Bristol 1 December 2017 Tucked in to the stage edges, Modulus III were a threesome of dual synthesizer drums and the rub of a cello, they cruised through some lovely motorik hypnotics. Musically siphoning their inspiration from a multitude of ports, but safely jutting out of entrapment, they notched up plenty of fireworks.
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English Heretic This has a stately grace, which seems full of ghosts. A fifty year de-celebration of The Summer of Love and a fugue for a darkening isle (that book seems closer to reality than any of us would like). It reimagines and repurposes, taking obscure psychedelic tracks from that lost year, 1967
Svart Jess And The Ancient Ones are a enigma; their first album and EP were labelled under the occult rock genre alongside such bands as Jex Thoth and Blood Ceremony. This may have largely been due to the press releases saying that the songs were all about the band’s experiences with magick. Then came the second album, The Aquarius Tapes, which seemed to discuss the occult influence during […]
London 23 November 2017 “Dunkel. Dunkel ist die Nacht“.i It is most certainly dark tonight, the evenings now well and truly drawn. The winter solstice approaches. And, as is customary for such astronomical phenomena, we are gathering together tonight to celebrate by watching the rise of the strange, intense sun that is Laibach.
Rock Fuel Media / Cleopatra / MVD Visual Hard to believe Ritual De Lo Habitual is a quarter of a century old, but a quarter of a century old it is, and has taken its rightful place in the pantheon of classic albums. A high point for alternative rock music in the 1990s, which began so optimistically with Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against The Machine and Nirvana and […]
Bristol 23 November 2017 Drastically redefining notions of jazz, Bristol-based Calcine Quartet were a textural pleasure. Dominic Lash‘s double bass shovelling, Matthew Grigg‘s crumbled fret skutters sending the speakers into spasms. A gravelly diesel chug, breaking ranks in a ping of overspilling metal melded to the rusty hinged squeal from Rebecca Sneddon‘s sax.
Riot Season The fifth album (as the title indicates) from Perhaps credits no fewer than eleven members of the group, comes wrapped up in a mind-altering sleeve — all jagged reds and blues with a eyeball-in-hand motif that shrieks LSD ahoy — and consists of two parts of vinyl to its one track, the intriguingly titled “Mood-Stabilizer”.
Sumerian Palaye Royale have been climbing their way into our ears for a few years now, building a fiercely loyal fan base and quite a name for themselves, working with greats like Andy Black and Kellin Quinn of Sleeping With Sirens, all this without releasing an album.
Relapse During the 1980s, synthesizer soundtracks for horror and science fiction films were ubiquitous; most low-budget, straight to video movies had them. But during the nineties they began to fall out of favour. Fast forward a few years and a new breed of artists began to fall in love with the sound of old analogue synths and decided to try and make music that conjured up the same […]
Avalanche (LP, CD, digital) / Hospital Productions (cassette) From the opening blasts and drum machine hurl of Post Self, it’s clear that Godflesh are in a very different musical space to 2014’s A World Lit Only by Fire. It’s not that the ire and scorn for seemingly pretty much everything humans do to themselves, each other and their home planet has dissipated — far, far from it
Transgredient Stretching from the Maeror Tri cassette years to the present day Troum incarnation, Drone Records founder Baraka[H] and Glit[S]ch have created some of the best drone work on the planet. First experienced their taste for the infinite through the excellent Tjukurrpa trilogy and have been partial to their wares ever since. Here dark ambienteers Raison D’etre have joined forces with the German duo for their follow up to […]
Witchfinder / Spinefarm Electric Wizard like Black Sabbath a lot, as do all right-thinking people, though I very much doubt the Wizard would like to be thought of as “right-thinking”. Calling your album Wizard Bloody Wizard is possibly the most blatant act of Sabbath-worship in an album title since The Rollins Band released Vol 4.
Thrill Jockey Their second collaborative album finds The Body and Full Of Hell colliding into a molten lava field of brutality and raw emotional outpourings the like of which pulls teeth and punches metaphorical guts with nihilistic abandon.
The Null Corporation / Universal If you have been watching, or have already watched, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick‘s brilliant and harrowing documentary series The Vietnam War, you can’t have failed to notice its masterful use of music. Famously the first war to have its own soundtrack, they’ve used the music of the time to devastating effect, juxtaposing classic tracks with scenes of brutality and hopelessness.
Imaginator After many years beavering away with King Missile, Bradford Reed‘s personal experiments feeding percussion through modular synths and playing around with the results has paid dividends on the release of the album Conduit by Ω▽ (pronounced Ohmslice), a band formed for this purpose.
Mute Marking four decades since Throbbing Gristle gave the world industrial music and a sharp shock to the system that made the punk rock scene exploding around them seem tame and backwards-looking by comparison, Mute are releasing anniversary editions of the band’s key albums. The Second Annual Report That splash of cover’s corporate blandness gives you little idea of the dirty pearls actively seeking your disapproval inside. 1977 […]
Nonplace Merging Burnt Friedman‘s distinctive electronic swirl with Mohammed Reza Mortazavi‘s deftly-played tombak rhythms, the Yek EP finds the Berlin-based duo in playful mode as they bounce musical sparks off each other.
6dimensions Sometimes, as Mick Jagger‘s character Turner observed in Nic Roeg‘s Performance, when going too far, it’s necessary to go further back and faster. This Steve Bicknell does on Awakening The Past by revisiting three tracks from his Lost Recordings days and concocting a fresh one for good measure to see if the old ways are still worth it.