Nonplace When it comes to drumming, the late Jaki Liebezeit is up there with the likes of Stomu Yamashta and Charles Hayward. So when I heard his cult-like percussive collective Drums Off Chaos was finally releasing two sweet EPs’ worth of tracks upon the world, I was more than stoked.
12″ EP
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Nonplace Merging Burnt Friedman‘s distinctive electronic swirl with Mohammed Reza Mortazavi‘s deftly-played tombak rhythms, the Yek EP finds the Berlin-based duo in playful mode as they bounce musical sparks off each other.
6dimensions Sometimes, as Mick Jagger‘s character Turner observed in Nic Roeg‘s Performance, when going too far, it’s necessary to go further back and faster. This Steve Bicknell does on Awakening The Past by revisiting three tracks from his Lost Recordings days and concocting a fresh one for good measure to see if the old ways are still worth it.
6dimensions Impulse Model is Bobby James Pike‘s first release as Heartless, appearing on techno doyen Steve Bicknell‘s 6dimension label as a deeply delirious slice of modular groove. Bloopy and bleepy it may be, but it’s also full of twisting dancefloor passions that writhe as if alive
Distant Spore After luxuriating in the carnival like atmosphere of 2014’s full length Make It Look Like Nothing Happened and the head spinning smorgasbord of 2016’s Everything Is Magick, nobody could really second guess Impuritan‘s next move. The colours and textures employed in the previous releases made them a fantastic new discovery and I was intrigued to see what the next step would be.
Psychomat Jono Podmore (AKA Kumo, of Cyclopean and Metamono) provides the music backing up Reason Stendec‘s sonorous multilingual vocals on the Impulsion EP. Intriguingly, “Stendec” was mysterious final Morse code transmission from a flight that crashed en route to Santiago in Chile in 1947
Marionette With a title that refers to a book about near-death experiences, suitably enough, Burnt Friedman‘s first release for Marionette draws upon his archive of recordings to construct a new EP of circling, abstract rhythms topped off with ghostly musical remnants.
Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records Metal isn’t a particularly progressive genre, in a lot of ways; for all the fluff that people throw at it, musicologically speaking, it’s rarely divested itself of fairly conventional tonalities, regular 4/4s, flattened out timbres and limited melodies. I appreciate that’s kind of “the thing” that makes metal and as someone who doesn’t really like metal it’s unfair for me to tar it […]
Red Robin / Jahtari Continuing the longstanding reggae tradition of producers cutting basic rhythms and then letting different singers and deejays work their vocal ways into the mix, New Zealand-based duo Naram and Art laid down the core tracks for this first EP
Southern Lord Ten minutes and ten seconds of stoner riffs that some waited some sixteen years to arrive since the last hazy wafts of Sleep‘s 1998 LP Dopesmoker faded out, “The Clarity” finds Al Cisneros and Matt Pike joined by Jason Roeder of Neurosis on drums. Originally released as a digital single in 2014, it now gets the full Southern Lord vinyl treatment
Nefarious Industries So the main reason I picked up this record for review is because I think that it’s the responsibility of the writer to pick up things for spurious reasons. The reason I will never review, or listen to, Jaga Jazzist is because the name is terrible. Bangladeafy is an awesome name.
4AD Nobody ever sounded like the Cocteau Twins, a band so startlingly original that they spurred a lot of imitators; they took the jangle of indie to a whole different level, an otherworldly soak that no doubt inspiring the shoegrazery verve that would follow in their wake. By 1985 they already had three albums under their belts, but their sound was still evolving to ever-more luscious territories, concocting […]
Haunter Source of Uncertainty is one of those records which pushes the boundaries of expectation quite a bit further than a cursory glance at the list of influences might suggest. So maybe there is techno, electro, Detroit and Berlin-style electronic music in here, and certainly a sense of experiment that is worthy of the term; but Giovanni Napoli’s second Haunter Records release as SOMEC follows on the heels […]
mottomotto There’s a certain mild krautishness nurturing in those Kinder Egg diode flashes, a light-hearted flush of danceability that’s swimming in the real and the synthetic in equal amounts. Oddly punctured textures and filtered sequins that seem to bubble-burst plenty of satisfied grins, a childlike tinkering perfectly matching the lurid orange vinyl and crayoned graphics of its package. Innard Listeningestion by Now “Innards” starts the ball rolling, its […]
More Than Human Board a hovercraft to ride the autobahn of yr dreams on this lovely fissure from Ekoplekz, via the good sonic alchemists at More Than Human Records. 2014 has been a big year for Bristol’s Nick Edwards, following two of his highest-profile — and highest production value — releases on the braindance juggernaut Planet Mu. Mike Paradinas, AKA µ-Ziq, worked head-to-head with Edwards in sequencing the […]
Öm It may seem ambitious to propose a histoy of techno in only four parts on one 12” single, but if there’s anyone who can do so, it’ll be the two drummers, bassist and one-man soul sonic force of K-X-P — Timo Kaukolampi (of Op:l Bastards), Tomi Lepannen (also of Circle and Pharaoh Overlord, among many others), Tuomo Puranen, also of of Op:l Bastards, and Anssi Nykänen. K-X-P are […]
Cosmo Rhythmatic With “2024” blasting straight down to business like Pan Sonic at their grittiest and crunchiest, Centaure finds Franck Vigroux a very long way away from his guitar extrapolations and explorations (such as the recently-released Ciment). Instead, he’s got electronic beats to flay and some serious noise to bring on three tracks and a remix which will effectively sandpaper any soundsystem they grace and most likely render […]
Gagarin Recorded live in New York in November 2009, 1:17 is one of those glorious conceptual pieces in which the premise – in this case, the use and re-use of a 0.7 millisecond snippet of sound originating from a Diskono collective concert in 2000, itself transformed gradually over the years into a one minute seventeen second blast of noise – is almost entirely irrelevant to the appreciation of […]