London 8 April 2022 Waiting for The Eggs to show, I notice singer / guitarist Holly Ross‘s Selmer Treble and Bass valve amp, on top of a double-miked cab. This, along with David Blackwell’s extensive drum set on the other side of the stage, all looks very serious indeed. Unfortunately, […]
Monthly archives: April 2022
12 posts
London 22 March 2022 The original Penguin Café Orchestra was formed in 1972 by guitarist Simon Jeffes and cellist Helen Liebmann. They released their first album in 1976, produced by Brian Eno and released on his Obscure Records series of recordings, and the band gave its first major concert in […]
In Real Life So 2020’s Pompi EP from Meth Math was one of the highlights of the year for me, despite the fact that I flounder to describe it any more accurately than the phrase “ketty reggaeton”. And this new EP is not very reggaeton. Which is fine but they […]
Hubro Benedicte Maurseth‘s love of her native landscape and the feeling of connectedness to her local Hardangervidda National Park informs a great deal of this latest album. Forming a trio with eminent compatriots Mats Eilertsen and Håkon Stene, Benedicte goes about evoking the correlations between music and hiking, or more […]
Ostravské Centrum Nové Hudby Ostrava Days, for those not in the know, is quoted as being “…a platform for making the music of our time…. No attention was paid to what the powerful cultural institutions expected or supported”. In the world of composition, there’s a constant struggle to stage “new” […]
Active since 1971, the Canadian Electronic Ensemble has the distinction of being the longest-running live electronic music formation in the world. Their session for Philippe Petit‘s Modulisme project showcases the sort of modular synthesis sounds that the ensemble have been performing annually in Toronto and on tour around the world […]
Dais Closely following the success of Coil‘s first volume of Musick To Play In the Dark came this second helping, a thematic continuum that surfed further out there, saw the group collapsing back with the departure of Drew McDowall to a trinity of players, a fact which made for a […]
Bureau B Both Etienne Jaumet and Fabrizio Rat are trained pianists, but they have done their level best to obfuscate that fact under layers of progressive experimentation that finds Etienne concentrating on modular synthscapes while Fabrizio treats the piano in a far more percussive manner than we might be used […]
Crammed Discs Crammed‘s reissue programme for their Made To Measure series continues unabated with the extraordinary collaboration between Iranian vocalist Sussan Deyhim and New York sound artist Richard Horowitz. Originally released in 1986, this album merged Sussan’s ululating vocal explorations with Richard’s fearless electronic textures and took the listener on […]
Mute / BMG Suicide are an odd band. Considered legendary influencers today, at the time (at least, according to the excellent No Dogs In Space podcast series on them) both reviled and adored — people hated the music, but loved Alan Vega and Martin Rev, so kept giving them gigs. […]
Discus Discus regular Nick Robinson has been experimenting with guitar looping for over twenty years and his experimental trio Das Rad finds opportunities to interweave them with Martin Archer and Steve Dinsdale. Here though on a rare solo outing, it is all about the guitar in all its incredibly varied manifestations.
Happy Robots Having been fortunate to catch Rodney Cromwell, the nom de plume of regular Happy Robots recording artiste Adam Cresswell, supporting Pram some years ago, I was looking forward to hearing his latest release and was not disappointed. This is his second album and continues his crusade, using ’80s […]