Important Most bands when releasing a collection of otherwise placeless split vinyl album tracks and remixes end up with a selection of shorter pieces compiled into what often ends up as some sort of a grab-bag of odds and ends. Not so with Nadja, who fit just four tracks on each CD of this two-disc set of recordings from 2007-08, and who also manage to make a coherent […]
Striate Cortex Striate Cortex seems to have gone, in just a few years, from another ‘yet another’ label putting out tiny editions of unheard of artists (or ‘no-audience underground’ as radiofreemidwich have it) to having a pretty heavy catalogue of exquisitely-packaged things. I can’t claim to be a completist but I’m seeing a lot of names on their discography of bands and people who are making great sounds […]
The Borderline, London 23 March 2012 The Deviants blasted out of the underground psychedelic scene in 1967. While Syd Barrett was taking the Pink Floyd into outer space and Jimi Hendrix was making his guitar wail to all the ‘foxy ladies,’ Mick Farren’s gang of urchins were singing the hymns of squat-land. With albums such as Ptoof!, Disposable and 3, the troubadours of Notting Hill sang proto-punk anthems […]
Thrill Jockey Let’s talk about SPACE, baby, let’s talk about you and me. As Salt’n’Pepa didn’t actually sing, but should have done. Let’s talk about all the BIG things and the LOUD things. Yeah. And like that. Space is many things to many people. To Lovecraft, for example, it was a constant source of terror. But then, so were most things. Poor guy. To Douglas Adams, it was […]
Earache A-side – “You suffer…” FDR stands for full dynamic range. Remember that, I’ll come back to it in a minute. This is one of those records that I’ve had a million conversations about. Heavy crust/grind/metal/metalcore peeps will claim various things about it – it’s not the best/ it’s the best/ it’s not the first/ it’s the first/ Carcass did it better/it’s better with triggered drums/ it’s better […]
Mute Breath was bated at this, apparently, but not mine. I mostly dislike collaborations, even when I try to like them, even when I love the collaborators. Collaborations regress towards the mean, like motionless wrestling or mutual strangulations in the back of army trucks (a personal joke, one intended only for my future self to smirk about; sorry). I blame everyone: Mike Paradinas and Richard James as Mike […]
Terp It’s got text in Amharic on the sleeve! I assume! It’s about single length! It uses exclamation marks to describe itself, and this seems awesome! Because the music is awesome! … I remember when I first heard drum n’ bass, on Peel, sometime in the 90s. It was weird and scary and made me feel a little bit sexy when being sexy was a weird feeling but […]
Spezialmaterial From the opening drone and chiming guitar trills of “Lovelight,” it’s evident that Zurich’s Hard Coming Love are big, big fans of West Coast psych, Spacemen 3, and among others, of course, The United States of America, the second track of whose similarly self-titled album provided the band’s (slightly embarrassing) name. Where the former had drums and bass to pin down Jason Spaceman and Sonic Boom‘s interlocking internecine […]
Terp The Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love has made a fast and hard-hitting impact on many recordings in the national and international scene of free-jazz and improv these last years. Whether as a band member of [post=peter-brotzmann-live text=”Peter Brötzmann”]’s Chicago Tentet, the assembly of some of the leading musicians of today’s free-jazz, or in the powerful Hairy Bones also including the said German. Also worth mentioning are the remarkable […]
(Not on label) Buh…yeah. -rock suffixes are lame. But this is good. GOOD I tell you. Ole’ timey two guitars n’ drums-core. Possibly fans of that K Records fallout . Y’know, Sleater Kinney, Urusei Yatsura, that kind of thing. But instrumental. No vocals and no need. And it’s steeped in a lot of those dreadful and dreary tags that make you think of dogshit music students yet to realise […]
L-13 Recordings A split 10″ EP (and/or mini-album, perhaps – but anyway, its hand-stamped sleeve covers up a hefty chunk of vinyl, and the Gestetner-printed notes add an extra frisson of retro-cool to the packaging) from two of the ever-prolific Pete Bennett‘s bands is one of those things which only comes along once in a while. Sure, there are downloads (offered to buyers of this disc too, as […]
Thrill Jockey Well, you knew this was coming. Dorwytch hinted (OK, explained) that Alexander Tucker was moving closer and closer towards a kind of English pastoralism and now he’s got to Third Mouth, where the drones and buzzes move still further away from the longer forms of his early albums and head towards smaller, yet exquisitely designed, packages of psychedelic folk. This is like someone’s swallowed Rob Young’s […]
Public Information A little sliver of electronic gargling from the man of the moment, Ekoplekz. If you want to know which moment, you’ll perhaps have to remember that Dromilly Vale is Nick’s imaginary recording studio, a hybrid of King Tubby’s on Dromilly Ave, Kingston and the Radiophonic Workshop’s Maida Vale studio in London. This is 1973 re-imagined uchronically; maybe Dick Mills and Lee Perry did hang out, swapping […]
Fire Right yeah, so – Pulp. WHAT I REMEMBER of the time of Different Class is that there was a bit of a sense of them being very much a “ooh, follow your dreams, keep plugging away and eventually you’ll make it” thing, in terms of what the press were saying. Which was nice of them. As if to say ‘even if your entire output is utterly shite, […]
Leather Apron MELVYN BRAGG – Good morning. Today on In Our Time we’re going to be looking at the Steampunk era, a time which often seems to be shrouded in a fog- or possibly even a smog, ha ha, of mystery. With me today is Dr Deuteronemu 90210, emeritus professor of Musical Archaeology at the Institute of Awesome. Dr 90210, it wasn’t all that long ago. Why is […]
Important “You never seemed to be waiting for me, but we kept meeting at every turn of the paths, behind every bush, at the foot of each statue, near every pond. It is as if it had been only you and I in all that garden.” A man and a woman meet at a social gathering in a magnificent baroque chateau. He claims that they met the year […]
The Null Corporation/Mute Reznor and Ross may have seemed a weird choice to score The Social Network, essentially a movie about courtrooms and codings; almost as weird a choice as Fincher was to direct it. But that worked out OK, didn’t it? So it’s no surprise that when reunited with Fincher, but this time on a movie about sex, violence and serial killing, the result is one of […]
Café Oto, London 19 February 2012 71 years old, and with the gravitas of a Prussian general contemplating one final glorious attack on Paris, free jazz saxophone legend Peter Brötzmann swings into Old London Town for a two night stand at Dalston’s Café Oto, E8’s achingly hip home of improvisation, experimentation and general squealing and freeping of every sort. Only a short hop, skip and jump from The […]