London 21 September 2013 It is a mild, early autumn Saturday night and Upper Street is the very picture of modern urban revelry. Outside the doorways of fashionable bars and clubs, the pavements are clotted with thick knots of drinkers and smokers, the ‘dun-tsch, dun-tsch, dun-tsch’ beat of anonymous dance music bleeding out from their dimly-lit interiors into the warm evening air. There is scarcely a free chair […]
London 18 September 2013 Zombie Zombie is an enigma. They are neither straight ahead progressive rock like near-namesake Zombi, nor either are they jazz or even space disco, but somehow an odd amalgamation of all three. Yes, they are a synth- and percussion-based band, but there is so much more in there. This was reflected in the audience that turned up tonight; there were prog rockers, synth nerds, […]
Dekorder On The Falling Rocket, sound sculptor Stephan Mathieu weaves a deft tapestry of astral drones, using a rather rudimentary array of Farfisa organ, mechanical gramophone and radio waves, all punched into a MAX/MSP patch and slurred up nicely. . So what is a drone? In music, it is a note or tone sustained continuously throughout a piece, and drone music is a minimalist musical style that emphasizes […]
Disco Gecko The moon is a strange mistress. She is the one object in the universe that controls more of what happens here on Earth than any other celestial body. She controls the tides on our planet and has been worshipped by many in the past and even still today. The remix of Toby Marks’ last album sings hymns to the lunar where the original album joyously chanted […]
London 14 September 2013 Loving this place, that subterranean cellar-like vibe; cobbles, cast iron pillars, oozes a Dickensian charm that no doubt Messers. Thrower and Knight approve of. On arrival, their musical wares are already set up on three tables, a tidy synth and keyboard sandwich a percussive jumble filling, the screen . There’s a long pre-show wait, having cut through London at a surprisingly swift pace. We […]
Normal Cookie A brushstroke painting of a cherry blossom landscape/ dance floor abandon = = > “i need a christmas tree” Will Long and Rie Mitsutake create a slice-of-life synth folk sound collage on their own label, Normal Cookie. With Oh, Yoko the pair were interested in exploring the openness of creativity in captured moments of a simple home and city life. Towards this goal, Long and Mitsutake […]
Touch If you have ever scanned the technical credits of television programmes as they glide slowly past in the wake of the action, chances are you will have seen the names of either Ken Morse or Chris Watson, or both. Morse is sometimes reckoned to be the most credited cameraman in history, so often have his rostrum camera skills contributed to the jewels that fall from the small […]
G-Wave/Cleopatra (North America) After reviewing the Hinotori single earlier this year I’ve been looking forward to the album release as the tracks on the EP blew me away. So it was with trepidation that I placed the CD into the player and pressed play. I certainly didn’t expect to be instantly transported to another galaxy. The album begins with an extended version of “Hinotori,” and from the opening […]
Sireena Surround Sound Evolution finds Mythos making music the size of planetariums, and this is an album filled with massive synths that take you on a tour of the universe. Following on from 2008’s Surround Sound Offensive, opening track “Surround Sound Passion” builds its layers of synths into a strong melody as electronic glitches add percussion beneath. The track feels like the opening titles of a sci-fi movie and […]
Spectrum Spools Unicorn Hard-On is a solo project of one Valerie Martino. She’s a great rhythm chaser, tugging those dry arithmetical presets in a piranha splattered synapse of pulsing inputs. Now, I’ve got to admit, I’m not the greatest dance music devotee, but Weird Universe is certainly throwing enough solid hooks and neon-splashed chameleons to satisfy my curiosity.
Roseland Theater Portland, Oregon 6 September 2013 The double-billing of noise guitar legends Gate, the solo project of Michael Morley of The Dead C, and the newly rejuvenated Godspeed You! Black Emperor on a Friday night at one of the United States’ largest music festivals was an act of bold and challenging programming that should further Musicfest NW‘s reputation not only as a world class music festival, but […]
Thrones & Dominions tl;dr – the sort of prog album that’ll tickle prog-fanciers silly, and the sort of album that . ANTA, née Snakes on a Plane, which I’m sure they’ll appreciate being reminded of. Second album, but they’re all been around Bristol and Bath for something like a thousand years in something like a million bands, many of which were brilliant but under-recognised (Loxondonta anyone? Thought not) I’m […]
Exotic Pylon/Zoharum These are separated by time and space (never separable, never suited) but are nevertheless kin – in Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color they would be pigs and people, skin-bonded, worm-tailed, consciousness-sharing. I guess they are both broadly branches of that jagged, never truly existing, tree called ‘dark ambient’ (a tree that confounds at every twist, that seemingly can’t die because it has roots in the infinite itself) […]
London 5 September 2013 In the lead up to the first London gig in thirteen years from Manuel Göttsching we have been treated to a certain amount of media nonsense situating him as a godfather of minimal techno.
Bureau B What an arresting cover, that alabaster face seemingly levitating, framed in a burn of auburn hair. I’m convinced that’s a gender messing Thomas Dinger caked in ghostly Clouzot cosmetics. The macabre blue of the lips, and the wing-like Bowie-isms of those scry-worthy eyes throwing everything forward whilst the background simultaneously envelops, giving over an eerie undulating quality to the stillness. Like a Buñuel freeze-frame, eternally tittering […]
Metropolis It’s hard to write about The Legendary Pink Dots. It’s hard on one level because they make music which tends to bypass the analytical centres of the brain and go straight for the bits that experience stuff. It’s hard in the same way that describing your dreams is hard, or trying to build a model of St Paul’s Cathedral from soup. But I’ll give it a shot, […]
Dublin 15 August 2013 There is a story. “It’s all made of stories, you know”. There is a story that back in 1980 David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) read an article in the music press about a band from England who were rewriting all the rules, who had discovered the new sound. Impressed by what he read, and based on the description of the music not the […]
Rural Isolation Project Quttinirpaaq‘s Matt Turner is condcucting a seance to summon the ’70s in a cement dirigible hangar. Coming from a long line of damaged Texan noise-punks like Roky Erickson, The Butthole Surfers and Pain Teens, Quttinirpaaq uses bad acid and bad horror movies as a gateway to a Dhalgren-limbo paradise, where Mario Bava‘s Demons dance the night away next to burning cars while Wolf Eyes and […]