Happy Robots The oval oddness of Anaphora’s opener “Pilomotor Reflex” are ace, reversed shivers cerebrally nibbling slowly, beaconing out on a delightful Kraftwerkian romance (minus that detached chill). A dance of chameleon-like shapes that fluidly viper that dry percussive, an agitated softness for that anti-capitalist narrative to dagger deep, tangle favouringly with your reason. Political / cultural arrows that empathetically grenade throughout the whole of this album, nestled in […]
Discus For French singer Carla Diratz‘s latest album, she has enlisted two of the Discus family to conjure some surprisingly diverse soundscapes for her smoky, timeworn vocalising. Both Martin Archer and Nick Robinson are hardy veterans, capable of providing the perfect backdrops and these veer from the gentlest of piano laments to forceful, driven, post-prog whirlwinds. In fact, the opening two tracks show the full range of their […]
Constellation When the first Light Conductor album was released, I remember considering that it would be a suitable one-off experiment and that an attempt by Jace Lasek and Stephen Ramsay to follow it might be folly; but I am really pleased to say on the strength of Sequence Two, it was a wise decision as there is much more ground for them to cover. This time, spread over […]
Constellation As with many artists, the genesis of Jessica Moss‘s fourth album occurred during lockdown and it acted as a means of working her way through the enforced isolation. Judging by her previous offerings, the sense of remove and the overwhelming melancholy is something to which her violin sound is suited; but on Phosphenes, it is as if the bar were raised and the immersive sensations of solitude […]
Geophonic The packaging for the latest Aperus release is a thing of beauty, containing a number of glorious weather photographs selected at random from Brian McWilliam‘s well-curated archive. Thankfully, the sounds contained within live up to this lush presentation, channelling the spirit of Covid as well as the New Mexico mountain fires which were delivering smoke to Brian’s back door. As you can imagine, these disturbing events have […]
This time (more or less) next week will see the launch of a Freq channel on Repeater Radio. UPDATE: The whole thing will be repeated from noon GMT on Sunday 26 December 2021; see below for times. We’re launching with a of the winter solstice, from 12:00 to 03:00 (GMT). There will be all manner of participants, many offering up live and indirect sessions – where the music […]
Sulatron Dave Schmidt AKA Sula Bassana invites us yet again into his personal cosmic world with his very own inventions for electric guitar. This album was recorded over three nights and expands Sula’s ever shifting psychedelic sound, using only a very basic setup of instruments to keep the mind focussed on the universal otherness.
One Little Independent Not only did Poppy Ackroyd have to contend with Covid around the writing of her fourth album, but the birth of her first child also coincided with the process. As you can perhaps imagine, on the strength of that, the album runs through a full range of emotions from thrill and ebullience to concern and introspection. Although the album is solely piano based, using the […]
Sulatron This is a live set by Electric Moon and Portuguese band Talea Jacta, recorded at a club in Lisbon pre-pandemic on 20 September 2019, when these kind of things were a lot easier to arrange. In that respect it is a document of a freer time when music flowed without boundaries or isolation.
Rose Hill As the album title would suggest, this is a Solstice recording made by God’s Teeth And The Interstellar Tropics at The Old Market Theatre in Brighton in the pre-covid bliss of the winter of 2019. A three-track recording that attempts to untangle your subconscious on a lysergic lance of percussive mis-shapes and vocalised abstracts, with a lovely Angus MacLise sensibility that floats on Karl MV Waugh’s […]
All Saints Laraaji was discovered by Brian Eno in 1979 while he was playing in Washington Square Park. At this point Eno had moved to the US and was in the process of working on his Ambient series of albums and label that had started with Music For Airports. Laraaji’s release would be Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance and was be released in 1980; it is the only […]
Upset The Rhythm If the Frank Sidebottom homage of a cover doesn’t grab you, the explosiveness of Bad Advice Good People‘s contents is certain to freeze-frame the widest of smiles to your face. A raucous six pack akin to Kleenex or Gang Of Four with hard-chiselled words and bloated basslines that hook you in front and centre, prowl your head like an over-active imagination with armfuls of day-glo […]
Zonedog For Under Triple Suns, Jan Gleichmar‘s Disrupt finds itself abandoned far from home, heading through the upper atmosphere, stretching and randomly steering through the sparsely lit sky amidst the rumble and flash of multitudes of unseen objects. The sound of freefalling against the background drone that opens the album contains a sense of helplessness. A voice appears telling us that “you have suffered minor head trauma” and […]
London, 15 November 2021 The sense of anticipation was immense, bathed in a blue haze, monitors staring out of it like Ewok eyes, the stage remaining empty as the words “Dream the name and I will answer to it” breeze in, tantalised in sparse flickerings and occasional birdsong roughed by the distinctive rub of a cement mixer.
Discus Jan Todd‘s third outing as Frostlake finds her appearance as part of The Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere lending a warmer and more open feel to this double-length collection when compared to the icier, more dramatic Ice And Bone from 2019. There is a lightness and an airiness to her voice this time around that brings to mind the first shoots of spring bringing to an end the […]
London 13 November 2021 It feels very strange returning (and especially reviewing) live music again after nearly a two-year absence. Some things have changed, but much was the same as before. The big thing was the crowd reaction; and starved of live music for so long, people seemed hungry to see their favourite bands again. Maybe we won’t take live music for granted and support many of the […]
Greyfade Christopher Otto has clearly read the twentieth century composer’s guide to nicking ideas from the East, and leans heavily on knowledge of just intonation. But this debut release isn’t one of those superficial “exotic” borrowings (when do we get to lay into Terry Riley for that, by the way?) and probably has more to do with the kind of tonal particularly of Horatiu Radulescu than any mid-twentieth […]
A night landscape of soil, mud, forests. Walls of intricate vegetation. A dense, humid atmosphere. Rain. The smell of swamps, rotten wood, decaying leaves. All senses are overwhelmed, and yet we’re not sure of what we hear: is it natural or artificial, almost mechanical?