Esoteric Six years after their surprise reunion, it still seems unreal to be listening to a new Van der Graaf Generator record. Stranger still, lowering the stylus onto A Grounding in Numbers instills the same rush of anticipation as when I ran round to David Hilton’s house back in April […]
Alan Holmes
70 posts
Bureau B Hamburg’s Bureau B label are doing a great job of keeping the Kosmische blowtorch alight. Treating the legacy as a living heritage, they give equal precedence to lovingly presented reissues of lost classics and brand new releases by survivors of the scene and their spiritual offspring. Alongside brand […]
Topplers Topplers Records are an old-style independent label based in Scotland who specialise in limited runs of beautifully presented eccentric pop gems. Depending on your point of view (or age), it’s a sign of either the label’s willful obscurity or unquestionable genius that a high proportion of these releases are […]
Applebush/Easy Action Back in the late 60s, Up were part of the same fired-up Detroit scene that gave us the MC5 and the Stooges but have been largely forgotten over the years. This is perhaps understandable as their only releases at the time were one and a half 7” singles […]
The Garage, London 11 September 2010 Reanimated musical corpses aren’t much of a news story these days – after The Velvet Underground and Throbbing Gristle reformations, nothing comes as a surprise. I was shocked then to realise just how stunned I felt to hear that The Pop Group had got […]
Not The Sixties Improvised music is sometimes more interesting in principle than practice, which so often involves accomplished musicians demonstrating consummate skill or immaculate taste (but rarely both at the same time). The Little Princess Orchestra happily have no truck with such nonsense, approaching communal music creation with the same […]
Casa Nueva Strangely enough, the first thing that comes to mind when listening to Kevin Dunn is just how quintessentially English he sounds – Brian Eno, Wire, TV Personalities – that kind of English. What a surprise then to read the sleeve notes and find out that he actually comes […]
Munster Mid-Sixties garage rock seems in retrospect to have been a grassroots movement on a truly global scale. Forty-five years on, obsessive labels like Munster and QDK Media are still unearthing lost curios, originating from ever more remote and unlikely locations. Who’d have thought that healthy garage scenes thrived in […]
PMag Plymouth’s Pocket Magnetic arrive all packaged in dayglo yellow warning signs – kind of Autobahn meets Computer World. The cover certainly holds a clue as to what to find inside, but there’s more to Pocket Magnetic than a low budget menschmaschine. More than Kraftwerk themselves, Pocket Magnetic remind me […]
Invada David Wrench received an epiphany while trapped in the worthy nu-folk purgatory of the Green Man Festival last year. Surrounded by polite and twee young indie kids who had discovered acoustic instruments and woolly jumpers, he despaired at how a once radical and iconoclastic social force had been reduced […]
Groenland New NEU! Releases are by their very nature important events, their three classic albums having grown in stature year on year since their original release back in the early 70s. Most serious fans of the group will have bought NEU!4 when Ken Matsutani’s excellent Captain Trip Records released it […]
Esoteric Forever doomed to be remembered as the one hit wonder god of hellfire, Arthur Brown is surely a true British eccentric maverick in the tradition of Syd Barrett, Peter Hammill and Genesis P. Orridge. After The Crazy World split, Arthur Brown put together the similarly theatrical group Kingdom Come […]
Gwymon The “quiet one” from Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci has been somewhat, well… quiet of late. In the five years since his former group officially called it a day we have been treated to no fewer than five releases from his ex-bandmate Euros Childs and yet We Went Riding is only […]
Brigadisco Instrumental surf music seems to be making something of a comeback this year, and a most welcome one too. I’ve recently thrilled to the live sounds of excellent Welsh twangsters Y Niwl on a couple of occasions and now the tide has just washed up this split 12” featuring […]
Applebush/Easy Action The world finally caught up with The Stooges when punk exploded, while Iggy himself ingeniously morphed into an alienated teutonic modernist, simultaneously retaining his appeal with the punks while appearing several steps ahead with his two 1977 Berlin albums The Idiot and Lust for Life. By 1979 however, […]
Rascals, Bangor 2 March 2010 For a supposed “Land of Song”, Wales has thrown up surprisingly few truly great musical mavericks over the years. Sure there’s been John Cale and David R. Edwards, and maybe Gruff Rhys and Brian Lustmord but that’s about it. It may then raise an eyebrow […]
(Endgame) Shane Fahey is an ex-member of the seminal Australian post-punk combo The Makers of the Dead Travel Fast, whose much sought-after late 70s and early 80s output has recently resurfaced on a couple of anthologies focussing on the releases of the M Squared label. If anyone was wondering what […]
(Hydrahead) For most of the twenty-eight years since Lustmord’s debut, the lot of a devotee has involved much twiddling of thumbs between infrequent releases and little chance of catching the man live – the portentous date of 06/06/06 seeing his first (and to date only) live appearance since the early […]
Imprint If John Peel were still with us today, he would undoubtedly love Monkey Island. Straddling the aesthetics of his own Dandelion label and his beloved Ron Johnson Records, this Hackney-based group may be the hitherto undiscovered (and indeed unsearched for) missing link between Stackwaddy and Stump. Opening instrumental “Back […]
Further Murmurations sees guitar noise dronemeister Urthona teaming up with London-based electronic boffin The Asterism to create some wonderful alchemy on two long pieces inspired by the natural world in the West Country. Although a CD release, Murmurations is conceived as a classic vinyl LP, with side one’s 24 minute […]