Important I first heard Overhang Party via their contributions to a couple of PSF’s Tokyo Flashback compilations back in the ’90s and a CD-R of their second album 2 that cultural commentator Jon Savage gave me around the same time. Since then I have almost completely failed to find any records by this most elusive of Japanese groups, the sole exception being a copy of their (I assumed) […]
Staubgold It’s unusual to encounter a CD reissue where the ubiquitous ‘bonus tracks’ amount to more than inessential filler. The extras here, taken from the group’s first single and LP, turn out to be far superior to the actual album itself. The good news is that there are no less than 23 of them – swamping the LP proper’s meagre 17 songs and making this CD an invaluable […]
(self-released) If you have ever longed to hear La Düsseldorf covering The Damned‘s “Neat Neat Neat,” Polly Harvey backed by Wire and Hawkwind (at the same time!) or The Saints fronted by Lydia Lunch, then Art Trip and the Static Sound are the group for you. EP2 (I somehow missed EP1 – but will remedy that) is full of concise, no-frills rock ‘n’ roll – driving rhythms, grinding […]
Convexe (N America)/Salvo (Europe) At the end of 2010, the Metropolis television company organized a series of intimate concerts at their London studios, each showcasing a ‘heritage’ act to 140 people, each of who paid £175 for the privilege. Apparently a glass of champagne and a meeting with the artist was also included in this price. The series included Caravan, Barclay James Harvest, The Zombies, Roy Harper, Bill […]
Future Noise The Pop Group reunion gigs seem to have revitalised Mark Stewart. Rather than basking in the overdue glory accorded his old group, Stewart was straight back in the studio recording his first solo album for four years. The Politics of Envy came out last March, featuring guest spots from many of his punk era peers – Keith Levene, Gina Birch, Tessa Pollitt, Richard H Kirk, Youth […]
Handmade Birds Spluttering rupturing, discordantly eviscerating the sounds and tropes of analogue and digital synthesis, Takahe Collage arrives in three parts but leaves music (once again) shredded in to far, far more. The first two pieces, the title track and “Tendeko,” weigh in at around the half-hour mark each, and after a through listen their presence soon becomes inscribed upon the ears like a permanent tattoo. “Takahe Collage” […]
Drag City UK digi-dub veterans Alpha & Omega have taken on the task of remaking Om‘s track “Addis” from their recent Advaitic Songs album, transforming the original’s hypnagogic swell of doomy bass and mournful cello into a dub workout in two parts. Side A weighs in as “Ababa Dub,” Kate Ramsey‘s haunting vocal lifted into the echo chamber while the strings vibrate below, riding on a coasting undercarriage of […]
Monotype When listening to noise, collages, field recordings or other kinds of abstract music, new compilations have always been a welcome listen. Mainly as it is usually very diverse, and for me almost never tiresome. The Grief That Shrieked to Multiply is of course not a compilation as such, but a collection of remixes, done by a big number of well known and some unknown artists from the […]
London 13 April 2013 Slipping quietly into the performance area, arch-noisemonger Russell Haswell opens his set with a slow build of spluttering sharp attacks, crawling eventually into chaos wrapped in shards of broken glass spat bloody and still sizzling into the ears of the willing victims in the crowd. Haswell is hunched intently over his boxes of dubious FX, never looking up and playing his devices the noisnik […]
Gizeh/Southern Aidan Baker‘s Already Drowning marks something of a departure for his solo releases, as each piece finds him collaborating with (in this case, women) singers with lyrical inspiration coming from the likes of Angela Carter, Philip K Dick and various folk sources. recorded over the space of two years, it’s also one of Baker’s most assured works in an already impressive catalogue both as a solo artist […]
Cardinal Fuzz For their 2013 contribution to Record Store Day, Mugstar unleash eight tracks (previously available as a tour-only CD) which emerge over the space of two sides of vinyl in an almost continuous mix of muscular psychedelic rock. Each instrumental merges with the next, the fading-out split between each side providing a suitable point to remind any stoners who might just possibly be listening that it’s probably […]
Full Contact Like the music of fellow synthpop freak Jimi Tenor, that played by the duo of Rättö ja Lehtisalo seems to come from a strange otherworld of their own devising, one where off-kilter percussion and jazzy notes sidle at the beck and call of Mika Rättö‘s distinctively weird vocals. It’s not even because they’re in Finnish, because Mika has an international delivery offset by the trademark tendency […]
Fourth Dimension Second in the series of Fourth Dimension Singles Club 7” releases, Into The Dark represents Sion Orgon‘s first new music to be released in a good while. Like his previous album, 2008’s The Zsigmondy Experience, the A side of this 7” features appearances from Thighpaulsandra, Seb Goldfinch and the late Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson of Coil, Throbbing Gristle and The Threshold Houseboys Choir infamy. The title track […]
Rise Above Purson’s first album has been long awaited in some quarters. After the sell out limited release of their first single “Rocking Horse” and support slots for both Electric Wizard and Comus there’s been something of a buzz about this band and this LP doesn’t disappoint. “Wake up Sleepy Head” is a beautiful acoustic opener with lush-sounding Mellotron and owes much to the lineage of ’70s psychedelic […]
Rustblade As Legendary Pink Dot chemistry lessons go, this latest instalment to the series burns with a slow slip of reality, the simplest backbone of rhythm caught in the tattered net curtains of Edward Ka-Spel’s mind. Absorbing word weaves hooking you in as the trancelike vibes dribble the vowel fall, reflecting everything back panoramically from inside an idea’s skeletal sheen. Love “Immaculate Conception”‘s agoraphobic airs: the slippery backing […]
three:four . But not only that. I hear a lot of new experimental music, and some of it has as a sound or quality that will wear you out if you listen to full albums. Not necessarily on account of the music itself, which can be very interesting and varied, but some experimentalists tend to use the same approach to the soundscape or palette of sound throughout an […]
Lyon 27 March 2013 The advantage of seeing Swans play at a relatively small venue like l’Epicerie Moderne over, say, one of the larger auditoriums in a bigger city (or one with a more active fanbase) like Paris or New York is that the experience is a little more intimate than when the gig is held in a very big room with not as much chance of seeing […]
Grönland Brian Eno once famously stated that there were three crucial beats in the 1970s: Fela Kuti’s Afro-Beat, James Brown’s funk and Klaus Dinger’s NEU!-beat. The latter – a hypnotic, strict and Spartan 4/4 that Dinger initially christened the ‘lange gerade’ (‘long straight’) or ‘endlose gerade’ (‘endless straight’), and later referred to as the ‘Apache Beat’ – came to be virtually synonymous with entire canon of German music […]