Grönland Well, this is a mammoth undertaking and no mistake. A mere three months after Herr Rother arrived once more in Londinium to rock the smooth, polished wooden bleechers of Hackney’s du jour gig venue EartH – a reviewing task I lazily palmed off onto my teenage soni – onto my digital doorstep lands the great man’s new Solo box set with an almighty whompfff. Comprising his first […]
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Foolproof Projects Andy Pyne and Lisa Jayne have reconvened as Map 71 to unleash a download EP of new material from Foolproof Projects. After time spent squirrelled away in their bunker (I imagine), the bouncing repetition and simple insistence of opener “Ex-Socialite Needs A New Invention” is faintly reminiscent of some of Factory Floor‘s rhythmic experiments, but here Andy uses squalls of synthetic sound to try and put […]
As per Freq tradition, Kev Nickells wades into every entry in the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest and ranks them on a slithery sliding scale from rubbish and pish via banging to poppers o’clock. So here we are, another year and another Eurovision. And what joys await us.
Phantom Limb JR Bohannon is a Brooklyn-based solo guitar player who first recorded this mini-album back in 2017 for cassette label Ausca. Phantom Limb liked it enough and saw enough in its diverse energy to warrant a reissue. JR originally hails from Louisville in Kentucky, and some of that city’s heritage has leaked into the sound of the songs, along with the usual likes of Robbie Basho and […]
London 19 April 2019 Ten years is a long time in music. Well, I mean, it’s quite a long time in anything, really. And if you adjust for inflation, ten years in the nineteenth century is actually AGES. Especially for a punk band. So it’s quite a thing that The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing are celebrating a whole decade of their anachronistic anarchy of […]
Out In the next part of Ut‘s re-issue campaign, their first album Conviction is up for the treatment and deservedly so. As mentioned before, for me they were unsung heroes and the purity of their democracy was something that a lot of other bands could have learned from. The fact that Nina Canal, Sally Young and Jacqi Ham all wrote and all sang is an unusual thing in […]
Constellation The first side of Mise En Abyme milks a soft melancholic as different voices are set alight to a rhythmic jumble sale of textural glitches and slipped-disc percussives as Jean Cousin, aka Joni Void’s second outing gets knee-deep into the virus of modernity.
Discus Martin Archer‘s Discus label certainly knows how to throw a curveball. After the motorik groove of Das Rad and the subtle freedom of Beck Hunters, their next release is the chilly post-folk artistry of Frostlake. Jan Todd has taken four years to record the follow up to 2015’s White Moon, Black Moon and once again has bassist Terry Todd adding his warm groove to some of the tracks […]
Houndstooth Renowned synthesist Abul Mogard‘s latest release and first for Houndstooth is a selection of reworkings which take in some interesting artists from today’s outer fringes.
London 12 April 2019 Ah, an evening of pure Detroit electronica some thirty-five years or more after it first happened is a must-see. The atmosphere of The Barbican’s post apocalyptic Logan’s Run architectural design just added to the palpable excitement as I made my way towards the venue. This is Juan Atkins and Rik Davis’s Cybotron, not to be confused with the seventies Australian Berlin School artists with […]
Rocket Gum Takes Tooth have waited five years to follow up their second album Mirrors Fold, but it would appear to have been well worth the wait. The wildness of the live spectacle is not so apparent when listening to this album, but the amount of ideas and angles that the duo has on drum and electronic sound-making is phenomenal.
Pelagic Suitably sepia-soaked, part one of Årabrot Speciale‘s Die Nibelungen stares off into the mysterious distance, its choral eddies peripherally chased in phosphorescent shivers. A discordia of wormy animates vapourising on an imagined horizon as malevolent motifs creep the architecture. Signatures that crystallize, dance skeletal, then are snatched away by this trembling expectation
Hubro Øyvind Torvund‘s latest opus on Hubro is a sweeping gesture laying open his love for the kind of crazy exotica that the likes of Martin Denny and Les Baxter wowed the unsuspecting public of the 1950s. It is not about copying what came before, though, as there are some curious modernist elements that attempt to update that classic lush and string-laden sound.
Hallow Ground Loving the minimal murmur of Distant Animals‘ Lines LP, featuring one lengthy excursion per side, the first taking a more Éliane Radigue-like approach. “A Pure Drone” is an unsullied flat-line ripple stretching a heat-grazed horizon of the type La Monte Young still surfs
On The Dole The new wave of British heavy metal then. It can safely be said that your writer has minimal understanding of the genre. Actually almost deliberately. So why pick up a compilation of NWOBHM? Something to do with “history is always written by the victors”‘.
Thrill Jockey Matmos‘s latest is a really impressive feat, considering every sound that you hear on the album was generated by something plastic. As a comment on the current surfeit of plastic items that we have on the globe, it packs a potent social message; and what’s more, considering the possibilities, it is a really good listen.
Kscope I apparently first saw Ozric Tentacles perform at the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1984, and although my memory of the whole occasion is rather hazy, to say the least, their music has remained with me ever since that long summer many years ago. Even though over the years band leader Ed Wynne has done various side projects, mainly the wonderful kosmiche sounds of Nodens Ictus, this is […]
Fiasco Recordings Art Trip And The Static Sound‘s 2018 album A Week Of Kindness is being refreshed in the public’s consciousness by the release of the “Iron Lung” single. This particular track shines a light on their more repetitive Spacemen 3 leanings, with a rough and grungey circular guitar motif. The drummer is the key here, not allowing anything to escape from the black hole of sound.