Constellation The first side of Mise En Abyme milks a soft melancholic as different voices are set alight to a rhythmic jumble sale of textural glitches and slipped-disc percussives as Jean Cousin, aka Joni Void’s second outing gets knee-deep into the virus of modernity.
Monthly archives: April 2019
Discus Martin Archer‘s Discus label certainly knows how to throw a curveball. After the motorik groove of Das Rad and the subtle freedom of Beck Hunters, their next release is the chilly post-folk artistry of Frostlake. Jan Todd has taken four years to record the follow up to 2015’s White […]
Houndstooth Renowned synthesist Abul Mogard‘s latest release and first for Houndstooth is a selection of reworkings which take in some interesting artists from today’s outer fringes.
London 12 April 2019 Ah, an evening of pure Detroit electronica some thirty-five years or more after it first happened is a must-see. The atmosphere of The Barbican’s post apocalyptic Logan’s Run architectural design just added to the palpable excitement as I made my way towards the venue. This is […]
Rocket Gum Takes Tooth have waited five years to follow up their second album Mirrors Fold, but it would appear to have been well worth the wait. The wildness of the live spectacle is not so apparent when listening to this album, but the amount of ideas and angles that […]
Pelagic Suitably sepia-soaked, part one of Årabrot Speciale‘s Die Nibelungen stares off into the mysterious distance, its choral eddies peripherally chased in phosphorescent shivers. A discordia of wormy animates vapourising on an imagined horizon as malevolent motifs creep the architecture. Signatures that crystallize, dance skeletal, then are snatched away by […]
Hubro Øyvind Torvund‘s latest opus on Hubro is a sweeping gesture laying open his love for the kind of crazy exotica that the likes of Martin Denny and Les Baxter wowed the unsuspecting public of the 1950s. It is not about copying what came before, though, as there are some […]
Hallow Ground Loving the minimal murmur of Distant Animals‘ Lines LP, featuring one lengthy excursion per side, the first taking a more Éliane Radigue-like approach. “A Pure Drone” is an unsullied flat-line ripple stretching a heat-grazed horizon of the type La Monte Young still surfs
On The Dole The new wave of British heavy metal then. It can safely be said that your writer has minimal understanding of the genre. Actually almost deliberately. So why pick up a compilation of NWOBHM? Something to do with “history is always written by the victors”‘.
Thrill Jockey Matmos‘s latest is a really impressive feat, considering every sound that you hear on the album was generated by something plastic. As a comment on the current surfeit of plastic items that we have on the globe, it packs a potent social message; and what’s more, considering the […]
Kscope I apparently first saw Ozric Tentacles perform at the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1984, and although my memory of the whole occasion is rather hazy, to say the least, their music has remained with me ever since that long summer many years ago. Even though over the years band […]
Fiasco Recordings Art Trip And The Static Sound‘s 2018 album A Week Of Kindness is being refreshed in the public’s consciousness by the release of the “Iron Lung” single. This particular track shines a light on their more repetitive Spacemen 3 leanings, with a rough and grungey circular guitar motif. […]
London 6 April 2019 The faded Tudor grandeur of the venue, set in the urban sprawl of Hackney, was a fitting place for tonight’s entertainment, and its small performance area just added to the night’s intimacy. The second night of celebration for Daniel O’Sullivan‘s Folly LP release (part of The […]
Important Warning: much tl;dr within. Minimal squee. Tread ye carefully. Initial thoughts on Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis‘s Chamber Music CD were something like: why would you put those two together? It’s an odd pairing. People really fall in love with Morton Feldman. He makes, at turns, utterly inscrutable, glacial, […]
Sparrow Hawk Cowboy Flying Saucer‘s second album dispenses a series of lead hollerer BK13‘s slightly surreal and repetitive vignettes over an at times contorted and at times spacious scrum of musical hubbub. His appearance at a Travel Lodge wedding that transformed into some kind of hallucinatory extended dream-state is brought […]
Mute / Cherry Red Thirty years a classic. A record that’s hugely saturated in my childhood — it might be my favourite Erasure album, or it might be the one that I heard most through my sister’s walls in the late 80s. There’s not much I still listen to from […]
London 2 April 2019 Italian producer and songwriter Giorgio Moroder is basically a legend. After discovering a certain sound in the mid-seventies, he reinvented disco music overnight. The sound was full of synthesizers pulsing to a pounding beat, but also never forgetting that key ingredient, melody. Moroder then won three […]
Rocmusic I was more than a little excited to discover R.O.C were returning after quite some time away and this album does not disappoint. Somehow, ROC manage to exist outside of the music industry and any trends and vagaries that may afflict it. Although it has been twelve years since […]