Label: Mute Format: 2CD “Still with Mute Records, the sadly neglected Fad Gadget looks like he could give The Human League a run for their money in the smart electronic pop stakes. His third excellent single in a row previews two tracks for his forthcoming album and features more of his clever, black humour lyrics and nifty tunes. “Fireside Favourites” pointedly combines the home fire, the atom bomb […]
Grönland/EMI Electrola/Astralwerks NEU! Guitar arches out like twilit sunshadows and the omnipresent beat is there, new dawn, new dawn. Synthesizer languidly moves backwards and forth, the Sunday eveningmorning that holds in rapt attention at the creation of something new. Six crepuscular tracks? Wcka wcka wcka. Wow wow wow. And so on. Then on to the swelling and pitching of the flanged cymbals, split side by side, side-to-side, riding […]
Label: Expanding Format: 7″ Abfahrt Hinwil‘s contribution to the Expanding Records EVS Series clicks and wheezes to life with “Links Oben”, built around a distracted melody constructed from synthetic bells. The undercurrents gurgle, fizz and whirr with biomechanical trills, keeping the electronica sweetly chilled. “The Light” starts off langorously swirled, rotating on a synthetic textural axis while deep down a bass tone generates vibrations. A gradual insertion of […]
Label: Mute Format: 2CD Okay, so it may be the wrong time, given recent events, for a band whose name translates as “Collapsing New Buildings” to release an album called Strategies Against Architecture III, but, heedless of a Stockhausen-style backlash, those wonderfully inventive German sonic terrorists (again, perhaps not a good analogy, but what the fuck) Einstürzende Neubauten are at it again, this time with a double CD […]
Label: Thrill Jockey Format: CD,LP Welcome to the end of the world. With civilization on the brink of destruction, and all those Biblical prophecies starting to look not quite so funny, the inimitable Bobby Conn bounds back onto the scene, perversely enough eschewing the eschatological apocalypses of Rise Up! and giving us an album of (among many other things), good time sleazy RAWK’n’RAWL!!! Yeah! Coming on like a […]
London 12 October 2001 Given that this appearance by Faust marks both their 100th live performance since the group’s reformation in 1993 and possibly their final show, it’s somehow appropriate that the emergency services soon became involved once again.
Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool 11 October 2001 Whatever combinations of players you find Keith Tippett in there is always an element of the spiritual, in a broad sense, in his playing. He says he plays to ‘move people’ and ‘remove them from chronological time’ and often that’s just what he does. On this occasion, as part of Liverpool’s Frakture Festival, he was in the company of drummer Peter […]
Label: Staubgold Format: CD What better subject for a To Rococo Rot concept album than a highly modernist building in Cologne? With twelve modular rooms to work represent both the structure and purpose of, the logical method the band took was to compose a three minute track for each section. What emerges is a stripped-down album which works within the structural constraints to deliciously minimal effect, whether on […]
Label: 130701(UK, Europe)/Alien8(North America)/P-Vine(Japan) Format: CD,2LP This recording contains the result of collaborative jamming from musicians including members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Fly Pan Am and Exhaust. They set up in a house in Montreal, ‘an old falling down monstrosity’, and recorded solidly for five days more concerned with the actual experience of collective playing/recording than the end results. But it’s the end results that we have […]
Label: Soleimoon Format: CD Face The Wound is a Sprache Opera, a dialogue between the male and female voices. Known for working with found sounds, Z’ev assembled the narrative of Face The Wound from 30 cassettes collected from thrift shops, garage sales, and flea markets. The rhythms of the voices mix with the rhythms of electronic percussion and electronic textures. The journey through Z’ev’s assembled narrative isn’t an […]
Label: Stretchy Format: CD Like Hawkwind before them, the Ozrics have stuck to their groove with determined, singled-minded commitment to spacey reggae bass and soaring, intricate guitar line. Rushy, twiddly synths, flute twirls and all the expected head, ears and what’s left of the brain in the sky moments ride over faux-Arabic percussion and nifty keyboard throbs. It’s all very lysergic, and as they’ve been at it for […]
The Klinker The Sussex, London 20 September 2001 Well, The Klinker was its normal inchoate self: the irrepressible Hugh Metcalfe yelling “We start in ten minutes” as a half dozen apparently unrelated machine operators tinker with toy tape recorders, laptops, bits of wiring, large wineglasses, violin bows and Super 8 projectors. I concieve a momentary connexion between autism and the avant-garde – the unconnectedness, the lack of affect, […]
Label: Matador Format: CDS,12″ Taking as its sample base the sounds of plastic surgery operations, “California Rhinoplasty” does precisely what the title describes; only funkily. Not for Matmos the obvious route of ambinece as the bones rasp and the noses are broken with a hammer. Instead, every sound becomes grist(le) to their sampler’s mill to make a groovy shuffle of sprightly plops, squeaks and chugging bass. Part of […]
Label: Matador Format: CD,LP In their latest album Matmos use the bone crunching noises of plastic surgery for their samples. So if you’ve had a nose job be warned, Matmos might have transformed the noise of your nose being broken into a snare. Well, here it is … A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure is a collage of sound recorded in clinics and operating theatres. […]
Tufnell Park Dome, London 2 September 2001 A history lesson… Everything you think you know is wrong. The last ten years never happened. Mrs. Thatcher’s still in power, The Dome‘s still standing (Tufnell Park that is… not the Big Tent), and Conflict are still gigging. We are ruled by a bunch of corporate whores who’d sell out their own party for some cash from Ronald McDonald. Hang on […]
Label: Brombron Format: CD Edited down from a week’s recording in and around Extrapool studio in Nijmegen, Holland by Antenna Farm and Main in the summer of 2000, AF_M is the first in the Brombron series of collaborations initiated by Staalplaat and Extrapool. Using laptops, guitars, environmental and close-miked recordings and the studio itself, the five untitled tracks were improvised then later whittled down in strict order of […]
Label: One Little Indian Format: CD If, at any point in the last six or seven years, you had only taken the time to ask, then I would have told you, dear reader, that Björk Gudmundsdottir was THE Great Pop star of the 1990’s, what Bowie was to the 70’s, and, I would contend, Prince to the 1980’s. I use the term great not in the term of […]
Label: United Dairies Format: CD One of Nurse With Wound‘s most assuredly out there recordings in a career constructed from such moments, Santoor Lena Bicyle takes many of the elements of rhythm and groove Steven Stapleton and collaborators have been working on over the last few releases, condenses them, mashes them up again and throws half away to produce a further chapter of derangement. With Aranos on board, […]