Rune Grammofon For Fire! Orchestra‘s fourth album for Rune Grammofon, the core group has once again reduced the numbers, this time to a far more manageable fourteen. The introduction of a string quartet (three violins and one cello) still has reed players outnumbering strings, but it doesn’t make for a […]
Monthly archives: June 2019
27 posts
Motto Motto Incredibly, the band Now have been plying their charming trade for the last twenty years or so, and yet every release sounds so fresh and imbued with the joy of a band that have just started playing together.
Bristol 19 June 2019 Audience-surrounded, EP64 kicked an intense noise. Dali’s word-tangled molasses kicked around by tribal drums and hawking sax in one of the most energetic performances I have witnessed from them
Bronson Martin Bisi‘s famed BC Studios in Brooklyn is renowned for bringing the noise to New York, and in celebration of it reaching the grand old age of thirty-five, they decided to throw a party in January of 2016, invite a load of old friends and record the ensuing fun […]
Drone For the seventh outing in Drone Records‘ long-running Drone-Mind // Mind-Drone series of vinyl compilations, Specimens, Skeldos, Mytrip and Opening Performance Orchestra get not only a track on the LP, but for the first time in the collection, the latter also have the chance to offer up the full […]
Nonplace The slightly sardonic title nods at a playful notion of just what could be taken to be traditional music these days, in central Europe or elsewhere. Does the music have to be of a certain age or place, and is its essence somehow fixed?
Substantia Innominata “Are All Things Equivalent?” may be the question, but the answers that Matt Waldron offers up for his contribution to Drone Records‘ sequence of 10” vinyl releases are as difficult to pin down as one might imagine from someone who has been a significant contributor to the surrealistic […]
Aesthetical Reflecting on symbolic imagery and how it is connected to physical objects, Franck Vigroux‘s Totem LP bristles with sampladelic energy and visceral bass perturbations. Over the course of ten tracks, he grasps hold of the listener’s attention and shakes their auditory perceptions until they start to buckle under the […]
Thrill Jockey Once again, Thrill Jockey play host to the Appalachian folk-influenced duo House and Land, and here they take seven songs of various origins and imbue them with a sense of their own characters. The songs, being the age that they are, are far from feminist tracts and it […]
Play Loud! Crack opens with the kind of psychedelic rock that has seemingly existed since the dawn of time (or somewhere around 1972) in all corners of the known universe. Or perhaps Berlin in the case of Glen, a quartet who like to slather their effects on the guitar, bend […]
Thrill Jockey The classic idea of the sort of band that one might expect to find on Thrill Jockey seems to be blown apart with every new release. Iowa City’s Aseethe are a great case in point with their second album for the label upping the heavy ante to monolithic […]
Play Loud! Filled with a plethora of recursing rhythmic elements, the mournful voice of a soul in non-specific agony (perhaps), scraping on an atonal violin while the rattle of snares and toms lurches across woodblock clacks, cuckoo-clock chimes
Rock Action As far as I am concerned, Luke Sutherland has been away from producing his own music for too long now. After helping to create the blood-rush post-rock of Long Fin Killie to the dreamy trip-hop of Bows and the pan-European Music AM, he wrote some delightful novels and […]
Zoharum Filled with a brooding sense of immanent menace, Dren‘s Time And Form LP feels essential, heavy, as if built from various elemental forces and carved into platonic solids. While the eight tracks might bear some initial resemblance to techno and industrial electronic music, there’s also a tremendously heavy bass […]
Following on from the release of their Bananas LP on Wavefolder, RPE Duo (Matt Postle on trumpet and Radek Rudnicki on electronics) present the “Broken Planet” video
Va Fongool In her bid to subvert the sound of the trumpet and meld it into something that is purely her own, Hilde Marie Holsen has teamed up with synthesizer artist Magnus Bugge as Bilayer to generate an album’s worth of esoteric and other worldly soundscapes. If you are lucky, […]
Taken from their début album, City Islands, Fabrik‘s remix EP Other Islands finds a quartet of tracks being reconfigured by four very different artists, including Gagarin,
Cherry Red / MVD Entertainment / New Ralph Too In Early Modern English – the transitional phase of the English language from the Middle English of the late fifteenth century to the Modern English of the mid to late seventeenth century – the mole was known as the “mouldywarp”. Could there be any more […]
Spècula A serial collaborator, Teho Teardo has been releasing music for the last thirty years, both as a member of various bands and also as a solo soundtrack composer. Max Porter‘s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, a book that has been adapted for the stage, directed by Enda Walsh, […]
Unrock So. A curio from the world of, uh, alt-world music? No, that’s entirely ridiculous and not a little bit condescending as fuck. What’s holding this split release together? Superficially, it’s all faintly “esoteric” or something like wonky improvisations writ with pan-Arabic influence but, uh, frankly there’s not a great […]