Editions Mego This’ll be the second Freq review where I start with “I miss Coil” but I do miss them, they felt necessary, at least in my bubble. They didn’t seem in the least contingent and thus neither of them being here – still – is vaguely preposterous, almost illogical. That said, there’s still hints, around the corners, in not especially dark places, under stones, inside the wind. […]
The Island, Bristol 22 November 2013 The venue’s an abandoned police station, now converted into an arts centre/studio space. The grim nature of the place gets more pronounced as you step deeper into the building, those institutional hues greying against the eerie wipe-clean gloss of the white tiling. The cold concrete and red-bricked Victoriana, dower, depressing as the flaking magnolia, or the raggedy plastic bag spectres barb wire […]
Exotic Pylon There is a television advertisement for Cow and Gate infant food supplement currently doing the rounds (at this juncture it is more or less obligatory to state that “Other baby and toddler nutritional products are available”), which shows a gang of little nippers unleashed in a spacious recording studio. Wandering curiously around this acoustic playground the bright little buttons innocently scrape away at violins, pluck at […]
Portland, Oregon 19 November 2013 Portland was at it’s finest on Tuesday night, for this sold-out performance of Dirty Three guitarist Mick Turner and indie staple Bill Callahan, who used to make music under the Smog moniker before returning to his given name for a series of well received albums. We’ve entered the real rainy season in the City Of Roses, but it was clear and frosty night. […]
Thrill Jockey On Drifter’s Temple, Plankton Wat takes us on a vision quest through a dream of America’s West Coast. The ghosts of deadheads and time-travelling Rainbow Family gather in ancient sylvan redwood groves, playing the endless groove, while immortal orange-clad Boddhisatvas hold down the pedal note on a tambura. . Dewey Mahood has been constructing homespun new age guitar meditations since 2008, leaving his native northern California […]
London 15 November 2013 After some mix up on the door where I had to admit to being me twice (not sure why anyone would want or even pretend to be me), I make my way down a crowded staircase into a packed Borderline. I’d not been here since the ill fated Deviants gig a few months earlier so it was good to see the place heaving with […]
Trost Full of throat-throttling goodness, this powerhaus trio carves quite a ruckus that effectively fills that massive void of a stage depicted on the cover. Right from the offing Caspar Brötzmann and Marino Pliakas‘s hexagonal arcs seem to leer, goading the somersaulting percussions and hypothermic cymbals of Michael Wertmüller. All three locking horns superbly , notching up quite a temperature, gnawing on each other’s shrapnel-filled halos in screeching […]
Captured Tracks To The Happy Few, the new album from seminal So.Cal. shoegaze/noise pop act Medicine, is like being submerged in a lake of amniotic glycerine, and watching the sky. Guitars like outboard motors disturb the stillness, making waves, while chanteuse Beth Thompson lulls you towards the depths. Jim Goodall‘s drums go off like depth charges, and it suddenly occurs to you how badly you’ve missed rock ‘n […]
London 9 November 2013 The Black Heart is filled to capacity to witness Jex Thoth’s first ever London date. I’ve been waiting and wanting to see this band live since the release of the first album, but for some reason every time they planned to tour here it fell through. So its only now, two albums and two EPs into their career, that they are hitting British shores […]
De Wolfe Music Library 1968 was the year that British horror films began to turn away from the cosy gothic perennials of Dracula and Frankenstein and move into the unknown territory of heathenism and the darkness of the English woodland. These new tales of secret rites and pagan communities had to have a very distinct filmic language of their own. Here nudity and extreme sadistic violence would take […]
Ex Cathedra / Words+Dreams …so there’s a thing with a lot of musical vaguely designated as ‘classical’ where the descriptions don’t per se tell you a great deal. ‘Pounding kraut vibes’ tells you most of what you need to know about a record but “ a palindromic movement structure, the quartet moves through a cycle of compositional styles from diatonic tonal material, to atonal, lyrical writing, to twelve-tone, […]
Ektro (CD)/SIGE (vinyl) Enharmonic Intervals (for Paschen Organ) emanates rousingly from that sharply-scrawled nonplace where Magma meets Khanate, where touches of doomy martial pomp worthy of Coil at their most mordantly impressive march alongside the scuttling electrical signals of cables jumbling in decay and the dusty, keening grandeur of Dead Can Dance. In reality, while the hints and ghosts are there, this record sounds like itself far more […]
Raster-Noton Ryoji Ikeda is perhaps best known for his mastery of the ultra-minimal, for harnessing digital drones, glimmers and glitches to make unfolding sounds take seemingly apparent form in glacial patterns of space-filling lightness, of sounds so subtle as to only be noticeable when they have gone. When placed in the context of installations as found in galleries worldwide (his contribution of pure sine waves combined with stark […]
LM Duplication This music is presented to the world via the extremely productive LM Duplication label, the LM standing for ‘Living Music’, which couldn’t be a more appropriate association for the music recorded here. Life is full of grit and dirt, no matter how much we in the west try and get away from and sanitise it. Some of this mess is captured on the album with tracks […]
Enraptured The future could be what it used to be. Are you disappointed in the lack of flying cars and chrome cities? Disappointed in the lack of robot maids? Miffed at the persistence of pesky inconveniences like war and famine? Retro-futurism is the idea of the future in the past, most typically illustrated in the Atomic Age ’50s utopianism of Disney’s Tomorrowland. As real life continued to be […]
Front & Follow Before I knew anything about them (I still don’t know much about them), I heard The Doomed Bird Of Providence (on the excellent Collision/Detection compilation of EPs) and assumed they were Eastern European Death Marchers. They seemed a little like the mini-tradition clustered around A Hawk and a Hacksaw with, perhaps, a sideswipe of Dirty Three (yes, I know how utterly dismissive that sounds); seesawing violins, […]
Avalanche As I write this, Lou Reed is freshly dead and the streets are littered with fallen branches from a storm widely tipped before its appearance to herald the Apocalypse. (Spoiler – it didn’t). What is called for is something elemental, something riddled with loss and sorrow, but also something that fucking kicks ass. What is called for, essentially, is Everyday I Get Closer To The Light From […]
23five This is like being trapped in the bubbling workings of a psychotic mind, reason lost in a fevered turmoil of carrion flies waltzing with the concrete scrape of the speakers. Feels like your head’s being invaded (especially on headphones) – neurons, a rutted dirt track between left and right hemispheres, full of scythed MRI slices and quaking vellum, scuttling insects and the odd snorting beast. Disembodied electro-acoustics […]