Lado ABC (CD)/Gagarin (LP) Ambitious as can be, mercurial music manipulator Felix Kubin joins Mitch & Mitch to generate ten tracks of modern big band electronic library music. Firmly placing tongue in cheek and putting on their stern faces, the mischievous collaborators offer up glockenspiel-friendly, brass-bound bacchanalia to jive the hepcats off their seats and into a swirl of ra-ra randomisers and stereophonic soundtrack swing, hopping and skipping gleefully […]
Dekorder With a title which perhaps both echoes and references The Faust Tapes, Luke Fowler‘s second edition of electronic murmurings sets out a distinct palette of scrawls synthesis which skitters and frolics with a studied playfulness. Despite the title, this is actually Fowler’s début album, edited down from many hours of recordings – and occasionally added to – by friend and collaborator Richard Youngs (see Lurists‘ Red & Blue, […]
Portland, Oregon 16 January 2014 It was a misty night in Portland. A thick gray pea soup clung to the street lights, obscuring any signs of modernity, anything outside of a three-foot nimbus. This Thursday evening had a particularly timeless feel – . The faithful have always gathered at night, apart from the common sense and rationality of the day-walkers. Whether it be antlered druids gathered at stone […]
Safety Meeting Inspired by Sabbath, Acid Mothers Temple & Space Paranoid seem to do black better than Black Sabbath ever imagined. That stoner bass-line on the opening title track giving out a deep seriously trough-like muscle. A rippling crypt-like foundation for Kawabata Makoto to riff-witch all over, his frets carving out super-bright highways. Veering into the uncharted with breathtaking ease, as if you could see Hendrix grinning in […]
Mordant Music On Your Crate Has Changed, the chimerical union of the wicked Baron Mordant and resident sonar technician Nick Edwards, better known to the world as Ekoplekz, eMMplekz rally against the digital diaspora with bricks, knives; words and confusion. If you picture the polished perfection of pop culture glitterati as the grotesque, stretch-faced bureaucracy of Terry Gilliam‘s Brazil, then eMMplekz are the freedom fighters and rogue air-conditioning […]
Sulatron Whoa! Let’s get things straight from the start – this is psychedelic music, pure and simple. . Both Papir and Electric Moon have a way of playing that turns your brain to mulch and then kicks it out of your head towards a multi-coloured sun. This meeting of fried minds on the edge could really only produce one type of music and that is bloody great slabs […]
Further You know that feeling of ominous expectation, when a storm’s a-brewin’? What about the feeling of sparkling clarity, once the clouds have broke and vented their fury? This colossal slab, The Elements’ Rage, is like hunkering down in a megalithic stone circle as silver-dappled thunderheads of guitar, feedback, percussion and field recordings doth spew and fume. It can take a lot for an instrumental, sound-collage theme record […]
Southern Lord Opening with a kick drum that could loosen the fillings in your teeth, Pelican‘s fifth full length gets off to a brooding, ominous start with “Terminal,” a dark slab of menacing noise, its first half filled with an almighty bass and wailing feedbacking guitars. The dust then settles bringing in more melodic, dare I say it “post-rock” guitar lines before the ferocious bass re-enters and we […]
Dekorder The trio of Luke Fowler, Richard Youngs and Steven Warwick of Heatsick have made some very strange electronic music here. Red & Blue is one of those on the spot collaborations which sounds like a huge amount of fun was had by all while plugging away in the studio. A liberated sense of playfulness is especially apparent, and it’s pretty much an electronic jam session which, if it […]
Consouling Sounds Joining together for a 19-minute epic on a single side of vinyl (also available as an all-black CD), the skin-crawling, crepuscular misanthropy of Netherlander Mories de Jong meets grim Belgian band Alkerdeel‘s doomy experimental black metal in dark celebration of Counsouling Sounds‘ fifth birthday. What a slathering, slavering beast it turns out to be, comprehensively , riding in on a mordant tide of bass groan and […]
Hank 3 You can’t say Hank Williams III (sometimes Hank III or Hank 3) isn’t prolific. Well, I suppose you could, but it would make you a big ol’ fuckin’ asshole of a liar. Since his first solo album Risin’ Outlaw in 1999, he’s released a colossal, some might say ludicrous, amount of music, giving nary a shit about genre. Aside from the obvious country and western stuff, […]
London 28 December 2013 So who would have believed all those years ago that a small British label focusing mainly on doom music would last all this time? But by the time I went to the last anniversary show a few years back at the ULU it was obvious then that the scene had grown and the blood lust for this type of music hadn’t abated. In the […]
Instrumentarium I love vinyl. There is something about it, lifting the needle and placing it down on a record seems real. That slight crackle of the run on groove, that wonderful analogue warmth that breathes from the speakers, the music’s cold hard digital heart taken away. So it was nice to be sent a real piece of proper lovely vinyl to review from a band local to me, […]
L’Embobineuse, Marseille. 20 December 2013 The first thing to notice – after being amused and bemused by the number of variously-mutilated teddy bears peppering L’Embobineuse‘s decorations (nailed to the ceiling; as the head of a nude mannequin in a fish tank) as well as noticing the number of SunnO))) stencils which have presumably recently appeared on every available surface in the place – including its in-car 3D cinema) […]
Bureau B This is a gleeful, cheery offering. A million miles from the moody cultures of Inland, Kurt Dahlke‘s ’79 debuting ice-breaker, it’s all ruby-cheeked whimsy, paddling in the shallow end, sucking on plenty of easy ear lollipops. Knowingly going where most experimenters fear to tread, into a world reserved for elevators and on hold appeasement; in short , the land of the inoffensive ditty. Pyrolator is clearly […]
18 December 2013 Pantomime season is once more upon us, and the heaviest and most bludgeoning pantomime of all is rolling into town. My first ever concert was Black Sabbath – a scary 38 years ago, and so when a friend who couldn’t make this week’s reunion tour offered me his ticket at a Christmas party last weekend, I was sufficiently inebriated to be unable to refuse. Arriving […]
Clouds Hill On the many occasions I have seen Faust live over the last years, the original krautrockers have played many favourites and songs from the ’70s classics, although mixed with some improvisations. But other times they grasp the opportunity to collaborate with other artists, letting them colour the expression, or even get a feel for a different setting creating new fresh music. This time it is the […]
Cadiz Music Although Julien Temple’s film about pub-rock heroes Dr Feelgood dates from 2009, it is only now receiving a DVD release (through Cadiz Music) in the US, and it’s this new edition that is reviewed here, although I’m not aware of any difference between this and the original release. Nevertheless, the fact that this is intended for an American market immediately invites focus on an intriguing aspect […]