London 16 September 2014 Listen, For in each tiny sound, In the movement of the air, And in the song of the birds, Shall the voice of God Speak unto you, If only you chose to hear it. Johannes Dieterich, Prorsus Inventa, 1573
Thrill Jockey When we look back to the ’90s, back when something that was called post-rock was as vital a part of the musical landscape as Britpop or grunge, we might find ourselves wincing at the apparent uselessness of this subgeneric category, or we might find ourself wincing at the uselessness of all subgeneric categories, or we might find ourselves just not caring either way. Post-rock was described […]
ReR Megacorp This is literally bonkers, and monkeys with your expectations in all the right ways, each song swerving from its original starting point in a genre-flinging bewilderment of mood swings (at least four, if not more, times within the confines of each song). Quite a trip, starting with an unassuming country tinge before suddenly going off-road with a rough dose of Eugene Chadbourne-style fisted frets and bouldering […]
Artemisia On Celestite, the fifth LP from Olympia, Washington’s atavistic warriors Wolves In The Throne Room, the Weaver brothers have done probably the least black metal thing imaginable, and released a record of modular synth soundscapes. And while the keepers of the trve kvlt flame are undoubtedly at home, sharpening their battle axes and planning a jihad, Celestite points out some interesting layers of the modern musical milieu, […]
Fourth Dimension “Christ, It’s Lonely” is the title of part three of the most recent release from Gary Mundy (of Ramleh) under the name Kleistwahr, and it’s about as good an indicator of the bleakness to be found mired on This World Is Not My Home as might be required to gauge its intent. Though the dense textures crushed and mushed into the album’s seven pieces (though the […]
Newhaven Fort, East Sussex 13 September 2014 Wow! This place was superb!! A semi-ruin with a labyrinth of white-clad tunnels eating into the gloom, the natural reverb promoting plenty of pseudo monk fun. The weathered solidity and teasing signs of atrophy, the stonework full of weird apertures that once occupied armoury now harbouring a host of musical oddness.
DAC Ciment starts spasmodic and spare, then proceeds to deploy buzzing, whining breath-fragments and scraping flexions among some moments of stark, simple beauty along the way. Pressed on two sides of vinyl, the LP is fully intended to be listened to with all the accumulated crackles, hiss, pops and incidental warmth the format brings with it, for better or worse. All sounds originate with Franck Vigroux‘s guitar, and […]
London 16 September 2014 Mounting the stage with a promise of a different set to the previous night’s show at the same venue, Nik Void, Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti settle quickly into place behind a compact selection of effects boxes, mixers and other instruments. As the gig gets underway, the backdrop lit up by the slowly-cycling op-art imagery familiar from their début album projected overhead, the […]
Zoharum It’s all about space: between things, around planets, the place of which Sun Ra spoke and the concept which he often evoked. But this is not a jazz album; Dawid Adrjanczyk and Krzysiek Joczyn are more electro-acoustic in their means and perhaps calmer in their demeanour here. The title Tajnie i Głębie – Mysteries and Depths – gives a hint of what the album brings as it […]
White Label Music Like the former colonel of the First Earth Battalion, Jim Channon, whom Jon Ronson encountered in the story he recounted in The Men Who Stare At Goats, Radio 9 are apparently encouraging their charges – their listeners – to embark on a mission to achieve the impossible, and walk through the walls; though maybe via the more simple expedient of metaphysically opening up the doors […]
El Paraiso On the four planets that orbit their warm star, a few hundred terran colonists have built their new homes, pioneers, lost thousands of light-years away from the home world… Causa Sui is the sound of molten rock on a far away world, of lava streams and eruptions that spout their waste high above the atmosphere of these almost dead worlds out into the cold reaches of […]
Bureau B I confess, I was in two minds about this one. When Freq’s esteemed editor suggested that I review the second album by Camera (their debut Radiate appeared in 2012), my internal braking system engaged almost at once. Reading the accompanying blurb, it was pushing to the hilt, their endorsement and live performances alongside (*cue angelic choir*) Michael Rother and Dieter Moebius lending an air of gravitas […]
Blast First Petite Stuck in traffic for hours, long after I desperately had to get somewhere. I’m still intent, which is past reason. What she’s doing on the guitar reminds me of the mid-’90s experimental electro scene. Ooh, nice bit of panning. Does that come off live? I bet it would be good live. They played in London, just recently, and a bunch of other places, including Bristol […]
Ankst So when a new EP comes out from Datblygu, Freq offers up not one, but two reviews. Firstly, Kev Nickells enthuses: In a caveat that might as well be me saying “this is why I don’t write for a living,” it’s tricky writing about Datblygu. Certainly from my perspective. If you don’t know, they’re broadly considered as arguably the most important Welsh-language bands of the last 32 […]
Handmade Birds Right from the offing, “Dancing On Ledges” is a difficult listen, plies a remarkably fucked-up notion of ambience, shooting your lobes in sherbety shards, like a redux of “Everybody is Christ” from Cindytalk‘s Camouflage Heart (which is 30 years old this year), its heavy drones daggering you brilliantly into submission as the uncompromising vision jousts it through with lathe-like screams. Discernible licks of bass give you […]
Planet Mu Ekoplekz‘s Four Track Mind isn’t necessarily Unfidelity‘s evil twin – more like its astral double that departs the flesh for regions unknown. And since Unfidelity was already well beyond the Oort Cloud, that’s pretty far out indeed. The music was culled from the same process that yielded Unfidelity, released in March of this year, which means two double LPs in less than 12 months for the […]
Play Loud! Just guitar, bass and drums — it’s a simple tirade but Guru Guru pushed beyond those limitations, expanding out into a universe eaten into with discordant joys, and zim-zoned tresses of effect-soaked goodness. There’s chord ego in there, yeah, but what Seventies band didn’t cling to that tattered flag — but for these guys it was just a starting point which hooked into a whole lot […]
Infinity Land Press John Balance dies and becomes a kind of saint. This is a hagiography of sorts, though it doesn’t attempt to smooth edges or unwrinkle ravages; it’s clear in these beautifully-presented pages that he was a complex, maybe difficult man. It’s also clear that he was a flame that attracted people to him, a person so out there that he was able to continually make them […]