Klangbad Klangbad are having a busy month, treating us to two almost simultaneous releases by intriguing quartets. Bob Rutman’s Steel Cello Ensemble is reviewed elsewhere, and here we have Spielwiese Zwei, the first release by B.I.L.L. This group brings together two of the most respected instrumentalists of the original krautrock era, Can’s Jaki Liebezeit and Faust’s Hans-Joachim Irmler, alongside their spiritual heir Robert Lippok of To Rococo Rot […]
Mute One of the hardest-working sidemen of the past three decades, Mick Harvey contributed enormously to the artistic success of both Nick Cave and PJ Harvey as well as the more low profile careers of Crime and the City Solution and Anita Lane. He seems able to turn his hand to just about any instrument, has a finely honed ear for arrangement and apparently even handled The Bad […]
ConSouling Sounds Rippling with softly-struck piano strings echoing through a slow accretion of sonorous drone fragments, the opening minutes of Lost in the Rat Maze finds Aidan Baker stepping briefly into the brightly-lit fresh air from the more weather-beaten fuzz and feedback soundscapes of Nadja and some of his other solo releases. Which is not to say that he has abandoned all things gritty and texturally-touched by the […]
Gnostic Dirt Even in this age of Tunng, Espers and countless assorted other groovy out-there New Folk outfits who are busy fusing ancient melodies and instrumentation with samples, beats and all the trappings of hip urban coolness as fast as their little hands can programme, for most people the word ‘Folk’ still brings to mind images of worthy acoustic sing-a-longs, beards and real ale as relentlessly as driving […]
Koko London 15 May 2011 Loved the minimal post rock vibes of the opening act Radian – that 23 Skidoo ethnicity and those broken This Heat narratives were riddled with an exciting unpredictability, each track, a scattered jigsaw filled with unusual colours and textures, oozing a restrained intent that was really impressive. Bruce Gilbert and Pan Sonic‘s Mika Vainio were next on the bill. Introducing themselves in a […]
Broken Horse Peaches and cream, assault and battery, Damon and Naomi…some things are just made to go together… With the unbelievable proliferation of ‘Americana’ over the past dozen or so years (just check out the bulging racks in Rough Trade), it’s hard to remember a time before such market segmentation set in so ferociously, when acts such as Giant Sand, Galaxie 500 and The Palace Brothers wafted in […]
130701 Prepared piano always struck me as one of those ideas that shouldn’t really have stopped dead with John Cage‘s nearly-pensionable pieces. I’m no scholar of modern piano, but I’ve not heard many people having a tinker about with the inners of a piano. A real shame, as I quite like the idea of some flat-capped old fella lugging the upright into his shed to make gamelan sounds […]
Susan Lawly/Very Friendly THIS REVIEW IS UNSUITABLE FOR THOSE NOT OF AN ADULT PERSUASION OR LACKING A SENSE OF HUMOUR She fumbled with the lock, scratching at it unsteadily with her key. Her head was swimming slightly from the drink, and she could feel his hot breath on the back of her neck, urgent, lustful, and bestial. Finally the key engaged and turned, and the door swung open […]
Important (CD) / Agitated (vinyl) Once upon a time, a long time ago (but not long in the annals of Britain’s space rock godfathers), a bunch of dishevelled reprobates, part time musicians and full-time dopeheads used to play around with Hawkwind songs, frequently changing the words of “Psychedelic Warlords” to “My name’s Dave/And I’m a good bloke/Got a wife and kids/But I still like a smoke” in a […]
Esoteric Armaggedon (sic) have an interesting place in the fecund story of German music in the late Sixties and early Seventies. as guitarist Frank Diez tells it in the sleeve notes for this re-release, he was recruited over the phone and flown from Berlin to Munich to record the album over the space of six days with a bunch of musicians he’d never met before for the small […]
Southern Lord It’s somewhat startling to realise that more time has now elapsed since the release of Winter’s seminal doom metal masterpiece Into Darkness – twenty one years – than had passed since the release of Black Sabbath when Into Darkness first appeared. For a genre as oft derided, sneered at and generally treated with contempt by the mainstream of ‘serious’ musicians, forty years is a pretty fucking […]
Dingwall’s, London 27 April 2011 Though this gig is billed occasionally as a [post=”wovenhand-ten-stones” text=”Woven Hand”] performance, it’s decidedly David Eugene Edwards‘ show from the moment he steps onstage to a rapturous welcome. Accompanied by Woven Hand man Jeff Linsenmeir on various forms of percussion and keyboard, Edwards dispenses with onstage banter, instead launching into a set which covers his back catalogue including a goodly selection of 16 […]
Ankst Klaus Kinski is a scary man. As scary as Herzog. And also a vampire. I think. (That one was a documentary, right? RIGHT?) You know that guy, right? Opera house in the jungle? Crazy Conquistador dude? Not him. THIS Klaus Kinski is an equally scary proposition, but in a very different way. This Klaus Kinski is a band, only they’re more like a handful of rotting horse […]
Beta-Lactam Ring Swooping up from the depths of infrasound, Tecumseh bring a faint whiff of glitch and a hint of industrial shiver to the emergent doom on Return to Everything, and the electronics thicken into string-driven rumbling among the encroaching wall of full-spectrum FX. The metal starts to kicking properly as the second track (or movement might be more correct) “Apophis”fills the all-pervading drone with . There is no […]
Parallax Sounds Brian Ellis is the guitar player with the band Astra, whose album The Weirding was one of the best of a batch of progressive rock revival albums released last year. It swept majestically over musical fields covered by Yes, early Genesis and King Crimson. On what appears to be his sixth solo release, Quipu, Ellis touches upon and expands on all these elements to make an […]
Sub Pop There’s always a tension going on between artists and their audiences growing up. Back when we first encountered Low they were playing deliberately quietly, persistently black and white. . In a few years we all stopped being so bloody miserable; us, them, everyone. Although God knows there was plenty to be miserable about. Some people went off and had kids. We thought that was the last […]
Nascente Zion Train began around 1988 and was one of the late John Peel’s favourite live bands. Their music was an essential soundtrack to the free festivals and (new age) traveller scene of the early 90s, their heavy dub sound influencing bands like Back to the Planet to add dub flavours into their songs and inventing a whole new sub-genre of ambient dance music. These guys are important, […]
Modisti In 1961, Harold Pinter was in Paris, attending rehearsals for the French production of his play The Caretaker. Pinter’s critical reputation was starting to gain serious traction at this time, and the literary establishment were beginning to write about him as the natural successor to Samuel Beckett in the same way that they had once referred to Beckett himself as the successor to James Joyce. The play’s […]