It has been a long, strange career for Eric Goulden. On the trail for the best part of fifty years, he is best known for the enduring universal smash "Whole Wide World", and although numerous groups have been configured and discontinued over the years, his solo output was relatively sparse until he and his partner, singer-songwriter Amy Rigby, moved to the US. Hidden away in upstate New York, they put an album every now and again and go on the road to drill it into the general public's consciousness.
Yearly archives: 2024
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Bristol 13 November 2023 Reimagining Suicide’s legacy they go, Lydia Lunch clutching her double microphones like a praying mantis — one’s all reverbed echo, the other sounds like pulled sellotape. Her vocals incoherently fall and flail around, gift-wrapped in Marc Hurtado‘s steely squall. His inky yells adding to the action […]
Moving from long-form kaleidoscopic compositions through live orchestrated sections to snippets composed for television, Electronic Works gives a fantastic overview of a composer who recognised that the very coldness of electronic music reflected the state of the world at that point but forged ahead anyway, constructing themes that still sound current fifty years later.
I’m pleasantly caught in the curling correspondence that Neil Mortimer and Mark Pilkington are brewing here, that syncopated-straight-jacket slowly loosening ,envelope-slipping and jangle-frosted. Its drifting contours are reborn in a looped simplification as strummed guitar falls on through, throwing a shoegazery sparkle into the mix.
For this latest album from prolific pianist Espen Berg (he is amongst other things a member of Tonic For The Troops, whose latest disc has not long been released), he has gathered together an ensemble of fellow Norwegian musicians with backgrounds in a wide variety of musical styles that gives this release an extraordinary breadth of vision.
This year has been huge in K-pop. South Korean pop culture is at a pivotal point where the new fourth generation of groups is making a definitive impact on the landscape.