Rural Isolation Project What’s often advertised as noise-rock tends to be just noisy rock. It’s usually very straight forward and just a noisy use of instruments. Lovely as this can be, I find it refreshing when Austin noise-punks Quttinirpaaq‘s third Rural Isolation Project LP is said to be “bleeding-noise industrial electronic rock”. This is the solo project of Matt Turner, who also joins forces with King Coffey from […]
Software Recorded over the space of ten years up until the early part of the current century, The Baltika Years gathers together a selection of recordings that Ben Zimmerman made almost entirely from samples he manipulated using software running on the now long-defunct Tandy DeskMate computer operating system. Working around and within the limitations of the music software available on DeskMate (such as 22 kHz 8-bit audio), Zimmerman recorded […]
Bureau B Dub is the very beating heart of music made with electric bass and drums, the low end and rhythm pared back to bare essentials as the bedrock of form, then modified with various levels of drenching in echo and other effects. It’s no wonder that a technique developed most prominently in Jamaica in the 1970s went on to enhance and then pretty much take over huge […]
Karl Gently grooving guitars weave in and out of focus, playful in their interaction and sporadic dialogues with each other. At times they align, generating a collective groove that rolls along with the free spirit of Krautrock. In other moments they separate, creating backdrops for each other casting light and shadows, or providing minute detailed explorations of sonic material, until once again, they reunite and take on a […]
Pica Disk Jim O’Rourke has released albums of jazz, noise, electronica and rock music. He has collaborated with artists such as Thurston Moore, Derek Bailey, Mats Gustafsson, Merzbow, Nurse with Wound and Fennesz, just to name a few, and has produced albums by artists such as Sonic Youth, Wilco, Stereolab, Faust, Tony Conrad, The Red Krayola, Joanna Newsom and US Maple. He mixed Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album […]
4AD Punk had vaporised into a new beast by the tail end of the Seventies, ripping out of its tri-chord skin into something altogether sleeker and weirder. Luckily for us pleasure-seekers, a then-unknown inquisitor going by the name of Ivo Watts-Russell was scouting around for talent for his fresh-faced label 4AD, mopping up all the post-punk verve he could get his hands on. In retrospect, he had a […]
London 28 May 2015 Tucked away in the heart of London’s St Pancras is St Pancras Old Church, one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in the country, and in whose grounds is buried Mary Wollstonecraft. Grounds that were at one point dug up by a young Thomas Hardy (the novelist, not the one out of Mad Max: Fury Road; that would just be weird) while working […]
Fresh from the release of their recent triple album Infinity Machines, psychedelic space cadets Gnod have stripped down to a guitar-heavy four piece on the road. Michael Rodham-Heaps questions Gnod Gnetwerker Paddy via email about this most freaked-out of bands.
The Dome and Boston Music Room London 24 May 2015 I have to admit that I’ve never been to Raw Power before. Every year, more than any other festival, there are always an amazing bunch of bands that I have wanted to see, or at least witness again. So even though I was unable to do both Friday and Saturdays events, I managed to race to the venues […]
London 22 May 2015 Fortis Green, north London. A place of fertile musical soil. Back at the turn of the Sixties, Fortis Green was the manor of brothers Ray and Dave Davies, whose combination of gifted lyricism, overdriven Vox amplifiers and almost unrivalled songwriting ability saw them take the output of their ground-breaking – although never less than highly combustible – band, The Kinks, to the pinnacle of […]
Pulver und Asche Drawing on their collective backgrounds in electro-acoustic composition, electronic music and free improvisation and with a general avant-garde interest in pushing at boundaries and generally mashing things up musically, El Toxyque, Luca “Xelius” Martegani and Zeno Gabaglio do their best to evoke the spirit of TS Eliot‘s The Waste Land on their second album as Niton. Through the application of cello, self-built instrumentation and a […]
New Nihilism Jarosław Leśkiewicz‘s (AKA Naked On My Own) first CD as Opollo delivers ten tracks of wool-gathering shoegaze ambience which pulse, glide and drone at the listener, prompting the attainment of theta wave-heavy states of consciousness, or perhaps more simply nudging them towards a kind of wakeful sleep state. As with the best of this kind of thing (Leśkiewicz is obviously a fan of both Brian Eno […]
London 21 May 2015 – The Conscious Pause – It is daunting to write about a show that was attended by so many Freq contributors because I know they’ll all read this and I am sure they will all have things to add (or deny). But what does that matter? It is daunting to write about a Swans show, because – Swans – This was my second time […]
Bristol 20 May 2015 Sadly, I only caught the end of Okkyung Lee’s set — a real pity as that scraping reverberation of cello was curving some lovely tonal mirages. It wasn’t long before the Swans gradually graced the stage (sometime around 8.37pm). First Thor Harris, who brewed a lovely metallic warble from his massive gong, a sound that sizzled excitingly in the ear. Phil Puleo joined him, […]
Universal Music Has it been twelve months already? Twelve months since Conchita Wurst swooped into our hearts and planted a big blue, pink and white flag in the heart of Europe for the second time in Eurovision‘s history. I realise that for a lot of people Eurovision is some chintzy, end-of-the-pier nonsense, but when you can have someone advocating trans* politics in front of millions of people across […]
Crónica Ma.Org Pa.Git is the fifth solo release from the Norwegian sound artist and experimental musician Alexander Rishaug. Here he is exploring the space and the acoustics of a church organ and the hiss, overtones and feedback of an old tube amp and electric guitar. The album consist of two long pieces, recorded in the Norwegian seaman’s church in Rotterdam. Even though the material is heavily processed and […]
London 15 May 2015 Friday night at The Roundhouse, and the faithful are gathered for what promises to be a night of epic heaviness — four bands culminating with the mighty Electric Wizard are set to compete for our hearts, minds and ultimately, souls. However, due to a rubbish London Transport experience, I arrive when the first of them, Moss, are already half-way through their set.
4AD (UK)/RVNG Intl (USA and elsewhere) About two thirds of the way in to Holly Herndon‘s Platform, on the track “Lonely at the Top”, there comes an intimacy so disarming that, on first listen, I was unsure of what I was hearing. Platform is Holly’s second album; I reviewed her first album, Movement and, though I liked it a lot, I found it a little too disjointed, calling […]