Sonic Youth Recordings I can still remember the electric thrill that jolted through me on first seeing the picture of Sonic Youth on the rear cover of Bad Moon Rising: clustered around that Ed Gein Halloween scarecrow, under a bruised mid-Western sky, the look of sneering distain on Thurston Moore’s face beneath his thatch of blond hair, awkward yet threatening in his combat jacket. The feeling was crystallised […]
Southern Lord It’s four years since God Luck and Good Speed came out and in those four years I have probably played it as much if not more than any other sludge album or any album for that matter with the possible exception of Harvey Milk.When I heard that Weedeater were releasing a new album I was excited, and unwisely and contrary to my usual cynical disposition believed […]
Northern-Spy At the risk of prematurely blowing my journalistic load, this is a great record. And that’s the bottom line for any review really. It’s not, perhaps, a record that fits with Rhy Chatham’s reputation for Glenn Branca-baiting massed guitar works. Outdoor Spell is nothing like 2005’s Crimson Grail, at least in terms of instruments – trumpets, vocals, percussion for this record, rather than his better-known battery of […]
Drag City It’s easy to forget how dismal the nation felt when the early High Llamas albums appeared. Like an unwanted, puke-spattered drunk still hanging around at the morning-after clear-up of a party, the fag end of the (last) Tory government had clung on for years after Thatcher was driven away from Downing Street for the last time with tears in her eyes. It was an exhausted, morally […]
Architects of Harmonic Rooms and Records There’s something tantalisingly unreal about these direct to DAT solo twelve-string guitar compositions, recorded between 2000 and 2006. Capturing almost exclusively the twang, scrape and buzz of the strings, the instrument sounds almost disembodied, a shimmering, glistening, glassy surface with barely any hint of the guitar’s resonating chamber, let alone any sense of the environment in which it was played. . Steffan […]
Mute Woman when I’ve raised hell, there won’t be a star left untouched in your sky When my lighting crashes across that night No shadows of doubt or of turnin’ in that questioning little mind Just a burnin’ rekindled truth and one single agonizin’ blinding white light The greatest protest songs contain a moment when the political becomes personal; the greatest spiritual songs relate the personal to the […]
Crammed Discs To borrow the imprecation that Debbie Harry once sang so passionately in 1978, “Picture this.” However, rather than a sky full of thunder, or for that matter Debs’ telephone number (wistful sigh…), try instead . For a finishing touch, decorate the neck and body of this Heath Robinson musical contraption with band names (in the manner of a rock band’s kick drum), slogans and even designs […]
Smalltown Supersound Top Auto road tests the latest model to roll off the production line at Helsinki’s Bleep Factory. First Impression Wow, this little baby can really move. Finland’s K-X-P have put together their first effort, and the time and effort pay off in no uncertain terms. Motoring along at speed, the K-X-P feels solid and stylish. The Finnish design team have certainly gone to town in the […]
Karl/Aagoo/Nonclassical Classical music, for some, is burdened with various odd stigmas – that it’s somehow posh, academic or too expensive to watch live. In my experience none of these are true – I have the stub of an £8 ticket for a five hour Messiaen opera attended by a musically self-taught scumbag (myself) that will attest to that. And, as purse-strings constrict further day-by-day, the classical music world […]
Esoteric Six years after their surprise reunion, it still seems unreal to be listening to a new Van der Graaf Generator record. Stranger still, lowering the stylus onto A Grounding in Numbers instills the same rush of anticipation as when I ran round to David Hilton’s house back in April 1976 with the newly released Still Life because he had the nearest available record player to County Records. […]
Dekorder Alexander Rishaug is a sound artist, producer and musician from Oslo, Norway, and one of the original members of the improv-collective ARM with Are Mokkelbost and Arne Borgan. He has also collaborated with artists such as Lasse Marhaug, Ingar Zach, Martin Horntvedt, and remixed albums by Jazkamer and metal bands Ulver and She Said Destroy. A new release from the minimalist is a rare event, as this […]
Bureau B Hamburg’s Bureau B label are doing a great job of keeping the Kosmische blowtorch alight. Treating the legacy as a living heritage, they give equal precedence to lovingly presented reissues of lost classics and brand new releases by survivors of the scene and their spiritual offspring. Alongside brand new albums by [post=”faust-something-dirty” text=”Faust”] and [post=”kreidler-tank” text=”Kreidler”], they have just unearthed a whole batch of Cluster related […]
Aurora Borealis 12th February 1923, Cefalù, Sicily – Evening. Aleister – God I hate Mondays, they’re so dreary. Aud, why don’t you put something on the gramophone? Surely you must have brought some of the latest sounds with you from London? Raoul – Yes, great master, I have with me a choice selection of discs. What can I tempt you with? Some Coil? Horse […]
The Borderline London 25 February 2011 “We are the survivors, the eternal survivors……” This phrase may have crossed Nik Turner and the rest of his Space Ritual cohorts minds at some points over the years. But here they are still playing some of the best darn space rock this side of the Andromeda galaxy. Before I start reviewing the tracks played I must make a special mention about […]
Play Loud! Although this DVD was released in late 2010, the footage — shot at the second annual festival held in Scheer, southern Germany — dates from 2005. Scheer is a small provincial town that since the late 90s has been the headquarters of Faust (or rather one of the two Faust factions, this being the one grouped around keyboardist Jochen Irmler and the Klangbad label). There are […]
Dekorder Branching out into conceptual composition with Ensemble Intégrales, Felix Kubin acted as a sort of central engineer/conductor for this piece, with each instrument recorded live with no overdubs in separate rooms at the Westwerk cultural centre in Hamburg under Kubin’s supervision, and the results edited by him down into the resulting album. As a result, each room sound is almost as important as the tones recorded for […]
Enraptured The most obvious thing to say about Autopia in the first instance is that Eat Lights, Become Lights are unafraid of putting their influences to the fore, wearing them proudly as signposts to a whole series of strands of underground music across the decades, and as with their live shows, their début album takes the hints and explicit quotations and rebuilds them as a thoroughly enveloping gestalt […]
Mantile The packaging aesthetic of London-via-Nottingham based Johnny Scarr’s Mantile label suits Spoils & Relics to a tee; recycled card with grainy, degraded and indeterminate images of dubious provenance; hand-stamped titles evoking a production-line gone askew; and each release on cassette, that medium so beloved of bloody-minded advocates of the warmth, tactile enjoyment and inconvenience of the near obsolete format. And you can’t get much more tactile than […]