Tequila Sunrise / Cream of Turner These two LPs came to me with the coolest hand-made sleeves I’ve seen in ages. Beautiful, odd designs. The Sunlore sleeve is a psyched wig-out of paint and scratches and burns, looking not unlike one of the shotgun paintings of William S Burroughs smeared by Max Ernst (you can see it being made on the label website). The Heart Land sleeve is […]
Ipecac This is an odd record. The Book Of Knots is an invitation-only collective based in New York around a core quartet and supplemented by peripheral musicians in various capacities. On this, their third LP, they explore everything from enormous metallic pounding to expansive forays into the gentle and sublime. They also manage to dig up a few top-notch guests along the way. Opener “Microgravity” brings a female-fronted […]
Thrill Jockey Three young men sit in a small room. Around them lie discarded food cartons, an ancient black and white Telecaster, and several battered pairs of Converse All-Stars. The faces of the young men would normally be obscured by thick curtains of long hair, but on this occasion a fug of smoke hangs in lazy striations across the air, so dense and impenetrable that they can scarcely […]
Touch Field recording is, for me, one of those genres so fraught with problems I generally disregard it almost entirely. Natural environments have a worse habit for being sonically unruly than the average coked-up drummer. A friend reminded me of the rule of festivals recently: “remember it’s in a field.” Because . I always admire sound artists turning to the field recording – but getting a result that’s […]
Bureau B Picture the scene: . Enormous illuminated signs flicker, punctuating the darkness, their garish primary-colour glow reflecting off the chrome and glass surfaces of the skyscrapers and the rain-drenched pavements far below. The driver glides your Spinner™ hovercar slowly and smoothly through the air as you look out at the panoramic vista beneath you, the raindrops trickling down the Plexiglas window, each bead of water a tiny […]
Dekorder This is a work in progress about a work of progress. A split album in all senses. Side A is Debussy’s La Mer played on sawtoothed (maybe snaggletoothed) electronics. Keith Fullerton Whitman’s latest Buchla synth missive, “101105,” comes with health warnings embedded; a strobe in sound rather than light, sending the audience (this was recorded live) into dead spasms. There’s rumours that a good few of the […]
O2 Academy Islington, London 8 July 2011 Two very different Japanese interpretations of the idea of rock’n’roll descended upon The Angel Islington. Compare and contrast the constructions of rock’n’roll energy, of gtr-bs-dr dynamics between the leather-clad machismo of Guitar Wolf and Bo Ningen‘s more androgyne angle. Bo Ningen favour the Acid Mothers Hendrix approach, riffing and cavorting at an angle to the regular hard rock template at the […]
OIB This started so well. Opening track “Gobachi” lets orie(m)ental toy tunes sumo each other out of the ring, while some crazy sub-Venetian Snares drums roll. It’s and had me and the kids dancing our hair off. It’s silly and relentless (the cover has a guy – I’m guessing this is Pseudo Nippon himself – with a fried egg on his head) but then, well, it kind of […]
Outlier . The fact that they’re from Iceland (via Rome) won’t help here; they could be from anywhere but they especially don’t sound Icelandic. You know what I mean. I’m struggling because I kind of like this but it’s because I really loved Spacemen 3, bought every Jesus and Mary Chain single (okay, I got bored by Automatic, but I bought most of the singles that people still […]
Zeitkratzer Since 1999 Zeitkratzer have done a sterling job of carving a particular niche for themselves in the under-explored hinterland between academic/serious music and the less academically considered world of noise/ ‘other’. I first came across them on the formidable 2002 release Noise \ … [Lärm], where they interpreted pieces by Merzbow, Zbigniew Karkowski and Dror Feiler. It’s been nine years since then, and it’s still an absolute […]
Southern Lord Though the golden age of alpinism – small, rapid mountain ascents with no additional oxygen, and minimal supplies and personnel – might, technically, be taken as the decade or so between 1854 and 1865 – there is no story in its history more tragic, inspiring and gut-wrenching that of the doomed 1936 attempt on the North Face of the Eiger. A truly terrifying and deadly piece […]
Phantomcode The vinyl version of Cyclobe’s long-awaited follow up to 2001’s The Visitors sneaked out a few months back as a limited edition pressing, but 2011 sees the welcome wider release of a CD edition. The album has inevitably drawn comparisons with Coil; not only did Stephen Thrower and Ossian Brown themselves both serve time in the group, but guests on Wounded Galaxies Tap at the Window include […]
Dekorder Soundtrack albums are troubled beasts – the relationship between visuals and music can forever colour how we feel about the music. Who can hear “Summer Loving” without thinking of that scene in Grease? Interesting, then, that this record doesn’t have the direct film-soundtrack relationship – while it was designed to accompany a film by Christoph Schlingensief, it apparently mutated into something else, and the film failed to […]
Southern Lord Xibalba are unhappy. You have invaded their space and their response is twelve tracks of letting you know just how much this has aggrieved them. This is music for pissed off, heavy-set men in their late thirties. . They make bands of a similar ilk, such as Hatebreed (to pick a name entirely at random), look like pansies. Xibalba would not have a video that features […]
Southern Lord This album marks German three-piece Planks’ first CD release and brings together their two previous 12” records; last year’s The Darkest of Grays full-length and 2011’s Solicit To Fall EP. The two were recorded so close to each other that they join rather seamlessly into an epic hour of darkness and, occasionally, light. Planks cover so much ground it’s almost pointless trying to classify them. Yes […]
Further You know the quote, Arthur C. Clarke’s finest: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” You can only imagine how mind-blown people must have been when Conrad Schnitzler cranked up his machines way back in the early 70s but his influence has been written out of the major theses on the development of electronic music, perhaps because of his affiliation with the hair-synth of Tangerine Dream, […]
Meltdown Queen Elizabeth Hall, London 19 June 2011 “Please take your seats in the auditorium, as this evening’s performance is about to begin.” Sent scurrying into the Queen Elizabeth Hall by Sir Ian McKellen’s stentorian tones, we bury ourselves deep into the QEH’s welcoming black leather seats just as the lights goes down. I bolt down half a glass of the overpriced pseudo-Coke sold to me minutes earlier, […]
Further The latest album from Neil Mortimer is pretty ambitious. It’s a single track ‘concerned with cyclic patterns in nature while charting the movement of a weather system across southwest England’. Make of that what you will, but through the combination of guitars, synths, drums and field recordings he’s managed to get pretty close to his subject matter. Drums represent thunder and cymbals lightning. . And why stop […]