Label: Bubblecore (North America)/Payola (Europe/Afterhours (Japan) Format: CD A high-pitched crackle like the malfunction angel coming to take your stereo away. Dulcet bass repetition and skittering percussion make a strange and uneasy juxtapose of quite lovely and what’s-that-noise? A warbling, wobbling sense of trying to move around in the world. Now a homey sort of gentle creaking, a tentative whistling, and then the sax and drums – another […]
reviews
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Stop The Panic The Spitz, London 28th February 2000 O! if all nights out could be so entertaining! A New Orleans style jam session set up between avuncular B.J. Cole (occasional collaborator with Spiritualized) and chin-pierced Electro Bohemian Luke Vibert (sometimes Wagon Christ and Plug) and a couple of friends to boot. And not New Orleans because of the Jazz like you might be thinking, but because of […]
Label: Soleilmoon Format: CD Built on a circling foundation of interlocking sampled sequences which shift the initial loop into self-generated patterns of intrinsically chaotic nature, Omphalos! (the navel) has much to recommend it for its hazy, slowly drifting ebb and flow of sound mixing itself into hypnotic strands. With the stated intention being to disengage from the centred focus of science and linear thought, Nigel Ayers is operating […]
Komedia, Brighton 22nd February 2000 First round on a rare night of electronic experimentalism in Brighton, held in the converted supermarket cabaret venue Komedia and hosted by Semiconductor was Lucky Kitchen, an electronic duo between Alejandra Salinas and Aaron Bergman (AKA Alejandra and Underwood as the handy little placards placed on top of the mixer for each act stated). Their music was accompanied by a little video projection […]
@ RoTa Notting Hill Arts Club, London 21st February 2000 There’s a great sense of expectancy generated by Chicks On Speed tonight; buzzing chatter from the West London cool squad building up a tension upon a foundation of eclectic Electro DJing. When the Chicks come on stage in decorated paper dresses (on sale at the merchandise nook too) there’s an urgent crush to the front which drags all […]
Label: Touch Format: CD More than just Pan(a)Sonic without the bass oscillations, Mika Vainio‘s second solo outing still bears obvious connections to his work with Ilpo Vaisanen on their last album release under that name as A , a recording which featured moments of unsettling stillness and texture among the distened beats and noise. Naturally, it’s also more about making a different kind of sound to Pan Sonic’s […]
The Garage, London 31st January 2000 It’s been seven years since Matt Johnson released Dusk, the last The The album; and barring the frankly bizarre collection of Hank Williams covers, plus a series of dubious rumours, nobody has heard from him since. Until now. Joining Trent Reznor‘s Nothing label (after Epic refused to release his experimental album, GunSluts) appears to have rejuvenated Johnson, and his triumphant return to […]
Label: Attack Attack Format: CD “I didn’t know they were still going” says anyone I tell, all breathless and excited, about the fact that New Model Army have a new album out, their second in as many years, and then they usually laugh laugh at me a bit. So I tell them to fuck off.
The Underworld, London 28th January 2000 Dead Voices On Air are conducting a bit of an experiment on the London leg of their tour, starting off loud, noisy and danceable and trailing down into ambient passages of extended mood workouts. Mark Spybey and Darren Phillips man the keyboards, sequencers, samplers, digital technology; Darryl Neudorf is behind a bare drumkit (complete with fluffy liner on one drum). So they […]
Label: Flesh Format: LP This record is to House music what Digital Hardcore is to breakbeat Hardcore. Flesh Records describe themselves as taking “great delight in unveiling the stenched schematics of a long imprisoned beast.” And this is just what they have done. This is dirty and nasty music that comes in some of the most rotten, unstable, and schizophrenic forms imaginable. Moments of nice funk are brutalised […]
Label: Digital Hardcore Format: CD Recorded at the end of an exhausting world tour in November 1999, with Hanin Elias out of action and Carl Crack gone loopy, as the sleevenotes describe Alec Empire and Nic Endo “were finally standing in front of a sold-out crowd of 4,000 people, Nic and I felt like we were in a bubble, a capsule, cut off from everything around us.” With […]
Along the Dotted Line… 12th December 1999 The Legendary Pink Dots are a phenomenon, producing a seemingly endless stream of deeply intense records and genuinely spellbinding live shows for nearly twenty years, initially as a London-based group and for more than a decade now from their Nijmegen base in The Netherlands. While former days on mammoth independent label Play It Again Sam in Belgium produced widespread distribution for […]
Label: Beggars Banquet Format: 12″,CDS Initially, this is really quite disappointingly normal, especially when compared to the stunningly evocative combination of HipHop rhythms with Isolationist textures which made up the remarkable Beat album a few years back. By contrast “Freedom Fighter” goes for the laid-back, casual-smoking vocal style and ironic personality analysis song-structure of indie trip-hop, but in what feels like a very commercial manner. Which, to be fair, is adequately hooky and […]
The Garage, London 28 November 1999 If a band sounds the same live as they do recorded, it can be a bit disappointing. Too clean, too rehearsed. Seeing Salaryman live at The Garage could easily have been like that, only it never strayed into those well-trodden pedestrian precincts. The only non-perfect things about this show were the lack of audience (Sunday night maybe?) and the less than amazing sound […]
Label: Smells Like Records Format: 2CD The century may still have about a year left to run through, but Sonic Youth have decided to take time to consider and pay tribute to their ancestral experimental roots on this double CD of less-than rock music. Built in earnestly engaged (but obviously joyful too) collaboration with old and new friends and musical relations Jim O’Rourke, William Winant, turntablizer Christian Marclay, […]
The Borderline, London 9th November 1999 A night at The Borderline, a night for Americanism. We arrived too late to hear the first set, a band called Kenny Process Team, so no insights there apart from the appropriate(d) soundtrack feeling their last couple of songs gave me as I took in the setting. This venue is a strange place for my impressions of London. Done up in 1970’s […]
The Underworld, London 5th November 1999 Back at The Underworld for the second time in six months, follwowing on from an absence from their founders’ homeland of six years, The Legendary Pink Dots bring home their unique format of intense live musical performance at the tail end of yet another whirlwind European tour organised due to public demand. Tonight there’s no support, just two hours of the finest […]
The Water Rats, London 2nd November 1999 The Water Rats seems like a broken place, barely still pulsing with the life of the twenty or so people inside. I wonder if it was once posh, evidence: rubbed-off velvet on the too few bar stools, forgotten glass cases built into dingy walls, and a mid-size double paned front door, spread wide and chained open. It lets in the chill […]