Jahtari Shinsekai comes on fresh and fast, as if WaqWaq Kingdom are in a hurry to cut to the chase, to speed through the dubs and rev up themselves and their listeners into a frenzy of echoed FX and sturdy rhythms.
Is this folk music? Perhaps, in the way that an elegiac requiem mass can be, or a threnody of loss and suffering felt on the part of a musician for the shocking violence which unfolded in his home town.
Red Robin / Jahtari Continuing the longstanding reggae tradition of producers cutting basic rhythms and then letting different singers and deejays work their vocal ways into the mix, New Zealand-based duo Naram and Art laid down the core tracks for this first EP
MVD For me, Morphine was one of the most important alternative bands to come form the USA in the Nineties. Their sound was unique and it is not often that can be said about a band, particularly a three-piece coming from the thriving post-punk and independent scene of Boston.
Trilithon Transits consists of three evenly spaced explorations of sonic time and motion taken – as the band name suggests – at the speed that the duo of Holy McGrail and Howard Marsden find most conducive to eroding the boundaries between the listener and the music.
Jahtari Seemingly beamed in from a parallel easy listening universe where the one and only King Tubby still reigns supreme, the Gl. Harlev Organ Orchestra deploy their vintage Technics organ, complete with cheesy electronic rhythms, dubbed up and overdriven.
Sulatron During the late Sixties, part of the psychedelic experience was to discover your inner self by going on the hippie trail to India and Nepal. Here people would find gurus, live in ashrams and contemplate the universe by the side of the Ganges. Electric Moon’s fifth studio album seems to be almost a soundtrack to these journeys
Play Loud! Formed in 1994 by ex PLO and Young Scamps members Kai Drewitz and Sabine Blödorn, Floating Di Morel have been mixing it up on the Berlin underground circuit for some time now. This, their latest album is my very first taste and I’ve got to say I’m really partial to what they have to offer.
Ormo Derby Derby is a French three-piece consisting of bass, drums and electrified trumpet. For them, the perfection of a monotonous drone is their goal, the sort that takes you away, transcending the ordinary and allowing you to slip into that mantra-like mindset where the slightest variation or the minutest change of detail become enormous.
Consouling Sounds With just two LP tracks totalling a shade over forty minutes long, Lueur presents its mood-altering substance in paths that wander from ultra-faded darkness into the natural world and back again.
Arts & Crafts This is Kid Koala‘s fifth album and I have to say is a serious change of pace to his previous output. Gone are the busy turntable experiments and instead with the aid of glacial vocals from the delightful Emiliana Torrini, we have a song suite of the kind of magnitude we are not fortunate enough to see very often.
London 29 March 2017 In the early ’90s, the Norwegian metal scene was a scary place to be. Church burnings, murders, violent assaults and a total refusal to take metal’s Hammer movie schtick as anything other than deadly serious mean that anything written about the era is as much true crime as it is musical history.
Rocket Recordings There will be many howls, and here’s one of the first out of the blocks. Gnod can meander, at times (and I like their meanderings), but here the rage is palpable; this is a headbutt into the side of a fast-moving machine. Hawkwind on double-speed, ditching the mushrooms for Brown Acid and amphetamania.
Play Loud! This is my kind of record, each track dedicated to its own side, a satisfying slab of uninterrupted evolution to burrow into, to savour. A completely live recording (and film) that shimmers plenty, full of the essential Velcro that pulls you straight into that open-ended fray
London 28 March 2017 Tonight, the rather beautiful Hoxton Hall is packed to the rafters with people all here to witness a rare solo performance of Richard Barbieri. The hall looks like it’s more used to hosting Jacobean theatre productions
House Of Mythology It’s all in the trails. In a recent, small-scale, study carried out by researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany, participants took LSD and carried out a number of tasks. The experimenters documented the experiences and noted that tasks that required linguistic and semantic application seemed to be particularly affected
Tip Top Well, this is quite a riot. Renowned experimental library musician The Man From Uranus has teamed up with 8-bit chiptune artist and fan of Gameboy and Commodore 64 sounds, Jellica, to produce an LP using as many duck-sounding synth noises as they can find.
The Barbican, London 21 March 2017 The tickets. We purchased them, they came. Who are they? Explorers in the further reaches of experience — demons to some, angels to others. We bought the tickets, they came. Now we must come with them and taste their pleasures.