Label: Touch Format: CD More than just Pan(a)Sonic without the bass oscillations, Mika Vainio‘s second solo outing still bears obvious connections to his work with Ilpo Vaisanen on their last album release under that name as A , a recording which featured moments of unsettling stillness and texture among the distened beats and noise. Naturally, it’s also more about making a different kind of sound to Pan Sonic’s […]
The Garage, London 31st January 2000 It’s been seven years since Matt Johnson released Dusk, the last The The album; and barring the frankly bizarre collection of Hank Williams covers, plus a series of dubious rumours, nobody has heard from him since. Until now. Joining Trent Reznor‘s Nothing label (after Epic refused to release his experimental album, GunSluts) appears to have rejuvenated Johnson, and his triumphant return to […]
Label: Attack Attack Format: CD “I didn’t know they were still going” says anyone I tell, all breathless and excited, about the fact that New Model Army have a new album out, their second in as many years, and then they usually laugh laugh at me a bit. So I tell them to fuck off.
The Underworld, London 28th January 2000 Dead Voices On Air are conducting a bit of an experiment on the London leg of their tour, starting off loud, noisy and danceable and trailing down into ambient passages of extended mood workouts. Mark Spybey and Darren Phillips man the keyboards, sequencers, samplers, digital technology; Darryl Neudorf is behind a bare drumkit (complete with fluffy liner on one drum). So they […]
Label: Flesh Format: LP This record is to House music what Digital Hardcore is to breakbeat Hardcore. Flesh Records describe themselves as taking “great delight in unveiling the stenched schematics of a long imprisoned beast.” And this is just what they have done. This is dirty and nasty music that comes in some of the most rotten, unstable, and schizophrenic forms imaginable. Moments of nice funk are brutalised […]
Label: Digital Hardcore Format: CD Recorded at the end of an exhausting world tour in November 1999, with Hanin Elias out of action and Carl Crack gone loopy, as the sleevenotes describe Alec Empire and Nic Endo “were finally standing in front of a sold-out crowd of 4,000 people, Nic and I felt like we were in a bubble, a capsule, cut off from everything around us.” With […]
Along the Dotted Line… 12th December 1999 The Legendary Pink Dots are a phenomenon, producing a seemingly endless stream of deeply intense records and genuinely spellbinding live shows for nearly twenty years, initially as a London-based group and for more than a decade now from their Nijmegen base in The Netherlands. While former days on mammoth independent label Play It Again Sam in Belgium produced widespread distribution for […]
Label: Beggars Banquet Format: 12″,CDS Initially, this is really quite disappointingly normal, especially when compared to the stunningly evocative combination of HipHop rhythms with Isolationist textures which made up the remarkable Beat album a few years back. By contrast “Freedom Fighter” goes for the laid-back, casual-smoking vocal style and ironic personality analysis song-structure of indie trip-hop, but in what feels like a very commercial manner. Which, to be fair, is adequately hooky and […]
The Garage, London 28 November 1999 If a band sounds the same live as they do recorded, it can be a bit disappointing. Too clean, too rehearsed. Seeing Salaryman live at The Garage could easily have been like that, only it never strayed into those well-trodden pedestrian precincts. The only non-perfect things about this show were the lack of audience (Sunday night maybe?) and the less than amazing sound […]
Label: Smells Like Records Format: 2CD The century may still have about a year left to run through, but Sonic Youth have decided to take time to consider and pay tribute to their ancestral experimental roots on this double CD of less-than rock music. Built in earnestly engaged (but obviously joyful too) collaboration with old and new friends and musical relations Jim O’Rourke, William Winant, turntablizer Christian Marclay, […]
The Borderline, London 9th November 1999 A night at The Borderline, a night for Americanism. We arrived too late to hear the first set, a band called Kenny Process Team, so no insights there apart from the appropriate(d) soundtrack feeling their last couple of songs gave me as I took in the setting. This venue is a strange place for my impressions of London. Done up in 1970’s […]
The Underworld, London 5th November 1999 Back at The Underworld for the second time in six months, follwowing on from an absence from their founders’ homeland of six years, The Legendary Pink Dots bring home their unique format of intense live musical performance at the tail end of yet another whirlwind European tour organised due to public demand. Tonight there’s no support, just two hours of the finest […]
The Water Rats, London 2nd November 1999 The Water Rats seems like a broken place, barely still pulsing with the life of the twenty or so people inside. I wonder if it was once posh, evidence: rubbed-off velvet on the too few bar stools, forgotten glass cases built into dingy walls, and a mid-size double paned front door, spread wide and chained open. It lets in the chill […]
Label: Sub Rosa/Quatermass Format: CD, Limited LP Simon Pyke, AKA Freeform, has shown himself to be one of those producers of electronic music who fails singularly to conform to rigid genres and substylings thereof. He simply seems content to produce music within the formats open to someone with a bank of samplers, keyboards, mixers and effects units, regardless of constraints of what anyone else might have done along the way. Now that […]
LA2, London 25th October 1999 Prepared and hyped for Atari Teenage Riot, I was ready to hear loud fast music. What a treat it was that the fun started long before ATR ever came on. Other girls have done this, face it, MANY other boys have done this too, but something just chimes right for Lolita Storm. I can’t tell a single song title from Lolita Storm’s set. […]
Label: Sprawl Imprint Format: CD Assembled from the now-usual urban sprawl of sounds which make up the inspiration for much of Electronica’s current output, Me Shape is Simon Pyke‘s contribution to the clockwork maelstrom which characterises this apect of late Nineties music, and of which The Sprawl Imprint and club are particular exponents. Built up from two years of sound recordings and live sets, the album is filled with coiled energy, prowling into view as the […]
Label: Caipirinha Format: CD Datach’i sounds like a deranged child given a selection of technology, old and new, to play with, abuse, and generally mess up sound with. From the get-go, it’s a stream of blurting noise, scrawled low-end mania and samples to reinforce the infantile world of an unsatisfied toddler (on PCP?) – who has heard that they now know their ABC, but are as happy with […]
Label: Thrill Jockey Format: CDS,12″ Four songs of love as seen through the Continuous Cash-FlowTM filter of Mr. Bobby Conn, Chicago, hell, the world‘s most curious of crooners and estimable heir to the Seventies legacy of Funk-Soul-Rock singer-songwriter troubadour anti-messiahs. In other words, a star. There are two new songs from Mr. C. himself – “Free Love”, an epic, near-histrionic bass-slapping time-signature mangler and possessor of a typically […]