Light In The Attic The Seventies’ favourite candy-coloured California cowboy, Lee Hazlewood stands alongside the likes of Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg in his stature (if not physically) as one of those perennially louche raconteurs of the counterculture whose influence has accumulated and expanded over the passing decades. The throaty baritone, the whiskey and tear-stained sheets, the twang and strum of a full-spectrum pop sound which still managed […]
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Rise Above (12″)/Coptic Cat (CD) It was 1974 when Comus, after two truly blood-curdling albums (1971’s First Utterance and 1974’s To Keep From Crying), retreated to his woodland bower, lay down in a mossy hollow and went to sleep. Those recordings had been barely understood at the time, their power and strange attraction undeniable, yet somehow they remained too demonic, too priapic, to be embraced by those frightened […]
Mute If someone had the bright idea of making a low-budget, crowdsourced skiffy film about Nazis found on the dark side of the moon, which artists should be asked to provide the soundtrack? Laibach, of course – who could be better suited to orchestrate the sound of fucked-up futurist fascism, the SS in space, of the ultimate Nazi holdout story – and so much the better if it’s […]
Mordant Music The sound of two hands not clapping. This is the latest monster release from the ever-prolific Ekoplekz, this time seeing him flip cassettes from selected live bits and bobs (more bobs than bits, judging from his live performances) to studio improvisations and back again. There’s a wealth of material here, unformed and fruity, mangled like he likes it (like we like it) Echo dominates, nothing goes […]
Clouds Hill I must admit that the thought of a new release from Gallon Drunk was a bit exciting. Lead singer, guitarist and organist, James Johnston has been a revelation to experience in recent years with Faust, though mostly creating fantastic sounds and noises with his guitar and organ. Terry Edwards comes along as a guest with his saxophone occasionally, creating additional depth to whatever is happening on […]
Rocket Girl I listened to this without looking at, without even seeing the title and it was still the first chimes of Summer. This is Spacemen 3 warm, a kind of druggy depth that might almost be twee if it wasn’t so headstrong, so sure of where it was going. I feel like I’ve spent over a year listening to Autumn and Winter records. The Tory/Lib Dem coalition […]
Baskaru Snoring into view, Francisco López‘ umpteen-hundredth record (many of them untitled, and here each track is unnamed and numbered instead) crepitates and crunches, rustles, whistles and sussurates with the close-mic’d presence of musique concrète, up close and present in the ears. López’ attention to detail is almost disturbingly intimate, sound sidling, shuffling and creeping around the stereo image. Across two discs of supremely directed environmental manipulations and […]
The Borderline, London 29 April 2012 It had been raining solid for 24 hours. The streets of London were filled with a babbling brook of water that the sodden masses had to navigate to stop them from getting drenched further and all the while more fell from the sky to dampen peoples Saturday night. As I entered The Borderline the place was already beginning to fill out early. […]
Hydra Head Twenty plus years and albums into the long strange trip that is Circle, Manner confirms that they are still a seriously out there band, whose œuvre can encompass punky noise and proggish metal with equal dexterity, a group who are never less than tight and whose playfulness is as convincing as their steely-eyed commitment to the very meaning of rock. This is the band who spearheaded […]
The Tate Modern, London 14 April 2012 In the days following the Laibach “We Come in Peace” show at The Tate Modern it is Mina Špiler’s singing of “Across the Universe” that stays on permanent replay in my head. Such a beautiful nearly acapella lullaby she made of the ominous lyrics, both promise and threat that nothing is ever going to change in this or any universe. ; […]
Fire The hardest working little man in show-business is back. Inventor of the Continuous Ca$h Flow System™, Anti-Christ, appliqué kitten fan, Chicago’s finest Juedo-Christian edutainer, Bobby Conn has, since his first album in 1997, taken more sobriquets for a walk than Tom Cruise has made turgid sequels to Mission Impossible. In a career with ludicrous highlights such as the original video for “Never Get Ahead” (eye-shadowed Bobby in […]
Bureau B This probably isn’t the D.A.F. you’re thinking of. The lines aren’t clean, the electronics are sort of around but incidental and hidden in shards of guitar noise and (real) drum bashing. This isn’t even the D.A.F. of the “Kebab Traume” track on the C81 compilation which was a gateway drug of a track I fell in love with and which set me on a path to […]
DFA Picture a disillusioned man – still barely 40 yet struggling with a spirit crushed by professional failure and a heart broken by disastrous marriages – reaching a point of exhausted resignation and moving in with his aunt. Withdrawing from life, in a few years time he will be dead. That man was Dr Hans Prinzhorn, a German psychiatrist, who earlier, in the course of his short and […]
Fruits de Mer Krautrock is a brilliantly meaningless term, full of meaning. Head Music attempts to show why. There’s motorik music (there’s some on here) which is often what people mean when they say krautrock (they mean it sounds like Neu! or the way Can’s drums flip over one another) and there’s the dense wiggy kosmische space music (which means it sounds like Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream). […]
Rune Grammofon Volcano The Bear have long done their best to confound the simplicities of classification; they’re not simple to sum up as an experimental or avant-garde project (whatever that might mean exactly), and on Golden Rhythm/Ink Music the range of emotions and auditory adventures they offer up is one which can easily – glibly even – be described as such, but which is also a case study […]
Riot Season Once upon a time, some enterprising music writer came up with (or popularised at least) the term “arsequake” to describe the sort of heavyweight sludgy rock which occasionally crawled out of Camden to force itself onto unsuspecting grunge audiences in the Nineties; usually talking about the sort of sounds which stepped very close to the definition of music, then trampled on it, bit off its head […]
Symbolic Insight This is a debut album by Colorado duo Sonolumina. The album mixes ambient music with world music and trance. Between the duo they play a mixture of traditional instrumentation such as flutes, violins and trumpets as well as Indian tablas. The whole comes together in as well. “Fire” features drones and electronic percussion that sound like the beginning of a journey into foreign lands. “Sona” is […]
Monty Maggot The Plague is [post=omenopus-time-flies text=”Omenopus”]‘ sophomore album, a double disc worth of songs that takes us on a whirlwind of an emotional rollercoaster ride across its two silvery surfaces. Disc one (or rather the first disc I placed into the machine, as I have the feeling you could play either disc first) contains the four part concept piece “The Plague.” This is a twenty minute opus […]