Thrill Jockey For Dommengang‘s third album for Thrill Jockey, it sounds as though they threw all their stuff into the back of the car and blew their LA home in favour of a wild ride into the desert, forsaking the concrete gleam for some dusty widescreen excesses. The scree of feedback that opens the album is a welcome reminder of their rock roots, but also that they are […]
Yearly archives: 2019
261 posts
Thrill Jockey The bringing together of two serial collaborating drummers can only be a good thing, and when they have the pedigree of Oneida‘s Kid Millions and Uniform‘s Greg Fox, we must be in for a treat. Greg plays drums on Biting Through, but he also concentrates on creating a synthesized backdrop for each of the six drum-crazy tracks appearing on the album.
Farmadelica Silver Relics are a duo from New York who ply a kind of synth- and rhythm-orientated take in classic American rock song-writing. Consisting of songwriter Alex Sepassi on guitar and synths, amongst other things, and Justin Alvis on drums, they formulate a sound that is redolent of the sort of film imagery that anyone could recognise from the last thirty years; those enormous storm drains that run […]
Interchill It’s incredible to think that Suns Of Arqa have been making music for forty years now. I first came across them at the start of the 1990s when they were being lumped in with other ambient dance artists such as The Orb, Future Sound of London and Banco de Gaia as that scene exploded in 1991. So here is Heart Of The Suns, a thirteen-track celebration
Rosélie Records Child ballerina turned singer-songwriter Bethia Beadman was transplanted from the West Country to the flat lands of Lincoln, and from there plies her trade, releasing albums of emotional and sweeping drama, the latest of which even includes Mike Mills of REM fame on keyboards, guitar and vocals. Having spent time as a member of Hole‘s touring band and part of Circulus, as well as writing and […]
Courier Sound Suffolk micro-label Courier Sound have released another of their beautifully presented cassettes. Coming in a lime green hand-made box and lime green cassette, with Quality Street wrappers and lovely little card inserts, it looks a treat, but it totally belies the aural contents. The fact that the wrappers are salvaged from “several years of reluctant Christmas obligation” should warn the listener
Wave Folder The list of equipment that Radek Rudnicki uses on the latest RPE Duo album is full of things of which I have never heard: a Buchla System 200, Eurorack modular, Octatrack and Bugbrand PT Delay, amongst quite a few others. His partner in musical nirvana, Matt Postle, meanwhile makes do with trumpet, piano, Korg and melodica. Between them, though, they weave quite a tapestry of textural […]
Touch What a gem of electro-acousticness David Knight and Stephen Thrower have created for their second UnicaZürn release on the Touch label. The weeviling warmth of the orchestration on the first track is erased by a Steve Reichian slip, snipping signatures ripped through with corkscrewing curls, tapering manatees full of planetary perfume
Disco Gecko Lower case soundscape composers Toby Marks and Andrew Heath recently found themselves in a fresh part of the UK, looking after a friend’s house and decided to travel north, south, east and west from that point, making recordings and taking aural snapshots of the areas in which they found themselves. Owing to the way in which they both work, the field recordings that they collected form […]
Arjuna Music Dark Star Safari is a collaboration between four doyens of the Scandinavian music scene bringing together Samuel Rohrer, Eyvind Aarset, Jan Bang and Erik Honoré. Their self-titled LP finds four kindred spirits looking for a way to push music into even newer directions, trying to find a new language amongst the remains of everything that has gone before.
House Of Mythology David Tibet’s been a busy man, undertaking lots of extra curricular activity to rich rewards by collaborating with the likes of Zu and Youth, now he’s dancing on the cuneiformed candy of Mesopotamia with the likes of Andrew Liles and an unknown commodity of the Shaitan-Boy — who may just be a figment of both their fevered imaginings.
Upset the Rhythm Hash Redactor hail from Memphis, Tennessee, but you wouldn’t really know it from the bass-heavy post-punk groove that they throw out on their first album. Made up of Alec McIntyre from Ex-Cult and Charlotte Watson and Meredith Lones from NOTS with George Williford on second guitar, the album is structured but sleazy at the same time
Grönland Well, this is a mammoth undertaking and no mistake. A mere three months after Herr Rother arrived once more in Londinium to rock the smooth, polished wooden bleechers of Hackney’s du jour gig venue EartH – a reviewing task I lazily palmed off onto my teenage soni – onto my digital doorstep lands the great man’s new Solo box set with an almighty whompfff. Comprising his first […]
Foolproof Projects Andy Pyne and Lisa Jayne have reconvened as Map 71 to unleash a download EP of new material from Foolproof Projects. After time spent squirrelled away in their bunker (I imagine), the bouncing repetition and simple insistence of opener “Ex-Socialite Needs A New Invention” is faintly reminiscent of some of Factory Floor‘s rhythmic experiments, but here Andy uses squalls of synthetic sound to try and put […]
As per Freq tradition, Kev Nickells wades into every entry in the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest and ranks them on a slithery sliding scale from rubbish and pish via banging to poppers o’clock. So here we are, another year and another Eurovision. And what joys await us.
Phantom Limb JR Bohannon is a Brooklyn-based solo guitar player who first recorded this mini-album back in 2017 for cassette label Ausca. Phantom Limb liked it enough and saw enough in its diverse energy to warrant a reissue. JR originally hails from Louisville in Kentucky, and some of that city’s heritage has leaked into the sound of the songs, along with the usual likes of Robbie Basho and […]
London 19 April 2019 Ten years is a long time in music. Well, I mean, it’s quite a long time in anything, really. And if you adjust for inflation, ten years in the nineteenth century is actually AGES. Especially for a punk band. So it’s quite a thing that The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing are celebrating a whole decade of their anachronistic anarchy of […]
Out In the next part of Ut‘s re-issue campaign, their first album Conviction is up for the treatment and deservedly so. As mentioned before, for me they were unsung heroes and the purity of their democracy was something that a lot of other bands could have learned from. The fact that Nina Canal, Sally Young and Jacqi Ham all wrote and all sang is an unusual thing in […]