Disco Activisto Like many, I came across Billie Ray Martin, other-styled “Queen of Electronic Soul”, via Electribe 101 and, especially, the Throbbing Gristle cover “Persuasion” with the smooth electrogliders Spooky. At the time, we needed a new Queen and Billie Ray Martin fitted the bill perfectly, investing a thick vibe of ether (not aether) into the boys in a bedroom techno scene. She stood, stately, aloof at the […]
Lo Alternative Frequencies Typical. A great summer album appears just after a dismal, wet August Bank Holiday weekend. Actually that’s not really fair. Whilst this year hasn’t exactly challenged 1976 for the ‘Golden Summer’ crown, nevertheless on Sunday afternoon we climbed into the car, slapped this onto the stereo and drove down the sun-dappled lanes of the Chiltern escarpment on the Oxfordshire Plain. Down the twisting, billiard table […]
Punch Drunk The title is revealing: throwaway and heartfelt, this is certainly intrusive (this is not ambient, except in the sense of enveloping) and it is a little incidental, a little sketchy in both senses of the word (cf everything else by Ekoplekz) but there’s more to it than that. There’s something else here. This is Ekoplekz unleashing his noise horde and the title might almost be read […]
Jowonio Productions (Below are combined the two original reviews of the vinyl and CDr releases of Hands/Birds and The Meat And Bread Variations which are both now available online digitally direct from Jowonio – references to the extra CD etc are now sadly redundant, and the releases have been modified slightly in the new format). Hands/Birds finds poet John Siddique in shifting moods, one moments or three drifting […]
Bureau B Some medical beast had revived tar-water in those days as a fine medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard; having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a choice restorative, that I was conscious of going about, smelling like a new fence.” Poor […]
Splendour This is music made from orchestral peak experiences and emotional aggregates; it’s big, a little brassy and, while perhaps not as overwhelming or pompous or Wagnerian as it might have been, it nevertheless has intent, like Laibach without moustaches and Lenin vests. Finnish quartet Siinai have created 21st Century marching music for non-psychick youths. You’ll have heard some of the guitar + synth textures before but rarely […]
Arka Sounds OK, so the thought of the world trance music wonders Suns of Arqa doing a cover versions album of Leonard Cohen songs didn’t at first leap off the page or even into my CD player at first. However, after the first initial shock of this venture the album works exceedingly well and creates . It would be pointless to compare the tracks to the original songs […]
Southern Lord It’s time someone finally said it; Ben Koller is quite possibly the Dave Lombardo of his generation. Now, Lombardo’s technicality may be outclassed by modern day metal standards, but what few drummers can match still is his propulsive feel. Koller is one of the special few. When he flies into an up-tempo 4/4 beat, you know it’s going down. And he absolutely tears it up on […]
Sargent House Well, what can I say…..I was going to start off this review with the same two words used to review Spinal Tap’s Shark Sandwich album…..You see I’ve been a Boris fan and collector for quite a few years, this at times has been quite a hard and infuriating task. They have either constantly recorded two mixes of their albums or added one track on to an […]
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 […]