London 20 June 2016 Over a quarter of a century ago, when I was much younger and prettier, I moved to London. The first weekend I was here I went to see Fields Of The Nephilim, who had just released the prog-goth epic Elizium. The support were a band called Creaming Jesus, a wickedly funny goth/metal band fronted by .
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Zoharum Presented in a double-disc package containing both CD and DVD versions, the former holding the music in standalone album format, while the latter combines it with the visuals, which are not merely an addendum, but integral to WIDT‘s work.
Young God (North America) / Mute (Rest of the world) The Glowing Man marks the culmination of what frontman Michael Gira calls “the current phase” of Swans, and is the fourth album by the current twenty-first century line-up which has been delivering uncompromising beauty and brutality since 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky. It shares with that album a returned fascination with […]
More Than Human A nice splash of exploratory electronics on this first LP from Beattie Cobell. A meld of surgical coldness with dirty analogues that comes across like a modern-day Throbbing Gristle eagerly eating into its rhythmic nihilism. Filling dimensionally light algorithmics with Reichian slips, euphoric juxt-a-posies and flirting undercurrents. Kinetic investigations creeping with interest.
Easy Action Where most bands opting to record a take on of one of their influential favourites would opt for a more or less straightforward cover version, Band Of Pain main man Steve Pittis chooses instead to invite Andrew Liles and Lucy Cotter to join him in re-imagining the anonymous poem “Still Falls The Rain”, as found inside the upside-down cross adorning the inner gatefold sleeve of Black Sabbath‘s eponymous first album.
“Noinge” / “Gloakid With Phendrabites” Dirter Promotions The first side is the sound of the playful Band Of Pain remixing Nurse With Wound‘s A Sucked Orange in a game of arrant right-angles and ink-splattered goodness where the original source material is utterly fucked over in malfunctioning attention deficits that splutter like a cyborg cat with a data hairball.
Sparrowhawk Perch is seemingly smudged into shape from the leftovers of Fat Bicth, one of Brighton’s embarrassment of “why didn’t they ever gig further than London?” bands. The Bicth were, perhaps, somewhat closer to Brighton stalwarts (your I’m Being Goods and Sweet Williamses) than Perch, so let’s hope this is the band to thrust Perch/ Bicth mastermind Chris Mitchell slightly further afield than London Road.
Bristol 9 June 2016 Matmos‘ new record Ultimate Care II is centred round a washing machine, and lo and behold that’s what is centre stage tonight at The Lantern, two microphones pointing at its innards. The rest of the stage is overrun with the band’s tech, squeezing the support UnicaZürn into the far reaches.
Thrill Jockey Back in March of this year, Sumac unleashed “Rigid Man” on to YouTube as a taster of what was to come from their new album What One Becomes. Personally, I was very excited indeed, so excited in fact that while listening to the song on headphones on a packed train pulling out of London, I didn’t realise that this utter racket was also being played full […]
Münster 29 May 2016 In a quiet and undisturbed corner of the Zentralfriedhof (Main Cemetery) in Münster, there stands an elegant, tapering stone stele, atop which is a death mask so wonderfully detailed and realistic it seems that the eyes might at any moment open slowly, like an image from Dennis Potter’s Cold Lazarus come to life beneath the blue Westfalen sky. Foregrounded against the thick green hedge […]
Zamzarec This is a truly haunting experience; think Mazzy Star with a whisper of Shelleyan Orphan or Alison Shaw from Cranes, but softer, swollen in the ambiguous. Its language a diffusion of hues, suggestions for your mind to play with, backed by switchblades of horizon that pull at the frame, inverting the scenery in cycling hooks of guitar, droning key-lines, tumbling percussives.
Play Loud! Since first appearing in 1968, Silver Apples‘ “Oscillations” — and perhaps to a lesser degree the flipside track, “Whirly-Bird” — have gradually become to be recognised as key pioneering moments in the history of electronic music that they most assuredly are. Play Loud! have pulled out all the stops for this, the first re-release of the single since its first appearance nearly half a century ago, giving […]
Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard has been busily investigating the particular qualities that can come from quantity on his Sound X Sound series of seven 7” vinyl releases. In this third instance, he has nine pianists playing two very different pieces in a veritable fall and resurgence along the keyboard, descending and rising up from the depths with results that are on occasion remarkably similar to some of the impossible to play black MIDI tunes […]
Zoharum Recorded between 1989 and 1992, Maëror Tri‘s Hypnobasia, Sensuum Mendacia and Somnia were originally released on cassette by various European labels, the latter appearing as one side of a split tape with Nostalgie Eternelle.
Bureau B I was overjoyed to hear that Peter Baumann was stepping back behind the keyboards to record a new album after so many years. Most people know Baumann for being part of the classic line-up that produced huge galactic-sounding Tangerine Dream albums such as Phaedra and Rubycon during the mid Seventies. And its seems that the death of Tangs founder member Edgar Froese in January 2015 was […]
London 17 May 2016 This is the first of two sold-out shows for Max Richter at The Barbican and there is a buzz around the audience about how two beautiful and intense albums will translate live. For starters this is no rock’n’roll concert, so there is no-one viewing the entire gig down their phone, in fact no one even takes a photo, which was quite wonderful. The mood […]
London 20 May 2016 Tonight, Matthew, Café OTO will be a smoky jazz club, only without the smoke due to it being 2016. It’s Ellroy for vapers, a healthier Lynch movie. Because tonight Little Annie is here delivering the latest instalment of her nearly forty-year career of eclectic awesomeness, on the back of her wonderful new album Trace. Accompanied by double-bass, understated drums, piano and sax, she takes the stage […]
Electrowerkz, London 13 May 2016 It’s Friday the thirteenth, the day of bad vibes, things going wrong and surreal killers with ski masks. Some people even refuse to leave the house on this day, in case they accidentally fall over a black cat or walk under a ladder. The thing is, you know when Electric Moon are in town, any heavy bad luck nonsense will dissipate in a glow […]