Label: Nettwerk / Sub-Conscious Communications Format: CD Okay. Let’s get this straight. The back cover is composed entirely of acid blotters. The pictures of Phil Western and cEvin Key on the inside are just a bunch of eyes. And the tracks are called stuff like “Muscaria” and “Ayahuasca”. Yes, kids, it’s an album about – call the cops – DRUGS. And really mental ones at that. A lot less abrasive than much previous Download output, and a lot […]
Label: M Records Format: CD, LP The indefatigable Ryan Moore keeps up the Dub pressure with this, his seventh album release as Twilight Circus, purveyor of fine Seventies-styled Dubs to the kids… and beyond. One of the first impressions of Dub Voyage, as is only to be expected, is the bass. Tons of the stuff, and warm, gloopy booms of it; while the LP starts off gently enough, […]
The Third Millennium Festival Union Chapel, London 14th October 2000 Generally I would say that if you want to see a gig in London, there are not many more beautiful places than Union Chapel. I would also add to try for summer. This cavernous gothic spired chapel all of stone and wood and beautiful doorways into maze-like passages provides an atmosphere of spooky tranquility and usually gorgeous acoustic […]
Label: Label M Format: CD Charming the snake of Jazz, the pipes lead the tones on a dance of hitherto unheard-of proportions. Bongos and drums – bongs and drugs? Methinks not. “High on life” seems more the fit. This is one of those recordings from the “outre” days of releasing – something so strange and unexpected that it is immediately endearing and entearing. A jaunty voyage. The sounds […]
Label: Caciocavallo Format: CD Hank and Slim, two good ol’ boys who lurched from legendary Bluegrass status and back into the trailer parks of Obscurity, Tx, making Country music take the dark experiemental route. Or Robin Storey and Nigel Ayers deconstructing the sound of the airwaves and the pedal steel into droning peyote-fuelled washes of moody Mid-West ambience? Rumours that the latter are true cannot still be confirmed, […]
Label: Soleilmoon Format: CD Structured around bursts of wheezing Drum & Bass breakbeats, Nigel Ayers‘ latest missive from the borderlands of music broadcasts at a frequency attuned to a zeitgeist-surfing mix of attenuated rhythms, (implied) anti-monarchism and community space travel. All this and an origami sleeve which builds into a peculiar design (instructions enclosed) and Futurist Antiquarianism makes for a rounded album which develops Nocturnal Emissions‘ edgy sound into […]
Label: MDZ Format: 12″ “Charme 75″, taken from Oh.‘s Upper Disker album, finds the gang in Housey mode, chuckling their abundant collection of analogue synths along to a slippery Funk-based track which does the dancefloor thing in spades. Warmth is the key here, and the knowledge that this is the result of live interaction between people and not just machines adds further to the pleasures of the basic […]
Label: Ash International [R.I.P] Format: CD+LP Benny Nilsen‘s second record as Hazard comes as a CD and LP set (or at least the first thousand pressed do), with six tracks on the 36-minute digital unit and two more on the 35-minute vinyl. Odd as this might at first seem, the different media suit the resulting pieces quite well; having quiet glitchy runs of excoriated environmental sounds and thin […]
The Royal Festival Hall South Bank Centre, London 27th September 2000 Performing for their 25th anniversary, Pere Ubu delivered such a marvelous performance as to bring me around to wondering why I don’t listen to this band everyday. And why are they not lauded as the one of the best of the last quarter century? Why is Pere Ubu not a household word? Just as well really, as […]
Label: Universal Egg Format: CD,2LP Originally recorded in 1993-4, around the time when messers Cod, Tench and Perch were at the forefront of squeezing as much out of electronic music and reggae as possible and remixing the two into a new style of digital dub music where the drum machine didn’t so much crash mechanistically as step to a more human heartbeat, Secrets Of The Animal Kingdom In […]
South Bank Centre, London 19 September 2000 For their third live performance in a year after the seventeen of build-up, Coil arrive onstage dressed in unlaced grey strait-jackets, backed by a neon sign proclaiming the title of the night’s performance, Persistance Is All. The multiple possible meanings of this slogan soon becomes apparent, as the playback of Jhon Balance‘s spoken title beat which opens “Something” fills the “Royal” […]
Label: Wobbly Music Format: CD The Lothars are one of those groups who revel in their references, but fail to fall into the trap of being copyists just for the process’ own sake: they use four Theremins; the album sleeve pastiches a Benny Goodman album cover; hints in their name to Sixties Psych group Lothar And The Hand People; their first CD was called Meet The Lothars as […]
Red Rose Club, London 16th September 2000 A night of drones on Seven Sisters Road, strangely light on traffic in the aftermath of petrol protests, but still teeming with North London’s variegated Saturday night fun seekers and the requisite fully made-up Goths on the 253 bus. The Red Rose is no stranger to the extremes of music, and the venue’s home as a noted comedy club is somehow […]
Label: FatCat Format: 12″ Matmos‘ side of this disc has two tracks, the first of which, “Freak ‘N’ You”, uses digital cut-ups to make snickering Funk from the garbage of sundry abandoned R&B acapella vocal CDs left lying in bins at Drew Daniel‘s college radio station; and very odd indeed it is too. Deracinated Soulful singers make a skipping, skimming presences in a piece which gets up early […]
Label: Chalice Format: CD,2LP 1. As I reclined in my sketchy little world and allowed the gasses to go to my head, I became overpowered with the notion that I was being carried away. Silly flashes of Communion-like images of alien beings lifting me and placing me against soft chrome and spraying my skin black metallic and an underlying fear that maybe, just maybe this could all mean […]
London 7 September 2000 Ween are one of those bands who embody the indie dream, the American Dream even. Starting out as lo-fi geeks with too much time, dope and a four track recorder on their hands, they turned their undoubted talents to warped and wonderful ends over the last ten years, from cult act to near-classic rock inheritors of the dubious mantles of both Butthole Surfers and […]
Label: Digi-Dub Format: CD The sounds on this recording were originally derived from pieces of detritus found at the Skrot Centralen scrapyard in Uppsala, Sweden, and composed into the Scrap Bodies soundtrack for the Su-En Butoh Company for their world tour of the dance performance. Lee Digidub and friends – Dodo, Liquid Acrobat, Egon Zoo, King Bimble – have taken the basic samples and put them through their […]
Label: Touch & Go Format: CD,LP Let’s give Three” the moodiest album of 2000 award. If we are passing out any awards that is. Black Heart Procession capture gloom and wrap it up in matte-coloured cowboy Goth like nobody’s business. Unfeigned resignation to everything is the raison d’etre and the low level chronic depressive sound topped up with teardrop pianos and rimmed with just right amount of experimental […]