proceeds to spend at least half the show doing trivia quizzes, it really is quite something to behold.
Modularfield Another of Modularfield‘s lavishly packaged cassette-only releases and yet another welcome change of direction for the label. Ambient guitarist Lela Amparo has released six of the most deliciously sweet guitar-based instrumentals on this mini-album.
Jahtari Jahtari label founder Disrupt has created a haven for all things dubular and dread-inflected, often bringing his own particular strand of science fictional elements to the fore on releases that reference a host of SF tropes from the interstellar planet-busting nihilism of Dark Star (sampled here, of course) to Blade Runner (memorably recreating Roy Batty’s final monologue using a range of heavily-effected speech synthesizers on “Love On” from 2009’s […]
three:four Swiss musician Manuel Troller has tried to shy away from performing solo, generally acting as collaborator with a wide variety of more esoteric artists, including Julian Sartorius and Merz. Having been asked three years ago to support Marc Ribot at a jazz club in Bern, circumstances have found him more open to the thought of his own album, and here finally are the fruits of his experiments.
Bristol 13 November 2018 Deep in the building’s basement, illuminated by flashing red strobes, Copper Sounds totally seduced with their ritualistic roast of belt-driven bicycle wheels and contact mic(ed) boulders. The undulating mechanism murmured like an arthritic after-shadow in the PA as the calcium rub of the stoney surfaces was effect-fed, bent across grainy percussives in a parade of pendulum-painting pennies
Adaadat When I received this latest cassette from Adaadat, I was taken right back to my childhood and the story cassettes that used to come from Marshall Cavendish. You could buy them from the newsagents, and there would be a book and cassette combo that could keep an easily amused child quiet for ages. The duo Story Teller, made up of writer and broadcaster Bruce McClure and sound […]
Bureau B From its pounding opening track “Gizmo”, Emotional Detox seems like a new statement of intent for Camera. Rather than relying on the more traditional Krautrock tropes that were present on their previous releases, this opener has a sense of early eighties electronica mixed with a fifties sci-fi style synth lead. This makes it sound a little like a weird hybrid of The Buggles doing the soundtrack of […]
Constellation Stepping out from the shadows of A Silver Mt Zion must be quite an undertaking, but Jessica Moss has chosen this opportunity to release her third album and see what she can offer under her own steam. The violin is her main instrument and, along with voice and drones, she has constructed some elliptical sound worlds from these basic ingredients that are far greater as a whole […]
ABKCO I’ve always fucking hated The Beatles and I know that our Ma once said, in a louche fashion, that she preferred The Rolling Stones in the ’60s. I’m going to assume that was because of the better tunes and, like, generally being nicer to look at. She’s not really a one for your rock stuff, our Ma
Thrill Jockey Koen Holtkamp has been pretty busy over the last ten or twelve years, primarily with his label Apestaartje, but also releasing music under his own name, solos and collaboratively, as well as all the albums that the lovely Thrill Jockey-signed Mountains released.
Cherry Red OK. I have a shocking revelation to share with you. And there’s an easy way you can test my hypothesis. Get thee to the internet and find a recording of the Enfield Poltergeist case. In case you’re unaware, in the late 1970s, an Enfield family reported strange goings-on at their house in north London, including furniture moving, unexplained noises
Too Pure / Beggars Arkive When Stereolab arrived on the scene in the early nineties, plying their trade on limited, lovingly packaged, vinyl releases, they also brought with them a new aesthetic for those times.
Beggars Arkive In the early eighties, Bauhaus were a bit of an odd phenomenon; musically, they changed with each album, and, like their contemporaries Japan, it was difficult to pigeon hole them. Eventually they were lumbered in with a lot of diffused other artists under the gothic rock tag, something that their music, apart from a couple of numbers, didn’t really adhere to.
Upset The Rhythm For Rattle‘s second album through the good people at Upset The Rhythm, they have chosen to use the long player as an opportunity to stretch their drum and vocal experiments over durations that allow the tracks to fully insinuate with their gradually unfurling structures. It is as if they took the ideas exhibited on their self-titled four track seven-inch EP
Anthology This is a CD to go with a book about that library music there used to be. It’s about curios, you see? So here we have another sense of curios. I like the Rolling Stones, say, but it’s just such a thing from another time for me. Curio. This is probably more directly obviously a curio. Library music. Curio.
Bureau B For Qluster‘s seventh outing since the restart in 2007, the duo of HJ Roedelius and Onnen Bock has expanded to a trio with the addition of Armin Metz, and has taken what for them could be seen as a radical change in strategy. For Elemente, each of the eight tracks has been constructed using all-analogue equipment, a list of which is included on the back cover. Arps […]