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 […]
Yearly archives: 2022
161 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.
Ramble My favourite Russian – Israeli – UK collective Staraya Derevnya are back with another slice of splintered luminosity influenced by the Saint Petersburg poet and artist Arthur Molev. “Scythian Nest” dives straight into a clink-clanked needling mélange of avant folk — an addictive jiver, hot-coal leaping in falsetto warbles and noisy rubs. An absurdist cabaret jigger-jagging the jovial on wizened limbs as the instrumentation plays a nomadic […]
Discus It has been a long time since the previous Army Of Briars release; sixteen years to be precise, but it does feel as though they have never been away. Coalescing around the quartet of Julie and Tim Cole, Martin Archer and lyricist Keith Jafrate, they ply their unique blend of folk, jazz and impressionist abstraction on Made From A Broken Star, leaving the worries of the day-to-day […]
Kranky Jacob Long‘s third release for Kranky as Earthen Sea finds him further cocooning the listener in his simple but effective web of shimmering soundscapes, soundscapes sent from a distant outpost their lazy beats laced with tingling textures. A rush and a sigh, a sense of plaintive motion, slowly rippling air and a feeling of inexorable forward motion. Sometimes submarine, the bubbles passing a smoky porthole, that gauzy […]
Cadabra Heavens above, this one comes so packed with goodness it’s hard to know where to start. Like a Whiskas Pure Delight fish selection, this burst of retro loveliness provides everything you and your cat need nutritionally for a healthy and happy life. From Twin Peaks dreamy moodiness to spaghetti Western Ennio Morricone twang, to soaring strings and a bass sound to make Klaus Johann Grobe faintly envious, […]
Diatribe Dutch violinist Diamanda La Berge Dramm has been playing since she was four, and although classically trained and a member of various ensembles, her first solo outing is a rather personal journey through avant-minimalist pop, taking lyrical cues from the work of European Poetry Festival founder Steven J Brown. Accompanying herself with sounds that are generated solely by Moog and violin, she manages to strip the backing […]
London 16 July 2022 Journey’s End is one of those rare “are we really in London” type of venues. A leafy relaxed, creatively crafted affair at odds with the industrialised ugliness of its surrounds, the gig itself taking place in what looked like a reclaimed school hall. UnicaZürn are first up, taking the lead from their new CDR (available on the night, and instantly acquired of course) the […]
Sofa The latest album from Norwegian tuba player Martin Taxt, as well as being a continuation of the work started on 2020’s First Room, comes on like the ultimate in minimalist sound as architecture. His microtonal tuba carries single tones as if they were the most precious of cargo, listening intently for shifts in pressure and additions of further textures. Assistance comes in the form of another tuba, […]