SPV / Oblivion This is Klaus Schulze’s first studio album of new material in five years, after many reissues of his older work. It is both a celebration of him turning seventy and also the artist reflecting on his career while he recovered from an illness that saw him stop […]
Yearly archives: 2018
232 posts
Mute Chris Carter is a worldly presence amongst electronic pioneers. It’s a shape of music with a number of associated images: the egg-head technician, the scientist, perhaps the hermetic egoist. There’s no doubt this music is cerebral – it seems joined together in a way that in many ways defies […]
Aagoo The tracks presented here were originally intended for Philippe Petit‘s Strings of Consciousness collective, but after their break-up, the songs clearly needed a good home and so Philippe has re-activated the And Friends moniker. Considering the wealth of different talent here, including some regular collaborators, it is very fitting.
London 4-6 May 2018 Friday: Justin It’s a sunny Friday in Olde London Towne, and the weather’s predicted to be a strictly non-traditional scorcher of a May Bank Holiday weekend. What better time to punctuate outdoor drinking with a succession of slow bands in dark rooms?
Rougge / Green United Music Rougge is a mysterious French composer operating in a modern neo-classical kind of vein, but with an added air of intrigue. The pianist and vocalist’s apparently wordless vocalising sketches shadows and light all over the compelling soundscapes generated by a wonderful string quintet
Esoteric Comus‘s First Utterance is one of those albums that lights your head with its brilliance. Even before you hear any music, the ball-point intensity of Roger Wootton‘s artwork rips into you, its monochromed grimace filling the canvas like some ancient peat man
Thrill Jockey For The Sea And Cake‘s eleventh album and the first since 2012’s Runner, the band has slimmed down to a three-piece following the departure of bassist Eric Claridge. I can find no obvious reason for his departure nor information as to who has taken over the bass playing […]
It’s May, so it means that it’s time for Kev Nickells to get the Eurovision ball a-rolling with the annual round-up of what’s grot and what’s not. Gay Christmas comes around so quickly and by the spirit of Judy Garland we are once again blessed with another bumper bonanza of Eurojoy this […]
LM Dupli-Cation I remember years ago catching A Hawk And A Hacksaw playing various little venues in Bristol. At that point, it was just Heather Trost and Jeremy Barnes and they were plying a kind of Eastern European street music, Jeremy sitting down playing the accordion with a drumstick taped […]
Upset The Rhythm Zesting the zeitgeist, the Instamatic fun on this baby is a gooning lime balloon that’s crammed with ideas. Emotionally volatile adverts that stick it to the line-towing yawn, cricks its neck over the environment
Sound On Probation It’s been proven by experimental research carried out at Yale University in 2005i that extreme ambient / drone music stimulates the part of the brain called Shatner’s Bassoon, which is the brain centre dealing with time perception. At certain highly-resonant frequencies, to the listener a second can […]
Consouling Sounds OK, a brief history lesson. In the fourteenth century, a man named Tamerlane, who dreamed of restoring the glory of Genghis Khan‘s Mongol empire, laid waste to big fuck-off tracts of Europe, Asia and Africa. Calling himself “the Sword of Islam” and “the Scourge of God”, Tamerlane built […]
Play Loud! Locust Fudge is a duo comprising Schneider TM‘s Dirk Dresselhaus and his old Sharon Stoned compadre Christopher Uhe. It seems they last put an LP out about twenty years ago, after which Dirk concentrated on the gradual and rather elegant electronic deconstructivism of Schneider TM.
Rocket Drawing its title from the concept popularised in Robert Anton Wilson‘s Illuminati-series novel The Cosmic Trigger, Gnod‘s Chapel Perilous embarks on a hepped-up journey through the outer and inner spaces of the mind, here expressed through the medium of guitars and other instruments rammed through amplification turned up to […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]