Pelagic Suitably sepia-soaked, part one of Årabrot Speciale‘s Die Nibelungen stares off into the mysterious distance, its choral eddies peripherally chased in phosphorescent shivers. A discordia of wormy animates vapourising on an imagined horizon as malevolent motifs creep the architecture. Signatures that crystallize, dance skeletal, then are snatched away by this trembling expectation
Hubro Øyvind Torvund‘s latest opus on Hubro is a sweeping gesture laying open his love for the kind of crazy exotica that the likes of Martin Denny and Les Baxter wowed the unsuspecting public of the 1950s. It is not about copying what came before, though, as there are some curious modernist elements that attempt to update that classic lush and string-laden sound.
Hallow Ground Loving the minimal murmur of Distant Animals‘ Lines LP, featuring one lengthy excursion per side, the first taking a more Éliane Radigue-like approach. “A Pure Drone” is an unsullied flat-line ripple stretching a heat-grazed horizon of the type La Monte Young still surfs
On The Dole The new wave of British heavy metal then. It can safely be said that your writer has minimal understanding of the genre. Actually almost deliberately. So why pick up a compilation of NWOBHM? Something to do with “history is always written by the victors”‘.
Thrill Jockey Matmos‘s latest is a really impressive feat, considering every sound that you hear on the album was generated by something plastic. As a comment on the current surfeit of plastic items that we have on the globe, it packs a potent social message; and what’s more, considering the possibilities, it is a really good listen.
Kscope I apparently first saw Ozric Tentacles perform at the Stonehenge Free Festival in 1984, and although my memory of the whole occasion is rather hazy, to say the least, their music has remained with me ever since that long summer many years ago. Even though over the years band leader Ed Wynne has done various side projects, mainly the wonderful kosmiche sounds of Nodens Ictus, this is […]
Fiasco Recordings Art Trip And The Static Sound‘s 2018 album A Week Of Kindness is being refreshed in the public’s consciousness by the release of the “Iron Lung” single. This particular track shines a light on their more repetitive Spacemen 3 leanings, with a rough and grungey circular guitar motif. The drummer is the key here, not allowing anything to escape from the black hole of sound.
London 6 April 2019 The faded Tudor grandeur of the venue, set in the urban sprawl of Hackney, was a fitting place for tonight’s entertainment, and its small performance area just added to the night’s intimacy. The second night of celebration for Daniel O’Sullivan‘s Folly LP release (part of The New Arts and Music Programme at Sutton House)
Important Warning: much tl;dr within. Minimal squee. Tread ye carefully. Initial thoughts on Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis‘s Chamber Music CD were something like: why would you put those two together? It’s an odd pairing. People really fall in love with Morton Feldman. He makes, at turns, utterly inscrutable, glacial, cold, dark, wrecked music that’s not so much impenetrable as it is a funeral for tonality. But note […]
Sparrow Hawk Cowboy Flying Saucer‘s second album dispenses a series of lead hollerer BK13‘s slightly surreal and repetitive vignettes over an at times contorted and at times spacious scrum of musical hubbub. His appearance at a Travel Lodge wedding that transformed into some kind of hallucinatory extended dream-state is brought to life in a way that I wasn’t expecting.
Mute / Cherry Red Thirty years a classic. A record that’s hugely saturated in my childhood — it might be my favourite Erasure album, or it might be the one that I heard most through my sister’s walls in the late 80s. There’s not much I still listen to from when I was a bairn, but Erasure sit in that category right next to Dolly Parton and The […]
London 2 April 2019 Italian producer and songwriter Giorgio Moroder is basically a legend. After discovering a certain sound in the mid-seventies, he reinvented disco music overnight. The sound was full of synthesizers pulsing to a pounding beat, but also never forgetting that key ingredient, melody. Moroder then won three Oscars for his soundtrack work and during the 1980s, he was pretty much everywhere working with many top […]
Rocmusic I was more than a little excited to discover R.O.C were returning after quite some time away and this album does not disappoint. Somehow, ROC manage to exist outside of the music industry and any trends and vagaries that may afflict it. Although it has been twelve years since their last LP, when the music starts it could have been yesterday that the previous albums were released.
Demiurg / London 3 March 2019 This is a story of two enigmas. One is an inscrutable totalitarian art-rock collective, and the other is the most secretive state on Earth. And this is all about what happened when the two collided to the strains of a much-loved feel-good musical with Nazis in it. Laibach have been defying musical and artistic conventions and outraging public decency for nearly forty […]
Omnibus Press Damo Suzuki will be seventy years old next year and has spent the best part of half of those traversing the globe with two distinct iterations of his musical caravan; first the Damo Suzuki Band / Network and latterly the ever-evolving global musical cast that are his Sound Carriers. Interspersed in those years were twenty-six spent working full time for a Japanese company that manufactured measuring […]
Blue Tapes The latest release from The Blue Tapes House Band has only one disappointing element; the cassette isn’t blue, but white. I don’t know what is going on here and it is fair to say I have no idea what the House Band are trying to do, except drive the listeners crazy. For nearly an hour, pure white noise rolls out
Dur Et Doux As your brain tries to get a grip on the multi-perspectives of the MC Escher-like arts, you’re pummelled by the intensity of the vibes on Ni‘s Pantophobie (the fear of everything) LP. I don’t know much about Ni, but I like the souped-up King Crimson metal-headed math rock surprise they are welding here. Pantophobie is a head-banger’s dream of accented angulars and jigsaw shifts, the […]
Rune Grammofon Maja SK Ratkje‘s latest album for Rune Grammofon is a really intriguing piece. Written for the Norwegian National Ballet‘s interpretation of Knut Hamsen‘s breakthrough novel Hunger, it is entirely centred around a modified pump organ. The device was something that she played every night live on stage with the ballet, and that is an incredible feat when you read the spec: “…a modified, wiggly and out […]