Dublin 14 December 2013 Set phasers to phase. Listening to the recent Wooden Shjips album Back to Land is a very different experience to seeing the band play the album live. That’s obviously true of every record. Every artist. Every band. But some more than others. And Wooden Shjips more than most. Fortunately both experiences are excellent. Back to Land (Thrill Jockey)is as good a slice of mellow […]
Dekorder Conical Space, the first offering of Dekorder‘s brilliant Hybrid Vinyl series, finds Pye Corner Audio‘s Head Technician channelling all his loves: ’80s horror synth, Detroit Techno, kosmische and corrupted technology. These synthscapes conjure images of polished chrome skylines, with miles high neon adverts, before yr cruiser exits the stratosphere, eventually being swallowed in the event horizon of Dr. Reinhardt’s black hole. It’s always a pleasure to hear […]
Thrill Jockey Getting the hastily-search engined blurb out of the way: Sidi Touré (no relation to the other famous musicians with the same last name from the same country) is from Mali; Mali’s had it pretty rough of late, and seems to be in a tempestuous state politically. I shan’t embarrass myself by feigning more than a cursory awareness but the appearance of a number of conflicting voices […]
Clouds Hill For those who have waited for a recent live document of Gallon Drunk, I’ll say it’s halfway there. As a part of the Clouds Hill live 10” series, only five songs fits on this white vinyl record and the good thing is that the fans can stay hungry for more.
Zoharum For his first album in seven years under his own name (rather than as S.E.T.I.), Andrew Lagowski seems to have decided to revisit every possible way of making synthesized music – let’s lump them all under the rubric of techno just for the moment – and give it an extra shove in various oblique directions. Sprinkled with bleeps, thwups, trickles and sprightly bursts of brightly-crafted sonics, Redesine+ […]
MIE Is Black Dirt Oak a supergroup? Perhaps. With members of Desert Heat, Violators, Pelt, Black Twig Pickers, Rhyton, Psychic Ills, D. Charles Speer‘s band and NNCK (that’s just from the more well-known groups too) it probably counts as one, if such a term really holds much meaning anymore. With seven musicians on board, it often sounds like there are yet more hard at work on creating as […]
Dubmission Deep Fried Dub are on a bass mission to quiver the livers of all who enter to within a five kilometre radius of ground zero around their bass bins, it would seem; because every track on Slow Cooked, whether presented in rootsier style, teched-up or given the dubstep wobbleover is a binshaker of the highest quality. Breakbeats and stepping rhythms are flavoured with horns, skanking guitars and […]
Zoharum The desert is a place of sunlight and shadows; a place of bedouins and fertile deltas; lazy, muddy rivers and ancient tales. Time stands still beneath the flaming orb of the relentless sun. You feel the need to whisper, despite the whining wind. It is a place of fakir and genie, supplication and purification. This is the realm of Vernal Crossing Revisited. Vernal Crossing was the third […]
London 10 December 2013 We leave the pub and head down towards Entrance F. The night is cold and dark, breath highlighted as white wisps against the blackness, lights pinpoint bright like stars. It’s perfect. And now the excitement is building, as the phalanxes of the black-clad, the long-haired and silver jewellery-bedecked are massing. What a truly a rag-tag army it is too, as diverse in its composition […]
Camber Sands, Sussex 29 November-1 December 2013 So it came, as the subtitle says, to the very end of an era for All Tomorrow’s Parties on the English coast. Returning full circle to Pontin’s at Camber Sands where it all kicked off 13 years ago (barring the festival’s origins with Belle and Sebastian‘s Bowlie Weekender a year earlier in 1999 at the same spot), ATP brought out its […]
Zoharum Tadeusz Łuczejko‘s eighth album as Aquavoice finds him stepping out beyond the more abstract and/or ambient territory hitherto occupied by his particular take on electronica. While all the elements are synthesised – in software or with physical devices – there is much on this album which resonates with the warmth of acoustic instrumentation. This is particularly evident on “Magma,” whose cellos and other strings, however artificial, tremble […]
Clouds Hill Bosnian Rainbows is the recently-formed group of Omar Rodriguez-López from The Mars Volta, and supposedly a more pop-like approach to music than he did before. I haven’t encountered Bosnian Rainbows’ studio versions yet, so I was curious to what to expect of this live recording from a series of 10” vinyl documents by Clouds Hill studios in Hamburg. What did I immediately hear? A record of […]
Ryan Moore has been hard at work on a remaster of his classic 1999 Twilight Circus album Horsie, and it’s a lovingly-tweaked and toned new version, available alongside the entire TC back catalogue here. Below is the original Freq review of the album, which still stands (though sadly hand-crayoned covers don’t translate to digital format quite as easily): Ryan Moore‘s fifth solo album as Twilight Circus is billed […]
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mike Gangloff‘s solo record Poplar Hollow (Blackest Rainbow) – here appearing on swirl-patterned vinyl wrapped up in a gloriously psychedelic sleeve, following on from an earlier self-released edition – bridges the sounds of the two groups he is best-known for. Opening with the plaintive violin round “Queen of the Earth,” it’s easy to hear within Gangloff’s deep attachment to and knowledge of the mountain music of […]
Northern Spy (North America)/ReR (Europe) I was determined not to like this album. I’d signed up to review it in advance of The Necks’ sold out three-night stand at Café OTO in early November – new album review, live gig write-up, . I’ve always like symmetry, me. Yet the album never showed up from the USA. And it kept on not showing up. Eventually, Freq’s estimable editor had […]
Endtyme Having played together at the Supersonic festival and with one joint CDr already under their collective (metal-studded?) belts, Zeni Geva‘s mainman KK Null and post-tuba drone duo Ore slip out this double A-side 7” vinyl single as a little extra, perhaps and hopefully prefacing more joint efforts yet to come. While “Components of Circulation” is as doomy and droney as might be expected (and that’s not meant […]
Lotushouse Is it a joke, disguised as a New Age record? Or a cosmic drone record, masquerading as a joke? In July 2005, a small package was delivered to an address in Stamford Hill, London for the attention of Mr Otto Amon and Mr Solomon Kirchner. The gentlemen who received the package have never revealed who sent it to them or what was inside it but a body […]
(self-released) Starts in a dawn chorus of cymbal scrapes and reverbatory metals, rebounding some abandoned factory walls, dust bars of light catching the . A mild introduction that opens to the raspy slaps of “Grey Meat,” a curmudgeon that clumsily knocks into drawers full of cutlery franked by Gnostic monk moans. Then moments later it’s jumping out of the fire extinguisher smoke going headlong into a percussive jumble […]