Rocket Girl Untreated, Colin Wilson’s voice might be Paul Vaughan, the narrator of Coil’s “The Golden Section”; it has the same, slightly clipped, slightly cold authority but we don’t get to hear enough of it on this album. There’s a lot of processing here and the voice is often unrecognisable, sent off into shivers and hums and blurs. This is a strength of most of the music I […]
Editions Mego This seems chunky and real compared to the other Ekoplekz releases. You can buy it at Sainsbury’s. It’s out there, in all senses but it also feels like something of an end, like Nick Edwards is drawing a line, er, under the sand; it’s like a statement of where he’s been and how far he’s come. Nick’s always been very willing to give up his influences, […]
Cooking Vinyl Ever since The Orb’s first album The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld you could almost feel that somewhere down the line this collaboration would take place. The Orb have always added dub themes to their music to add to the blissful wholeness of the dance experience and to get the people on the floor . On this album you get The Orb at their dubby best with […]
Drag City There’s something that’s always struck me as a bit weird, not to mention lazy, in Om‘s usual categorisation as a doom metal band. Sure, they are one of the awesome phoenixes to have arisen from the ashes of doom pioneers Sleep, and they’re kinda droney and dirgey, but they’ve always been more celebratory than doomladen. Not quite joyous, but certainly devotional. They’re more like stoner metal […]
Alan Holmes speaks to Laetitia Sadier about her second solo album. One of the most played records at our house so far this year has been Silencio, the second solo release by former Stereolab front woman [post=laetitia-sadier-silencio text=”Laetitia Sadier”]. It’s a record that releases its charms slowly, each listening revealing new and wondrous depths. This subtlety is counterbalanced by the direct political nature of the lyrics, harking back […]
Corsica Studios, London 9 August 2012 As I walk in, a crazy man is on stage, pumping out some lovely squelchy bass sounds from a laptop which are instantly recognisable, thanks in part to his wonderfully overwrought vocals, as Black Sabbath‘s “Black Sabbath” (from the album Black Sabbath). And then it gets stranger and sillier from there, for this crazy man, it transpires, is Glatze, self-styled “musician and […]
The Muslimgauze Preservation Society Given a vinyl release nearly two decades after it first appeared – somewhat unusually – as a DAT, Satyajit Eye comprises outtakes from the Vote Hezbollah and Hamas Arc albums. Recorded with engineer John Delf at the Abraham Mosque Centre in Manchester, this album marks a key period in the development of the Muslimgauze sound, as the extensive liner notes on the LP recount, […]
12K/Bitstream Sometimes, smaller and quieter is better, is perfect. This slender little piece is 20 minutes exactly, a precise slab of (ahem) Lovely Drones that shows Stephan Mathieu at his serious, studied best. Beauty slowed down. The WK is legendary “quiet” pianist Wilhelm Kempff, whose 1927 recordings of Beethoven‘s Piano Sonata No. 26 Les Adieux are used as some of the generative material here. Mathieu’s process sort of […]
Klangbad It was a total surprise to find out that Golden Diskó Ship is really one person, Theresa Stroetges, a Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist – because I was struck by how much this sounds like several different bands, all vying or attention and all too polite to really push their ideas to the foreground. The production seems to place these bands in different sound chambers, so that they’re marginally aware […]
Bureau B Those good people over at Bureau B have been delving into the archives to bring us two classic slices of pre-Cluster goodness. Well before ‘71 and Zuckerzeit, these two albums, originally released in micro editions of 300 copies, demonstrate an avant-garde spirit that was and still is, a pleasure to absorb. Very much a ‘kicking k’ before the soothing ‘c’, these recordings still rival many of […]
Bureau B It can’t be a mistake that Red = Rot since this is electronic music rotted one note at a time. As a debut solo album – its actually more complicated than that – it’s a singular attempt to define a new genre of bubbling, messy, electronic music… Rot is propulsive/compulsive; as dark and shiny as a Scribing Mirror. You can hear the tangles that Conrad Schnitzler […]
Mute With London’s Olympic opening ceremony still reverberating freshly, it’s time to consider the next logical step in the bombast and nationalistic celebration: Laibach and their art host entity NSK conducting the premier global televisual propaganda occasion should Slovenia ever host the Games. Handily, it seems that if budgets are tight in straitened financial times to come, then An Introduction To Laibach/Reproduction Prohibited (not actually their greatest hits album […]
Bureau B Over the past few years, Hamburg’s Bureau B label has released an astonishing treasure trove of music. Reissues of long out of print kraut classics, including much of the enormous [post=cluster-roundup text=”back catalogue of the Cluster family”], now sit alongside brand new work by many of the people from the German scene, old and new, including recent releases from [post=faust-something-dirty text=”Faust”] and [post=kreidler-tank text=”Kreidler”]. The label […]
Klangbad The release of [post=faust-is-last text=”Faust Is Last”] a couple of years back seems to have freed up Hans-Joachim Irmler’s creative enthusiasm, his output rate suddenly jumping from Scott Walker to Acid Mothers Temple territory. These two new Klangbad releases are the fourth and fifth new projects involving Irmler since the Faust album in 2010 and there’s no sign of any let up in quality yet. The third […]
Esoteric Hmmm… a Van der Graaf Generator instrumental album eh? For a supposed ‘prog’ band, Van der Graaf Generator have never really gone in for lengthy instrumental passages, preferring to fill their convoluted songs with Peter Hammill’s densely-packed words. Then again, The Graaf, as they’ve seldom affectionately referred to, have never really gone in for the usual ‘prog’ behaviour. Of course their biggest ‘hit’ “Theme One” was an […]
Drag City It’s mandatory when reviewing [post=laetitia-sadier-interview text=”Laetitia Sadier“] to glibly remark on how everything she does sounds a bit the same, so let’s get that bit over to start with. Silencio isn’t sonically a million miles away from 2010’s The Trip, or indeed most Stereolab or Monade releases if it comes to that. The familiar elements are present: retro-futurist electronica, lushly arranged textures, “exotic” rhythms, sophisticated melodies […]
PNL A ping hits my mind, over and over again, record crackle from the turntable, strange voices talking to me, giving me unheard messages, drums moves frequencies back and forth in all kinds of directions. Subtle periods mixed with what sounds most people would argue does not belong in music. Repeat-loop train-tracks going to a playful sound together with jungle musique concrète. Stressed out or going through the […]
LF Wow! Take in that space. It’s practically a whisper for the first minute … Hákarl’s violin glowing like some gipsy succubus in the headphones… tugging the emotions as Daniel Hignell‘s electronics flitter the periphery, hugging those violin strokes in a dance of vaporous tastes. Vignettes of sensation, like a creeping doppelganger to that lichen-needled concrete. Six minutes in, its leisurely unfolding into a beat driven penance with […]