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 […]
London 16 June 2011 Returning to the London stage after testing the waters at Hellfest, Roadburn and the redoubtable Supersonic festivals (the latter of course taking place on their home ground in Birmingham), GC Green and Justin Broadrick make an admirable choice to not overdo their stage dressing at The Forum tonight. One modestly-large amp stack each, and a screen for projections, plus some smoke. Actually, a lot […]
Meltdown The Queen Elizabeth Hall, London 17 June 2011 A soaking rain in London tonight makes it thinkable to skip out on a trip to the South Bank Centre and opt for home movies instead. In New Orleans it can rain much harder and you’d never think of staying home when there’s good music to be heard, so I try to take on that spirit and trudge on. […]
Tin Angel I love Little Annie’s voice. It’s a time-stretched instrument; a voice wracked with melancholy, a voice you’ll find singing alone in a bomb-blasted, ex-colonial hotel at the outer edges of the Empire. The press release puts her way down in the mix, as if she’s on there in the same way she was on Coil’s Love’s Secret Domain, but this is misleading. This album isn’t hers […]
The Lexington, London 22 June 2011 What can be said about The Cesarians that hasn’t already been described, outlined, put into the public sphere? That Charlie Finke is one of the great cavorting besuited frontmen of the century? That Justine Armatage arranges tunes to set the heart pounding and the pulses racing while being cool and intellectual too? That the ever-evolving band can multitask like no-one’s business, swapping […]
GEO Gagarin’s sole member Graham ‘Dids’ Dowdall, has played with various cult and avant-garde and electronic musicians over the years including Nico, John Cale and Suns of Arqa. This polymath of musical activity may go some way to explaining the patch-bay electronica of Biophilia as it majestically slides through 11 tracks of uneasy ambience. At times it’s hardened-edge electronics seems to have more in common with Ben Frost’s […]
Neurot The Valley Path is a spiralling one track mini-album that last just under 40 minutes (that would have been a full length album in the old vinyl days). The track opens with doom laden three note riff with sad sounding vocals that put it more in the vein of Boris and Om as it sludges its way to a wonderful psychedelic guitar solo that sonically uplifts the […]
Riot Season I’m in a marquee, somewhere in the midst of pre-Empire, pre fucking ‘Glasto’ Glastonbury. An odd hour. Somewhere just behind me, people are bartering over the price of admission to the Healing Pyramid: “Nah, mate; three quid each.” “Each? But it’s the same energy, isn’t it?” “If only it were, my son, if only it were (shakes head sadly)… you should see what the Orgone Accumulator […]
Klangbad In The Brain of Moebius, Moebius – his mind now encased in a hairy Frankenstein-style monster body – responded to taunts from Conrad Schnitzler, and the two Kraut Lords battled it out in a mind-bending contest which saw Moebius eventually chased out onto the mountains, plummeting over the cliffs to his doom… Now I admit I could have that wrong. It’s possible that 1971 in fact saw Schnitzler […]
Constellation Bruce Cawdron (Godspeed You! Black Emperor) and Becki Foon’s (Thee Silver Mt. Zion) latest release as Esmerine (now expanded to a quartet, with harpist Sarah Page and percussionist Andrew Barr) is dedicated to Lhasa de Sela, the Montréal-based singer-songwriter who succumbed to breast cancer in 2010. I know nothing about Lhasa, but I’m guessing this is a fitting and heartfelt tribute. The tones are uniformly elegiac and […]