London 5 December 2018 The good people at Upset The Rhythm have been trading for fifteen years now and the calibre of artists that they have to play seems to improve with every year. It feels as though they made their home at The Islington and tonight’s treats for the ears teamed UTR friend and recording artiste Robert Sotelo with Canadian guitar legend and Constellation label stalwart Eric Chenaux.
New Heavy Sounds BlackLab are a Japanese duo that use the mighty fuzz pedal to create some epic doom and Under The Strawberry Moon 2.0 is their début album. A wall of crushing fuzz snarls in “Black Moon” as it crashes its way into its big chord sequence. Echoed vocals cry from beyond the void into the darkest night.
London 1 December 2018 It’s Saturday night. It’s Oxford Street. It’s nearly Christmas. It’s fucking horrible, is what it is. And what a relief to get into The 100 Club which, while packed, is still somehow less claustrophobic than the street outside. And the reason it’s packed is because everyone’s hear to see The Heads, the elusive Bristolian psych-rock combo
4AD It’ll End In Tears Being the kind of guy to gravitate towards the melancholic, there’s certain records that stay with you, speak an (un)comfortable truth, live far beyond the era they were created in. Dreampop supergroup This Mortal Coil‘s It’ll End In Tears is such a jewel, a timeless beauty whose cover versions went beyond mere homage, opened up lots of extra-curricular exploration
Cleopatra Well deck my balls with holly and call me The Saviour, bugger me if it isn’t nearly Christmas. So get the tinsel up, dangle some dongles from a tree and slap Die Hard on the telly. Oh, and at this holiest time of year, have you considered inviting William Shatner into your heart?
Cavaillon 28 November 2018 Theatrical ensemble BOT have been presenting their Ramkoers (Collision Course) production around Europe for the last few years, frequently performing in disused factories and other spaces that allow them to bring their post-industrial cabaret to venues appropriate to their subject matter.
Dry Cough I’m not sure if it splits cleanly down the middle, but I tend to think there’s two types of heavy music — music that sounds like the smell of melted plastic, warped doorframes and scattered glass of a burnt-out building, and stuff that’s clean. Happily, this falls into the former category. A bass sound that’s less bass teacher with a neat ponytail and more holding to […]
Mute Laibach doing The Sound of Music. If those words hold any meaning for you, you’ve pretty much already heard this album. You’re probably already aware that this is a bunch of studio recordings inspired by a performance they did in DPRK.
Lo Recordings Lo Recordings have been going for over twenty years now. An often overlooked but important arbiter of modern electronic based music, they have chosen this moment to release a compilation of material that they see as exploring the connections, overlaps and roots of that oft over-used term ambient. In association with Strange Attractor Press, they have invited a wide variety of artists to offer a contribution […]
Leaving / Stones Throw To: Monsieur F., France London, Nov. 22nd __18. It is just after midnight, and as I write these words, weak and weary, my hand scarce possesses enough strength to hold the pen. I am in a wretched condition. I cannot rest. No sleep will come to me. Its peaceful, blessed sanctuary seems now to elude me completely and, though the laudanum helps a little, the […]
Beggars Arkive For me, one of the best things about Bauhaus was that they managed to cover so much groundover a relatively short career and for each album to be a rapid progression from the previous. After the dark dealings of In The Flat Field and the esoteric spirituality of Mask, The Sky’s Gone Out found the band really stretching their wings with so many different styles and textures […]
Tiny Global Productions Forty years young, The Nightingales are back with a storming album. Perish The Thought is a sharp and saturated beast wrapped in a lush baroque of a cover full of rich flora, that if you stare hard enough is a garden full of death, subtly strangled in barb wire. The Crass-like eye-popping photo-montage of the inlaytoo (is that Elvis floating above tenements?)
Adaadat Sound artist Joel Cahen initially designed this album to be listened to in a submerged state, ie in a body of still water like a swimming pool or large baths. Apparently, when sound travels through water it moves four times as quickly as through air and also affects our bodies more noticeably than when we are on land.
London 17 November 2018 My, what a strange day. Going to an afternoon concert is a rare enough event these days anyway, but when the bill of fare involves a jazz ensemble led by a bona fide Hollywood film star, who then proceeds to spend at least half the show doing trivia quizzes, it really is quite something to behold.
Modularfield Another of Modularfield‘s lavishly packaged cassette-only releases and yet another welcome change of direction for the label. Ambient guitarist Lela Amparo has released six of the most deliciously sweet guitar-based instrumentals on this mini-album.
Jahtari Jahtari label founder Disrupt has created a haven for all things dubular and dread-inflected, often bringing his own particular strand of science fictional elements to the fore on releases that reference a host of SF tropes from the interstellar planet-busting nihilism of Dark Star (sampled here, of course) to Blade Runner (memorably recreating Roy Batty’s final monologue using a range of heavily-effected speech synthesizers on “Love On” from 2009’s […]
three:four Swiss musician Manuel Troller has tried to shy away from performing solo, generally acting as collaborator with a wide variety of more esoteric artists, including Julian Sartorius and Merz. Having been asked three years ago to support Marc Ribot at a jazz club in Bern, circumstances have found him more open to the thought of his own album, and here finally are the fruits of his experiments.
Bristol 13 November 2018 Deep in the building’s basement, illuminated by flashing red strobes, Copper Sounds totally seduced with their ritualistic roast of belt-driven bicycle wheels and contact mic(ed) boulders. The undulating mechanism murmured like an arthritic after-shadow in the PA as the calcium rub of the stoney surfaces was effect-fed, bent across grainy percussives in a parade of pendulum-painting pennies