Marionette With a title that refers to a book about near-death experiences, suitably enough, Burnt Friedman‘s first release for Marionette draws upon his archive of recordings to construct a new EP of circling, abstract rhythms topped off with ghostly musical remnants.
London 22 June 2017 Hindsight can be a famously cruel opponent. On the freezing New Year’s Eve of 1961, The Beatles drove all the way down to London from their native Liverpool amidst swirling snowstorms and treacherous roads. The following day, whilst the nation sipped delicately at some Alka-Seltzer and nursed its collective sore head, The Fab Four fired up their Vox amplifiers
Sulatron Beautiful artwork by Komet Lulu is wrapped around this new release by Sula Bassana, which already tempts the listener to give it a spin. This is Sula’s first soundtrack album and is for Michael Yates’s new movie The Ape Regards His Tail.
Northern Spy Seeing Larkin Grimm at the (now demolished) Seymour’s Family Club in Bristol back in 2006(?) was a real pleasure, that incredible voice of hers just held its own, her musicianship spurring and stirring her wordy glow-forms.
Consouling Sounds This is a first for me, listening to Nadja. For some reason they didn’t cross my radar, but on the strength of this re-release, I have seriously been missing out. Consouling Sounds have chosen to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the Alien8 release of this album by reissuing it with an extra disc containing an unreleased live studio version of the album and it is a […]
The Gatherer Consouling Sounds A-Sun Amissa‘s The Gatherer weaves a rich cadaver of intrigue. A sombre dream horned by a raspy clarinet yarn and a trickle of hypothermic piano. A poetically pinned bleed with a lysergic slur of percussion and convulsive coils of sax, burning bright in sulphurous melodics to be cut back to a gorgeous microcosm.
London 14 June 2017 ‘Are you going to see Kings X?’, the guy in the pub says to me. ‘No, I’m going to see a band called Blood Ceremony at The Garage’, I reply. ‘They sound a bit weird to me, mate’; and with that he shuffles off, pint in hand.
Zoharum Emil Mat’ko‘s tenth year of recording as Strom Noir is marked by the collection from Zoharum, bringing to light old and new material alike.
Zoharum Hallucinatory and suffused with a sense of being largely abstracted from place and time as it is generally understood to exist, Rapoon‘s My Life as A Ghost seethes with fluctuations in the space-time continuum. Drenched in reverberant FX, the album is in part a product of its era
Bureau B Magnetband: Experimenteller Elektronik-Underground DDR 1984-1989 Like Play Loud!‘s excellent Ende Vom Lied, this collection from those bastions of Germanic goodness Bureau B gives you another whistle-stop tour of the DDR’s vibrant underground tape culture. Magnetband is a fourteen-track compilation from the mid- to late Eighties salvaged from a load of brave documenters
Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records Metal isn’t a particularly progressive genre, in a lot of ways; for all the fluff that people throw at it, musicologically speaking, it’s rarely divested itself of fairly conventional tonalities, regular 4/4s, flattened out timbres and limited melodies. I appreciate that’s kind of “the thing” that makes metal and as someone who doesn’t really like metal it’s unfair for me to tar it […]
Old Captain Originally released in 1988 on cassette (and under the name Vidna Obmana as the project was styled in those days, rather than the later vidnaObmana), The Face That Must Die is very a much a release redolent of its post-industrial musical era, but still holds an effective and occasionally gruesome fascination thirty years later.
Geographic Music It seems that quite often in my reviews I am cheering the welcome return of bands that appear to have gone missing in action and enthusing about those returns, but I am particularly thrilled to be listening to the first Crescent album in ten years.
Pica Disk Originally released on LP in 2003 on the French label Élevage De Poussière, Dietrich was the solo debut of noise rock band Borbetumagus‘s saxophone player Don Dietrich. Here it comes in remastered form on CD
Beggars Arkive Buffalo Tom were part of that wave of post-hardcore guitar bands that came out of Boston in the late Eighties along with the likes of Dinosaur Jr and Lemonheads. They were friendly with J Mascis and he produced their first couple of albums, and that connection dictates a little as to the sound of those two albums.
Play Loud! Floating di Morel‘s Goal Less Play LP is a sparse, spittle-mouthed wonder nuzzling into some glinting sparks of acoustika. Bursts of sonic weirdness lurk between the main feasts – brief sketches that clear the palette for the more song-oriented goods
Bureau B I think the first thing that should be mentioned about this record is the press release. Breaking all form and convention, it’s readable, witty, descriptive and — get this — actually tells you some information about the record.
File 13 I must confess The Poison Arrows are a new one on me, but a great discovery because they ply the kind of slinky bass-heavy American post-hardcore that the likes of Girls vs Boys (GVSB) and The Jesus Lizard put out years ago.