Zam Zam A splinter from the family Gnod, AHRKH AKA Alex Macarte, spiders a delicate thunder here on a Bliss Waves (From The Heart Realm) in trio of tracks that meditatively pull, sparkle with a caressive light.
Yearly archives: 2021
167 posts
Courier I was reading Bram Stoker‘s Lair Of The White Worm recently, and there is something about the slow creep of the latest Courier cassette that evokes the brooding, underground menace of that book. The ominous drone, the slow vibrations, a rustling movement of an inexplicable body. Aqueous groans sound through stagnant pools and the creek and scutter of smaller things vanish into the shadows of hidden caverns.
Named after Jean-Luc Godard‘s classic of French new wave cinema, Breathless re-release their 1991 album Between Happiness And Heartache via Tenor Vossa on 16 July 2021 as a deluxe thirtieth anniversary edition on what they describe as “heartache pink” vinyl. The double a-side single of “Over And Over” and “Everything I See” comes out on 25 June, and the latter is a bonus track only available on the […]
Intimate Inanimate The artwork for the latest collaboration between Aria Rostami and Daniel Blomquist is lovely, but has a kind of impenetrability that filters through to the sounds within. It is as if these undiscovered runic symbols had a diffuse and languorous soundtrack that had been beamed in from some hitherto uncharted land. Time Apart In The West is broken down into fourteen months, and that sense of […]
Daniel Burke has been recording and performing music as Illusion of Safety since 1983, with a variety of collaborators joining him along the way. Dormant from 2015, he revived IOS in 2020, continuing the exploration of unconventional sound using unorthodox devices and methods. Daniel’s session for Philippe Petit‘s encyclopaedic ongoing Modulisme project last no less than eight hours, and is a tour de force of experimental music in […]
Announced today by Bureau B: This box is the first virtually complete collection of FAUST works from the years 1971-1974. In addition to the debut album referenced by Morris, it includes the 1972 album So Far, the legendary 1973 Virgin UK release The Faust Tapes (“Some chose to play frisbee with the LP, others said it changed their lives” as Jean-Hervé Peron noted), Faust IV and, for the […]
Joyful Noise Recordings You could suggest that after nearly forty years in the music industry that Lou Barlow has finally found himself in a position where he has various different directions in which to flex his musical muscles; Dinosaur Jr for his bass playing chops and meatier songwriting, Sebadoh for the more esoteric ideas and interplay with Jason Loewenstein, and his solo work for the more personal and […]
Sacred Bones In the great taxonomy of rock, Alan Vega was kind of like a platypus. ‘What? That can’t exist in nature!’ A Catholic Jew (a combo not known for its over-frequent presence in demographic cross-breaks), a veritable Methuselah when punk broke (he was already forty, though pretended to be a decade younger) and a pioneer of the electronic sound when all around was guitars, one would struggle […]
Opa-Loka It seems to me that Philippe Petit‘s mission in his artistic existence is to make us re-appraise the way that we listen to music, sound, noise, however you wish to describe it, and to try and rewrite the rules, using sounds and forms that are so outside of the general sound world that they feel like transmissions from another planet. It is as if he has tapped […]
Constellation I was really looking forward to seeing Fly Pan Am come to Bristol last year. On the strength of last year’s C’est Ca, it was bound to be a storming show — and then lockdown hit, so although we didn’t manage to see them, instead we have ended up with another album and what a beauty it is. Conceived as a musical narrative accompanying the acclaimed contemporary […]
Ear Music “Some people have a landscape written in their bones”, sings Justin Sullivan on Surrounded, his incredibly long-awaited follow-up to 2003’s Navigating By The Stars. (But cut the guy some slack, he’s been busy fronting New Model Army, one of the hardest-working bands in rock until Covid made it hard for bands to work. Still, they managed an epic fortieth anniversary live stream, so it wasn’t all […]
(self-released) Drummer Jochen Rueckert uses his Wolff Parkinson White alias when he is in the mood for subverting the romantic notion of the soulful vocalist tugging the heartstrings of the listener. This he does by surrounding the singer in question with a barrage of sonic accompaniment that tests the strength of the singer’s ability to put across an emotion. Following on from last year’s collection Small Favours, which […]
Spoon / Mute The live CD is a precarious beast. Cementing the band’s reputation or besmirching it with cash cows. Or somewhere in between — servicing the more obsessive of a band’s fanbase, kneecapping the bootlegger. I’m often cautious — for a band like Can, how much is it adding to know that they could turn out the goods live? Well a fair amount. There’s a lot of […]
The Leaf Label Fernando Corona has been pushing the boundaries of recorded sound as Murcof for some twenty years or so now and for this latest, he is reunited with The Leaf Label; a fitting home for his restless innovation. The work on this double album was started four years ago as pieces for the Geneva-based dance company Alias. The fact that it was produced for such a […]
Atlantic Curve I’m loving this album’s cinematic sizzle, the slow sanguine accompaniment that grows round Lisa Gerrard’s voice, full of subdued simmer and deep-diving delight, then the drums kick in and spread the panoramics wide open. Rocky adrenalines that sparkle the headphones surrounded in quantising amber and torn turquoise, an aesthetic that has me hopelessly hooked as doubled-up gusts of echo breathe from within.
Upset The Rhythm Finally, more from Kaputt in the form of this delightful clear blue 7″. Only two tracks, I know, but what a frantic mood they bring to the party; slightly sickly, Fursy sax, high-pitched keening guitar, double-tracked inquisitive conversational vocals. It all just jumps in there, grabs your hand and starts running.
Constellation Godspeed You! Black Emperor are a very self-contradictory band. They draw you in and push you away at the same time. The arcane press releases, the obtuse packaging, all designed to confuse as much as entertain or educate. That exclamation mark in that unwieldy name. Everything about them says “difficult”. But then you bung them on and and they couldn’t be any easier to actually listen to.
À Tant Rêver du Roi Kong‘s sole album has taken thirteen years to finally be issued on vinyl, and its muscular insistence and discomfiting tension is great to have back in circulation. I can’t remember who suggested that the trio was the ultimate expression of the rock format, but these three certainly brought noise as well as the mania and the telepathic interconnection. It seems extraordinary that Snake […]