Taas Kerran, Äkkiä combines traditional Finnish folk musician Hannu Saha, who plays the kantele (a type of Finnish zither) with the electronic music duo Pakasteet. A relatively new(ish) improv group which consists of Circle founder and Pharaoh Overlord member Jussi Lehtisalo swapping his usual bass for synths, drum machine and prepared zither with film director and visual artist friend Mika Taanila accompanying him on tapes and synth.
Yearly archives: 2023
151 posts
There is one for each of the eleven pieces rendered here and they run the gamut from pen and ink minimalism to all-out felt-tipped abandon in much the same way that the musical pieces run about covering lots of ground with manic energy.
A proper overview of Goth is probably at least a decade overdue. The first band who could arguably merit the tag as exponents rather than just forerunners (and more about them later…) trod the boards around forty-five years ago, and music writing has proved distinctly tardy around giving the phenomenon some decent examination and analytic heft. In an era when the bookshelves of major retailers are fair groaning under the weight of mighty tomes covering the minutiae of everyone from EMF to The Shaggs, it seems curious that a movement that encompasses such revered names as Bauhaus, Siouxsie And The Banshees, The Sisters Of Mercy and The Cure seems to have remained so impervious to criticism for so long.
Here, with the first outing for his self-titled quartet, the atmosphere is sunnier, more vibrant and world-reaching, drawing the listener's attention to the current plight of the world and more specifically its oceans. However, rather than pound the message home with darkness and doom, the album has a far more sunny disposition, the whole album smiling through its six long tracks and forty minutes.
Roedelius is now eighty-eight years old and has had a fifty-four-year career in music, starting with the formation of Kluster in 1969 (who later changed their name to Cluster). He then ventured in to the more soporific tones of slightly more ambient sounds with Harmonia, which then lead him to recording three albums with Brian Eno in the mid-seventies. Since then, he has released dozens of solo albums and many collaborations, including one with former Japan keyboard player Richard Barbieri.
Pieces were chosen from various live environments and time periods, but all are recognisable; while the use of such disparate material gives Julie an opportunity to visit various styles and tempos, forming the lyrical structures around the rolling, tumbling constant momentumof the piano.
An ambient introduction of birdsong and news snippets dusting a smokey melody, its chirruping curls of wordless vocal only hinting at the songworthy delights yet to come.
Could we call The Toads an Australian supergroup? The list of other bands for the assembled quartet is a long one and this blast through the shrubbery contains equal parts early Fall- style punkabilly energy, and the kind of dry and dusty laconic vision that could only come from the other side of the world.
Kranky The barely visible greyscale cover of Tim Hecker‘s latest is the perfect embodiment of the dully guarded repetition that seeps from the album, its insidious electronic creep dusty and belaboured. With titles like “Monotony”, “Anxiety” and “Total Garbage”, you kind of know what you are in for, added to the press release’s comment that it is “a beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive capitalist […]
House Of Mythology Rosarium starts like you’re eavesdropping onto some fizzing broadcast, Daniel O’Sullivan‘s daughter Ivy imparting electrified words poetically bleeding into a cello’s resonate glide. Cocooning ellipicals lightly dusted in harp-like radials and shimmering sententials, as if you were starring at the sun’s spiking corona. Affecting shapes akin to Shellyan Orphan caught on sweeping vocals, wordless and levitating a , to which the strings hold a golden […]
YOU WANTED THE BEST (I was fifteen in 1980 and Kiss were one of the first bands I ever saw live), YOU GOT THE BEST (that show has stayed with me all these years making me a fan), THE HOTTEST BAND IN THE WORLD (here I am forty-three years later to bid a fond farewell to….) KISS!
Masked, anonymous and attached to a dubious folk-horror backstory (concerning, among other things, Sweden’s apparently lively history of voodoo curses), Goat have long found their tone between the spookhouse camp of Ghost and the saturnine pagan nightmares of Comus. In Goat’s hands the two sound like natural bedfellows, but make no mistake, it’s a tricky tightrope to walk...
The ‘Orchestra’ were originally part of Brian Eno’s Obscure Music label in the '70s, whose reason for existence was to introduce ‘rock’ fans to more avant-garde artists and modern classical composers such as Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman. The Orchestra built up a large following though, and were involved in many different aspects of the arts including dance.
Echoing, cyclical drums pound out a remorseless beat, an emergence of sounds like a draught blowing something cold and portentous in your general direction, but just out of reach. Simmering guitar streaks, like intimations of an avalanche bring veiled threats, blocking out any sight of the sky.
Zam-Zam / La République des Granges Building on the spacey krautrock shivers of their 2018’s Pan And The Master Pipers LP, Zohastre‘s Abracadabra salivates like a mediævalised motorik. Vivid and laser-locked, this sci-fi verve enthusiastically contracts into a an insane neu-techno crowbar of a groove. A brightness that’s squeezed into the dagger dance of “Tarantella”, its folksy core valve-smurfed into a repetitive dazzle as that snare sonically snips […]
Pianist Stephen Grew has been testing the limits of the piano for the best part of four decades, alone and in collaboration and the extraordinary thing about this album is that he still finds so much ground to cover, revelling in the freedom of what he describes as the blank canvas of the piano. It must be quite thrilling to constantly be refreshed by the act of sitting in front of the keyboard awaiting a spark of intuition from which his personality then unfolds.
The intermittent strums of the first scarred in Gira’s vice-like vocal, a phonically physical experience that always feels like he’s at the coalface of emotion, mining some immaculate truth. The buttressing splashes of instrumentation between each sentence cut back to just words, then strung out on a symphonic hypnotic, shimmering into bleeding lines sung over in chorusing volatility.
Although recently released, this album compiles work that dates back to 2020 and perhaps because of that runs an absolute gamut of styles and sounds, constantly switching positions, leading the listener astray and dropping hints that don't always come to fruition and instead end up far from home.