(Hydrahead) For most of the twenty-eight years since Lustmord’s debut, the lot of a devotee has involved much twiddling of thumbs between infrequent releases and little chance of catching the man live – the portentous date of 06/06/06 seeing his first (and to date only) live appearance since the early eighties. Happily, in contrast to most creative trajectories, the old contrarian seems to have grown more prolific during […]
Imprint If John Peel were still with us today, he would undoubtedly love Monkey Island. Straddling the aesthetics of his own Dandelion label and his beloved Ron Johnson Records, this Hackney-based group may be the hitherto undiscovered (and indeed unsearched for) missing link between Stackwaddy and Stump. Opening instrumental “Back to the Stoneage” could be an out-take from Beefheart’s Mirror Man had The Magic Band been imbued with […]
Further Murmurations sees guitar noise dronemeister Urthona teaming up with London-based electronic boffin The Asterism to create some wonderful alchemy on two long pieces inspired by the natural world in the West Country. Although a CD release, Murmurations is conceived as a classic vinyl LP, with side one’s 24 minute “River Severn Bore” incarnating the relentless natural power of the said tidal current, layers of distorted guitar and […]
(Applebush/Easy Action) The collections of ‘rare’ T. Rex material to have appeared in the years since Marc Bolan’s death in 1977 by now dwarf the official output released during his lifetime. Although much of them are deeply inessential, and sometimes indeed unlistenable, carefully sifting through these volumes of out-takes and demos unearths some gems that actually surpass the official releases. The alternative versions of Electric Warrior and The […]
(Hometapes) Hailing from Copenhagen, Slaraffenland have made an album that seems quite out of time without sounding in the least bit dated. Their sound is at once infectious and fidgety – a restless pop music that harks back to the days when groups had too many ideas to stop and spend any time polishing any of them into blandness, moving on to the next song before the last […]
Viktor Wynd Fine Art, London 22 & 29 January 2010 Strange Attractor Journal, now in its third edition of writings promoting unpopular culture, has long been intertwined with the visual, musical and performing arts. For January 2010, the Strange Attractor machine has moved into exhibitionist mode, taking over the Last Tuesday Society‘s art space above their very curious basement shoppe of horrors on Mare Street in Hackney located […]
(Midwich) A folk group from Essex recording a concept album about the Lofoten Islands in Arctic Norway seems an intriguing though ultimately self-defeating idea. After all, isn’t the idea of folk music that it reflects the culture it comes from, rather than holiday snaps of exotic locations? Actually, it turns out that the two areas share a large amount of common folklore, dating back to Viking times, and […]
Pica Disk This release is the first in the Jazkamer 2010 Monthly Series. A card accompanying the CD states: “One new Jazkamer album on Pica Disk every month of 2010. One year of music and anti-music.” Perfomed by the two founders and regular members Lasse Marhaug and John Hegre, plus Jean-Philippe Gross, who also edited and mixed this CD very interestingly, Solitary Nail is one 30 minute track, […]
Koko, London 14 December 2009 The cavernous space of Koko, once known better in the days of music hall and indie rock dance club as the Camden Palace, turns out to be eminently suitable for hosting bands whose raison d’etre is shifting air pressure through the application of low end to the somewhat notoriously loud speakers of the PA. Koko may not exactly have the acoustics of a […]
Islington Mill, Salford 8 December 2009 Ever vampiric, the avant-guard periodically replenishes itself on fresh blood in pastures new. Jazz, psych, prog, industrial and Dance have all fallen prey during the past half century, and now it’s the turn of that seemingly most reactionary of genres, metal. The signs had been there as far back as the early 90s, with the Melvins, Sleep and Earth all forging new […]
Denovali Available on both heavyweight vinyl as a proper double-sided split LP and the more prosaic, though no less lovingly-packaged CD edition, this record serves partly as yet another waypoint on Nadja‘s seemingly unstoppable mission to collaborate with every possible combination of drone/doom-mongers across the known and occasionally unknown world. It also contains Kodiak‘s “MCCCXLIX The Rising End,” a piece which starts off in a slow accretion of […]
The Forum, London 17 December 2009 ‘Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the Forum, not a creature was stirring apart from that seething, thronging mass of goths, punks, crusties and beardy CAMRA-men that only New Model Army seem to be able to unite into one celebratory whole. And they’ve been doing it for a while now. Next year sees their thirtieth anniversary tour… this year makes […]
Thrill Jockey Trans Am‘s blend of rock/electro comes to the stage with live album What Day Is It Tonight? Many lesser bands wouldn’t be able to pull this kind of fusion off. Synthpop and hard driving rock are seemingly chalk and cheese. Lesser bands might have troubles, but this is what Trans Am do and they do it like fucking champs (and indeed sometimes alongside The Fucking Champs). […]
Fysisk Format There’s a lot to like about Necropsalms, Obliteration‘s second album, unless you don’t like doomy death metal that is. But, of course, everyone likes death metal. Obliteration hail from Kolbotn in Norway, that’s the home of Darkthrone amongst other bands. Their first album was released on Tyrant Syndicate, the sub-label of Peaceville run by Darkthrone’s Nocturno Culto. So you’d be forgiven for thinking Necropsalms was a […]
Thrill Jockey I wasn’t expecting Super Roots 10 to sound like this, which is what I have come to expect from the Boredoms and the Super Roots series. Super Roots 10 contains “Ant 10” and three remixes of it, and lives up to the impressive legacy Super Roots lays down. “Ant 10” itself continues the Boredoms’ recent love of tribal druming. Beginning with chanting, it then moves into […]
(Sinnbus) I Might Be Wrong come from Berlin and are, apparently, “supported by the Initiative Musik Non-profit Project Company Ltd. with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media on the basis of a resolution passed by the German Bundestag.” Splendid! – how can we resist an album boasting such venerable patronage? Naming your band after a song by your fave combo however, is rarely […]
uZu Music UnicaZürn was, apparently, a surrealist artist known for automatic drawing. I never knew that. Well, not until I just looked it up, anyway. The wonders of the internet. These days, at the touch of a button, you can learn all manner of things. You could, for example, go onto Freq and learn, from me, about the other UnicaZürn, whose début album, The Temporal Bends, I am […]
Cooking Vinyl / Recommended Records Pere Ubu evolved in a different universe to the rest of 70s rock. In mainstream history as we know and remember it, The Sex Pistols single-handedly swept aside years of proggishness, clearing a completely new path and establishing the new year-zero (OK, that’s a parodic exaggeration, but it isn’t far from what it felt like at the time). But in Ubu world, then […]