Label: Locus Solus Format: CD Charles Hayward‘s unique observations on the grimness and greatness of human existence are usually slightly off to one side of the general flow of music and song, and Abracadabra Information is decidedly at a tangent to, but entirely redolent of the pains and pleasures of 21st Century living. Flickering on, flourescent tube style, with “Toytown” and it’s straight in to an entropic hymn […]
Label: Mute Format: CD Mute have reissued Einstürzende Neubauten‘s 1993 album Tabula Rasa along with the singles that were released at the time. These include the French, Japanese, and English versions of “Blume”. Anita Lane provides the vocals on the English version. Its a smart album full of lyrical games and riddles. Up there as a personal favourite, along with Haus Der Luge, Tabula Rasa is a turning point […]
London 16 May 2004 Twenty-three years, man. Twenty-three (of course) years since (when I was way too small to appreciate this shit) the colossal monster of sound known as Throbbing Gristle last stomped its way through a live venue. The mission was terminated? Or was it? Cut to NOW.
London 11 May 2004 Since leaving Thee Headcoatees, Holly Golightly has been carving her own idiosyncratic niche in Garage Blues, lo-fi R&B in a retro Punk vein. Eschewing the vagaries of digital technology for the immediacy of vintage Vox amplifiers, Hofner guitars and a voice turned to honkytonk leather by bourbon and bar room smoke. Bearing all this in mind it is perhaps surprising to find Holly playing […]
Label: The Grey Area of Mute Format: 2CD Ah, Industrial music before the word Industrial became synonymous with Heavy Metal! Earlier/Later is the second album of Richard H Kirk‘s archive tracks from The Grey Area of Mute, the first being Digital lifeforms Redux in his Sandoz guise. As with that album’s second disc, this compilation contains previously unreleased material, including a cover of Can‘s “I Want More” which […]
Label: The Grey Area of Mute Format: 2CD Digital Lifeforms Redux is a reissue of work originally available on Touch from Richard H Kirk, the electronic half of Cabaret Voltaire. Unlike the Early/Later compilation simultaneously released by The Grey Area, this album represents a specific moment in time: the years 92-93. It is less representative of his work in Cabaret Voltaire, not that an Richard H Kirk album […]
The Astoria, London 18 April 2004 First up, Pink Grease. I’ve been holding off on reviewing these buggers until I could manage the supreme effort of will that is not being so drunk while watching them that I couldn’t tell whether they were wonderful, or really shit. Happily, I can tell you it’s the former, although they are very, very silly indeed. They look fantastic, like they’re out […]
Label: Staubgold/Klangbad format: CD It would be difficult to predict the outcome of a collaboration between two such disparate musical outfits as these. I mean Hip-Hop and Krautrock, or whatever category Faust‘s music falls into these days, don’t suggest themselves immediately as likely partners. Or perhaps that’s just my perception. Whatever preconceptions I may have had the resultant recording has blown them away, this really is a natural […]
The Garage, London 9 April 2004 It’s good to know Thrash is alive and well and kicking up a stir, and tonight The Garage is graced with a queue down the street and eventually with a venue full of The Kids, Heavy Metal or otherwise, almost visibly churning with excitement at the prospect of a night of speedy percussion and throaty vocals. Ephel Duath provide more of the […]
The Forum, London 3 April 2004 If one thing in life is true, it that people get older, bands get mellower – the noise and sound and fury of an Industrial youth flows into a neatly-tailored sartorial elegance and a penchant for slower numbers. Or so it is with Einstürzende Neubauten; perhaps it was always there, as such things happen with people as with music. A friend recently […]
Label: FatCat Format: CD Creature Comforts is a drifting album of instruments and electronics, where rhythm and tune merge and mutate into one another. New sounds growing out of old ones. An epic psychedelic jam at points like listening alien conversation, or elsewhere like a chorus of demented narcotic Hawaiian guitars. Citing contemporaries such as Sonic Youth does little to define Creature Comforts. It at once sounds very […]
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 […]