Brighton 28 April 2022 It’s difficult not to use words like “hushed reverence” for a band like Low, and you wonder if someone isn’t very much testing that by hosting them in a lovely church. I’m not sure if we’re “post-“Covid, but certainly being out and about, at a gig with lights and everything, is unnerving. I’m pretty sure everyone’s forgotten how to act in public and the […]
Discus For Mark Holub‘s latest album and his first for Discus, he has expanded on his usual collaborative numbers and put together his first group as bandleader since starting Led Bib twenty years ago. Here, the accent is more on his songwriting rather than the more collaborative efforts of Led Bib, but allows the chosen players to lend colour and texture to his compositions, all of which are […]
Play Loud! The Buchla 100 series is a modular synthesizer designed by Don Buchla in the 1960s. The instrument was championed by Suzanne Ciani, whose name, among many others, became synonymous with the instrument and what looked like a complex way you had to programme it.
Not Applicable Sam Britton‘s continuing experiments as Isambard Khroustaliov find him wandering further into a hinterland in which the way we experience sound as entertainment is taken out of a musical context and more into an aural tapestry or home listening sculpture. Using solely electronic means, familiar sounds and fragments of previously recognisable music are manipulated and distorted using AI and various synthesisers warped to such an extent […]
Zam Zam The solo project of Bristol-based artist Christelle Atenstaedt, Orryx’s ethereal pull is undeniable, the guitar-scapes of her earlier EP now enriched with beats and keyboard kinetics, and of course that beguiling voice which glues the package together.
London 8 April 2022 Waiting for The Eggs to show, I notice singer / guitarist Holly Ross‘s Selmer Treble and Bass valve amp, on top of a double-miked cab. This, along with David Blackwell’s extensive drum set on the other side of the stage, all looks very serious indeed. Unfortunately, I cant quite see Holly’s pedals. Since I am ignorant of The Lovely Eggs prior to the show, […]
London 22 March 2022 The original Penguin Café Orchestra was formed in 1972 by guitarist Simon Jeffes and cellist Helen Liebmann. They released their first album in 1976, produced by Brian Eno and released on his Obscure Records series of recordings, and the band gave its first major concert in 1976 supporting Kraftwerk at The Roundhouse.
In Real Life So 2020’s Pompi EP from Meth Math was one of the highlights of the year for me, despite the fact that I flounder to describe it any more accurately than the phrase “ketty reggaeton”. And this new EP is not very reggaeton. Which is fine but they have entirely pushed me down the rabbithole of reggaeton (tl;dr – Bad Bunny is a trans hero; Daddy […]
Hubro Benedicte Maurseth‘s love of her native landscape and the feeling of connectedness to her local Hardangervidda National Park informs a great deal of this latest album. Forming a trio with eminent compatriots Mats Eilertsen and Håkon Stene, Benedicte goes about evoking the correlations between music and hiking, or more accurately the Norwegian term vandring, which I guess translates closely to wandering.
Ostravské Centrum Nové Hudby Ostrava Days, for those not in the know, is quoted as being “…a platform for making the music of our time…. No attention was paid to what the powerful cultural institutions expected or supported”. In the world of composition, there’s a constant struggle to stage “new” works — where new often means anything written in the last fifty years — so the fact we […]
Active since 1971, the Canadian Electronic Ensemble has the distinction of being the longest-running live electronic music formation in the world. Their session for Philippe Petit‘s Modulisme project showcases the sort of modular synthesis sounds that the ensemble have been performing annually in Toronto and on tour around the world for over fifty years. The current membership includes founder members Jim Montgomery and David Jaeger alongside John Kameel […]
Dais Closely following the success of Coil‘s first volume of Musick To Play In the Dark came this second helping, a thematic continuum that surfed further out there, saw the group collapsing back with the departure of Drew McDowall to a trinity of players, a fact which made for a tighter, more personally focused beast, on a collection where hindsight haunts your every listen.
Bureau B Both Etienne Jaumet and Fabrizio Rat are trained pianists, but they have done their level best to obfuscate that fact under layers of progressive experimentation that finds Etienne concentrating on modular synthscapes while Fabrizio treats the piano in a far more percussive manner than we might be used to, distending the strings as he hammers the keys.
Crammed Discs Crammed‘s reissue programme for their Made To Measure series continues unabated with the extraordinary collaboration between Iranian vocalist Sussan Deyhim and New York sound artist Richard Horowitz. Originally released in 1986, this album merged Sussan’s ululating vocal explorations with Richard’s fearless electronic textures and took the listener on a journey that somehow combined the chilled sand-blown wonder of the Sistan Desert with the gritty of New […]
Mute / BMG Suicide are an odd band. Considered legendary influencers today, at the time (at least, according to the excellent No Dogs In Space podcast series on them) both reviled and adored — people hated the music, but loved Alan Vega and Martin Rev, so kept giving them gigs. Some people got it, though, perhaps most notably Bruce Springsteen, whose album Nebraska bears all the bloodstains of […]
Discus Discus regular Nick Robinson has been experimenting with guitar looping for over twenty years and his experimental trio Das Rad finds opportunities to interweave them with Martin Archer and Steve Dinsdale. Here though on a rare solo outing, it is all about the guitar in all its incredibly varied manifestations.
Happy Robots Having been fortunate to catch Rodney Cromwell, the nom de plume of regular Happy Robots recording artiste Adam Cresswell, supporting Pram some years ago, I was looking forward to hearing his latest release and was not disappointed. This is his second album and continues his crusade, using ’80s synth sounds to reproduce his own soft, dreamlike world.
Blue Tapes Those prolific Ashtray Navigations have more lo-fi on your hi-fi – a ten-track odyssey that leaves your brain a fizzin’. The diode-soaked bag-piping of the first takes no prisoners, brings back that glittery glutton of “Bird’s Beak”, oozy with a plunge-pool of sticky sauce celebratories. Meditatives you tune into, adjust your antennas towards and the slippery eels of “The Tactic” make it far easier to disgust.