Liverpool Philharmonic Hall 27 March 2004 Described as a ‘brilliantly conceived concert’ by The New York Times this promised an evening of aural and visual assaults from across a century. It almost seemed too much to squeeze into one performance but, with the exception of the interval, all video/visual material ran concurrent with the music. Any revisiting of music which has been considered outside the mainstream by audiences […]
London 24 March 2004 A bit like starting a notebook backwards, I rush in after taking a stupidly slow and expensive cab ride, barely in time to see the last beautiful few moments of Rothko. Theirs is a sound I can recognize from way down the stairs as I run up and through the doors. Frances Morgan‘s violin is good and loud tonight, like passioned crying — just […]
Label: 130701 Format: CD Richter’s work follows the releases by Set Fire To Flames and Sylvian Chauveau on FatCat’s 130701 imprint. In addition to the carefully wrought instrumental arrangements, he has chosen to use words sparsely. The work of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz is integrated, along with parts of Kafka’s text The Blue Octavo Notebooks, into the dreamlike landscapes he constructs. These words are read quietly and fairly unobtrusively […]
Label: 13th Moon Format: CD There is something at once comfortingly ordinary and outrageously Other about Alien Sex Fiend – the extraordinary seems such a part of the Fiends’ image that they wear it to the point of blending into the landscape of the musical landscape. Nik Fiend has always delivered his barbed couplets and blokish paranoia with the deadpan conviction of the geezer down the pub who […]
The Slimelight, London 1 November 2003 The Pressure Point, Brighton 2 November 2003 The Legendary Pink Dots return to their founders’ home country after an absence of a good few years is always a welcome event – that they then play two gigs in a mini-micro tour is an added bonus. First surprise is their appearance at uber-Goth Saturday mainstay club The Slimelight; second that they play the […]
9, 15, 17, 21 October 2003 The South Bank Centre, London The Mind Your Head festival for 2003 is subtitled “Exploring new meanings in sacred music”, though this seems more of a loose thread connecting the line-up together somewhat tenuously. However, the intriguing double bill which opens the series at The Queen Elizabeth Hall provides some food for thought on the issue, as do the series’ participants in […]
London 12 October 2003 Witnessing Laibach perform onstage is guaranteed to be a spectacular experience – not in the form of flaming scenery, explosives or even sheer brutalist noise, but because they put on a show. A proper show with much too much in common with a political rally for some tastes, but a theatrical event nonetheless, and one which grips their audience with an impassioned fervour. As […]
@ Kosmische Upstairs At The Garage, London 16 September 2003 A reasonably well-filled Upstairs At The Garage is in store for a sleazy night of lateral Rock and Roll tonight. Caesar Romero pull off several good sweaty tricks – they use keyboards and guitars like they were meant to be scuzzed up and with a hint of wah; their guitarist manages to wear a stetson onstage without looking […]
Label: Rehab Format: CD So. Imagine the guy from Electric Six has managed to spend all your money, pump you full of drugs and take you to a gay bar, gay bar, gay bar. And the first thing you hear is a pumping Electro version of the Stooges‘ “I Wanna Be Your Dog”. No, not Alec Empire‘s “Addicted To You“, which took the same riff and straped it […]
Label: Paw Tracks Format: CD,LP From the acid-drenched woodland scenes of the band members lurking in a mirror wilderness on the cover to the music itself, Here Comes The Indian screams and drones and scrawls with psychedelic brightness and insanity. The Animal Collective yell and chant, whip up frenzied percussive grooves from nothing then let them rip into splashes of unhinged harmonious melody – the lysergic force is […]
Label: Mute Format: 2CD Diamanda Galás has never been timid about exploring the darkness and horror of her chosen territories. She’s been doing it for some years and these latest recordings are no exception. Defixiones, Will and Testament is rooted in Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides carried out by Turkey between 1914 and 1923. To construct this exploration she has borrowed texts from a variety of sources as […]
Label: Bomb Mitte Format: 7″ The first Faust record I owned was on vinyl and now they have another release on the shiny black stuff. This time its a limited edition 7-inch collaboration with Dälek and is a taster of an album which will appear later this year. Collaborations appear to be part of the current Faust direction and it would seem to be a productive area to […]
The Spitz, London 5 June 2003 When the Acid Mothers Collective come to town, a few things are certain – extended improvisations, guest appearances (tonight’s honourable psychonaut is none other than Daevid Allen), antics and japes at the keyboards, and hair. Lots and lots of hair: not just on the heads of Makoto Kawabata and Higashi Hiroshi, what with the Camembert Electrique crowd out in force, some spectacular […]
Label: Soleilmoon Format: CD This is Nigel Ayers‘ twenty-fifth Nocturnal Emissions CD since 1979, and here he chooses to sample, loop and mutilate chunks of Indie guitar music and slam them up against the music of the Third World, old and new. The results are certainly funky, rolling on heavyweight grooves and beats with a deliberate Fourth World flavour, delving deep into the synthesis of Western Pop with […]
Midnight Sun : Sounds Of Norway Unity Theatre, Liverpool 27 May 2003 It was with some trepidation that I went to Liverpool to see the 21st century’s version of the “package tour”. I’d been told, by someone whose opinion I trust, that most of the evening had been crap when he saw it. In fact he was a bit more splenetic than that. Still you have to find […]
Label: Beta-lactam Ring Format: LP Opening with a gurgling faux-didj sheen which soon develops into a four-floored drumkit rhythm of the not-quite title track, She And Me Fall Together In Free Death finds Steven Stapleton expanding the consciousness of his Nurse With Wound project in further psychedelic directions.
Label: Beta-Lactam Ring Records Format: 2LP,CD As is only to be expected from someone who contributed so much to the classic Nineties Legendary Pink Dots guitar sound, Martijn de Kleer‘s So Close Yet So Far Out spreads out into psychedelic space as deep as the images from Hubble used on the cover art. Trippy is the word, and then some, though for the most part de Kleer shows […]
The Mean Fiddler, London 27 April 2003 I’ll be honest: I went for Peaches. Her 93ft East show last year was one of the most bacchanalian gig experiences I’ve had in recent years, a benevolent riot of loud, fired sexuality and abandon. But, truth be told, I’d really enjoyed the lyrical audacity / buffoonery of the few Gonzales tracks I’d heard. Someone summing themselves up as “a combination […]