Bristol 21 August 2015 Loved the way Twin‘s guitars seemed to shimmer in your mind’s eye like a hazy mirage. A spectre of voice weaving through as lush loops were overlaid in trebling ascents. Endlessly changing, channelling, dusted in a candle-lit intimacy of curling chords caught in a Fursaxa-like beguile. A sound that . A delicate and dreamy apparition that exploded in applause. https://soundcloud.com/twin-music-2/asteria Next were angular tantrums […]
live reviews
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The Royal Festival Hall, London 18 August 2015 Throat-singing. It’s the new rock and roll. Or the OLD rock and roll, if you subscribe to the theory espoused by the likes of luminaries such as Patti Smith, Julian Cope and me that a rock concert is essentially the modern variant on religious worship. Phurpa bridge this gap across time and space by playing ancient devotional Bön music (from […]
London 7 August 2015 It’s a balmy Friday night in old London Town, and the Mothership has just landed on Camden’s Electric Ballroom, bringing its message of light, love and lavatory humour in the form of George Clinton and Funkadelic. And godDAMN if he still isn’t the best pilot it could ever wish for.
The Dome, London 3 July 2015 Okay, so here’s a thing. I don’t really remember ever seeing Acid Mothers Temple. I’ve seen them on various occasions, and I don’t really remember any of them. Now, I don’t make a conscious effort to indulge any more before an Acid Mothers Temple gig than I do before a show by anyone else, but somehow after the fact they always elude […]
The Barbican, London 18 July 2015 “My name’s Terry Riley, I’ll be here all week”. It would be nice to think that at some stage over the previous weekend, America’s great composer actually expressed his forthcoming residency in exactly this way. For in order to celebrate his eightieth birthday, El Tel (as doubtless everyone calls him), has spent the last seven days encamped here as part of the […]
Hôpital Caroline, Marseille 5 July 2015 Festival MIMI has been bringing all kinds of innovative, avant, experimental or just plain far-out music to Marseille for thirty editions to date, and for the last fifteen years its annual home has been in the splendid isolation of the ruins of the Hôpital Caroline on Ratonneau, largest island of the Frioul Archipelago, just off the coast and in sight of both […]
London 4 July 2015 And did those feet, in ancient times, walk upon England’s mountain green? And was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen? Whilst my marginally less ancient feet are walking up Olympic Way once more (a mere ten after having last done so), the one man who might be able to answer those questions is doing a decidedly poor show of proving […]
The Barbican, London 27 June 2015 88 cymbal beaters, five drummers, four bassists, four guitarists and one EYƎ, an ensemble that literally dwarfed the stage bathed in super-real colours. Right from the start this felt more like a ritual than a show — an invocation even. From its early referential whisperings it held you in its meditative grip, then flung your expectations wide open on colossal tidal pulls, […]
London 24 June 2015 I’m shuffling through the Wembley sand, but my head’s in Mississippi. It’s been a long time since I was last at Wembley Arena. Twenty-two years ago this month, in fact, lured like a Hamelin rat by the strange and, ultimately, ill-fated second coming of The Velvet Underground (Reed and Cale needing to spend more time together in order to remember exactly why it was […]
London 16 June 2015 There is a German proverb which reads, “Jede Leiter fängt mit der untersten Sprosse an und nach der obersten kommt nur noch freier Fall.” We might possibly translate this as, ‘Every ladder begins at the lowest rung, but after the highest the only way is down’. Tonight, the capacity audience packed into a summer-heated Cafe Oto are treated to evidence that miraculously both confirms, […]
London 10 June 2015 It is good to remember why you came. How the reverberation of the bass through every cell is like the lift of a wave that carries you. How each staccato re-teaches your heart to beat. Percussion is life, rhythm is the first language and with it we make sense. Every sentence you’ve ever read and truly felt has had its own cadence to keep […]
The Jazz Café, London 30 May 2015 A couple of years ago I had the very great pleasure of interviewing New Model Army‘s angry yet affable front man Justin Sullivan for this esteemed organ (matron!), and we got to talking about venue sizes. “All of us”, said he, “when we go to see our favourite bands, we want to see them in the old Marquee, or in some […]
Bristol 6 June 2015 Henry Collins’ — formerly known as Shitmat — Morris Meets the Bikers (after the ZX Spectrum arcade game?) were up first. They were having so much fun that they were oblivious to the fact that only five people were actually watching, which was a shame for they were really bonkers. Billed as a DJ set, this was more a performance than just spinning tunes. […]
London 28 May 2015 Tucked away in the heart of London’s St Pancras is St Pancras Old Church, one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in the country, and in whose grounds is buried Mary Wollstonecraft. Grounds that were at one point dug up by a young Thomas Hardy (the novelist, not the one out of Mad Max: Fury Road; that would just be weird) while working […]
The Dome and Boston Music Room London 24 May 2015 I have to admit that I’ve never been to Raw Power before. Every year, more than any other festival, there are always an amazing bunch of bands that I have wanted to see, or at least witness again. So even though I was unable to do both Friday and Saturdays events, I managed to race to the venues […]
London 22 May 2015 Fortis Green, north London. A place of fertile musical soil. Back at the turn of the Sixties, Fortis Green was the manor of brothers Ray and Dave Davies, whose combination of gifted lyricism, overdriven Vox amplifiers and almost unrivalled songwriting ability saw them take the output of their ground-breaking – although never less than highly combustible – band, The Kinks, to the pinnacle of […]
London 21 May 2015 – The Conscious Pause – It is daunting to write about a show that was attended by so many Freq contributors because I know they’ll all read this and I am sure they will all have things to add (or deny). But what does that matter? It is daunting to write about a Swans show, because – Swans – This was my second time […]
Bristol 20 May 2015 Sadly, I only caught the end of Okkyung Lee’s set — a real pity as that scraping reverberation of cello was curving some lovely tonal mirages. It wasn’t long before the Swans gradually graced the stage (sometime around 8.37pm). First Thor Harris, who brewed a lovely metallic warble from his massive gong, a sound that sizzled excitingly in the ear. Phil Puleo joined him, […]