Polydor There is certainly something special about secretly listening to this album sitting on a dirty Paris street lined with overexcited kids eagerly waiting for those venue doors to open, to flood into a tiny downstairs room to hear these songs played live, some for the very first time. Yungblud is a twenty-five-year-old singer from Doncaster in England, who came up into the alternative pop-punk scenes over the […]
Monthly archives: August 2022
11 posts
10 to 1 It is always heartening to see a new release from Mark Kluzek‘s Doomed Bird Of Providence, because you know that something of historical significance will have piqued his interest and then has prompted him to gather around friends and collaborators to turn it into some sweeping musical extravaganza. This time around, The Doomed Bird consists of eleven musicians plus the fantastic artwork of Judi Dransfield […]
Mute This one-shot adventure between Dome’s Bruce Gilbert, Graham Lewis and Mute Records‘ Daniel Miller is a sparse and abstract beauty rubbing up against some glowing new wave edginess, a crooked mix of soundscaping with a smidgen of songwriting. A serious art over commerce venture, that the relentless squishy bounce of “Hill Of Men” typifies. A soft and fleshy techno to muffled distant voices and a subtle hum […]
Leaf A welcome return from Szun Waves after a four-year break finds them in shimmering, dreamlike form; horns, synths and percussion in perfect unison, Earth Patterns conjuring up a journey through the kind of landscapes that are hard to focus on, wreathed in smoke or scattered with dry desert dust. Opener “Exploding Upwards” has the kind of slow drift that builds out of sight, with mournful horns sleepy […]
NEOS What an exciting listen — that creeping tension weaving the fragments is ace — a stretchy saturate for all that delicious atonal action to dance in divergent colour and sparing tuning. The surging symmetry of all those haunting little details jostling for your attention, somewhere a drunken Kurt Schwitters stumbles into a squabbling Punch and Judy, stapled in an uneven measure of ulcerated piano. The , leaking […]
Discus This new trio, formed by Discus head Martin Archer along with pianist Pat Thomas and percussionist Johnny Hunter, seems to be as much about the spaces in between the notes as about the sounds and textures themselves. Spread over four pieces that hover in the hinterland between dreams and waking, the sounds in opener “Rotten Start” eke out of the speakers, hints of horn more breath than […]
Zehra Devotional music is always so awkward to write about, and this collection of Gnawa music is no exception. And for why? Well, it’s never entirely clear what folk mean by devotional music, and that gets less clear the less information there is available about a group. And the Gnawa, well, they’re apparently the descendants of enslaved folk brought to Morrocco. What kind of devotional are we talking […]
Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil Dais As Coil albums go, Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil is an assault on the senses, as was the first time I saw them live. “Persistence is all” couldn’t have been a better expression of the fact, that skin-shredding noise / strobe fest of a finale still scars me with satisfaction twenty-two years later. One of those gig experiences that has yet to […]
Tenor-Vossa After the relatively recent reissues of Glass Bead Game and Between Happiness And Heartache, the time has finally come for new material from Breathless. Their gaps between album make the Blue Nile look prolific, but seriously each outing is worth the wait. Having prepared songs for this release, not only did they have to cope with lockdown delays but close to the time of recording, drummer Tristram […]
Faber and Faber Cosey Fanni Tutti is likely best known to readers of Freq as a musician of some reknown, part of the imperative of Throbbing Gristle and with a substantial discography (Chris and Cosey etc). Art mavens know her variously for her work in pornography and mail art (also etc). As of 2017, she’s found a new life as the kind of writer who gets featured on […]
Happy Robots Barely six months since Mood Taeg‘s sophomore album Anaphora, the pan-continental collective returns with an album of mixes that uncover the hidden corners and unexpected perspectives of some of those tracks. A few have been dealt with in house, while others have been loaned out and then returned with a little electronic surgery that renders them familiar yet different, certainly enough to justify this little outing.