One of the great lost traditions of British television, the BBC’s Ghost Stories For Christmas ran through the seventies and remain fondly remembered, a singularly British reading of classic horror stories.
While Earth 2 has undoubtedly influenced a generation of experimental and drone musicians, its impact goes beyond the confines of genre. The album is a pilgrimage, an exploration of the primal power of vibration and resonance. It transcends the boundaries of conventional rock music, offering an immersive experience that is both challenging and rewarding for those willing to embark on the journey.
We make our way towards it and spy the ancient instruments intone slowly and tremulously, and a roll of thunder embodies a warning of things yet to come. Water seeps in threatening to engulf as Maja's wordless utterances throw you somewhere completely new, just the Hardanger fiddle and bells indicating we are still within the warm reach of the campfire.
Their music often feels like a dark comfort blanket that you could pull around yourself, relax into — and tonight it’s hitting the spot. A brooding brew of blurring intention and fleeting impression that grasps at and enhances the storyteller’s weave of tangible disappointments with the human animal and the redeeming embrace of love.
Diverse trumpeter and flugelhorn player Charlotte Keeffe is a restless soul and one who itches for musical opportunities. For this album, she has has re-assembled the quartet that appeared on the previous album Right Here, Right Now and thrown them into the studio to see what can come from this immediate interaction.
Blue Tapes I’ve yet to see this band live; life always conspires against it, but I’m glad this tantalising snapshot from their 2022 Café OTO show has made it out there. A beautifully packaged Blue Tapes item that amplifies the primal weirdness of Staraya Derevnya‘s studio recordings, takes things to a whole new level. The transformative shivers hit early and stay throughout, each track lifting out of an […]
After scoring a resounding early success, with his debut Love At First Sight winning the Best First Feature Film award at the Cesars, Thomas Cailley slipped into television and writing with his frequent collaborator Victor Saint Macary. Almost a decade after his first film, he returns with The Animal Kingdom, a film that sells itself as a political sci-fi but is far from it, and all the better for it too.
When establishments come under new management there are sometimes doubts from the old clientele about whether it would be as good as it was before, whether it will have the same ambience and charm or even quirkiness. Tonight, a packed house at the Union Chapel has no doubts that this revamped Penguin Café still has everything that the old one did and has added some delicious extras as well.
That stop-start mania leaps at you right off the bat. They turn on the taps and liquid craziness assails us immediately; that searing acoustic drive, the internal rhythms and prettiness of the drums and guitar together, ever entwining and ever expanding, twisted into unexpected shapes. The cheval gallop, the occasional strut of the guitar or its dizzying cyclical patterns, or even the Spanish-inflected modesty. It is all here.
For this solo album he’s clearly built on his Erasure-ing — it’s not a swerve into cumbia or zydeco, but it’s also not ‘Erasure minus vocals’. Tempos are typically on the slower end of things and melodies are perhaps more pronounced. Critically though, there isn’t a moment on the album where melody disappears entirely.
To this end, the existence of this film alone is heartening. Varda now sits at a place where a documentary like this can get green-lit; broad, populist, removed from the academic and cinephile discussions she was once the reserve of. Here we get Varda by those that new and loved her and her work; her family, fellow filmmakers and critics, and as such it’s by no means a deep dive, though enjoyable all the same.
A track that finds "Blass Schlafen Rabe"’s sleeping raven caught in the tumble of some synthesised ambulance / car horn honk. A Keystone Cops comedy that sizzles in its simplicity, finds Holger a zombified poet in a driven piano gallop beset in peculiar interjections and shifting signatures that insistently flood you with plenty of pigeon-toed footwork.
It really feels like a step back in time with the opening bossa beat straight out of an enormous rhythm machine, standing in the corner of a sunken-floor living room with shag pile carpets and orange wallpaper. The comfort of the sax, the sway of the background strings, the title "Have Some Punch"; it all evokes a hip party, ladies in flowing nylon dresses sashaying around the drinks cabinet.
London 8 November 2023 Last time I saw Laibach, it was here in this very theatre, and after a set comprising both the entirety of The Sound Of Music (as previously performed in North Korea) and a slew of “greatest hits”, they’d confounded everyone by having Milan Fras come on in a big white cowboy hat (worn ON TOP of the iconic hat with earflaps that makes him […]
For Portuguese guitarist Pedro Velasco's first solo outing on guitar, he is searching deep within himself, looking at memory and solitude and how that can be interpreted in a solo guitar manner. Working simply through an eight-track and a mixer, he has produced a wealth of emotionally resonant vignettes that linger in the mind long after the sound has dissipated.
Although perhaps better known as one half of Suicide, Martin's solo career was sporadic but he was heavily invested in it, the tracks at points ranging from rock'n'roll inflected flurries through drifting desert atmospheres right through to impressionistic industrial workouts. Although often made with the cheapest of instruments, the range of ideas and textures was vast.
After Boris invited them to join them on stage for a rendition of "Akuma No Uta", a certain chemistry emerged that led to ideas for an album collaboration. Following twelve months of preparation, they went into the studio and this is the result, nine tracks of Boris’s trademark proto- and doom metal merged with Uniform’s own brand of aggressive noise.
The foursome gathered together for the inaugural Fjall release From The Rough Hill has a veritable cornucopia of instruments, with Martin Archer on a variety of reeds and electronics, Jan Todd playing three forms of harp plus the psaltery, and percussionists Fran Comyn and Richard Jackson including bells, bowls, gongs and field recordings.