Klangbad In The Brain of Moebius, Moebius – his mind now encased in a hairy Frankenstein-style monster body – responded to taunts from Conrad Schnitzler, and the two Kraut Lords battled it out in a mind-bending contest which saw Moebius eventually chased out onto the mountains, plummeting over the cliffs to his doom… Now I admit I could have that wrong. It’s possible that 1971 in fact saw Schnitzler […]
David Solomons
121 posts
Tin Angel “The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” In the summer of 1741, George Frideric Handel, broke and depressed, inserted this insanely great Biblical quotation from Corinthians into a little number he managed to belt out in a mere 24 days. The fact that the end product of this feverish tumult of composition was The Messiah, one of […]
Gnostic Dirt Even in this age of Tunng, Espers and countless assorted other groovy out-there New Folk outfits who are busy fusing ancient melodies and instrumentation with samples, beats and all the trappings of hip urban coolness as fast as their little hands can programme, for most people the word ‘Folk’ still brings to mind images of worthy acoustic sing-a-longs, beards and real ale as relentlessly as driving […]
Broken Horse Peaches and cream, assault and battery, Damon and Naomi…some things are just made to go together… With the unbelievable proliferation of ‘Americana’ over the past dozen or so years (just check out the bulging racks in Rough Trade), it’s hard to remember a time before such market segmentation set in so ferociously, when acts such as Giant Sand, Galaxie 500 and The Palace Brothers wafted in […]
Southern Lord It’s somewhat startling to realise that more time has now elapsed since the release of Winter’s seminal doom metal masterpiece Into Darkness – twenty one years – than had passed since the release of Black Sabbath when Into Darkness first appeared. For a genre as oft derided, sneered at and generally treated with contempt by the mainstream of ‘serious’ musicians, forty years is a pretty fucking […]
Modisti In 1961, Harold Pinter was in Paris, attending rehearsals for the French production of his play The Caretaker. Pinter’s critical reputation was starting to gain serious traction at this time, and the literary establishment were beginning to write about him as the natural successor to Samuel Beckett in the same way that they had once referred to Beckett himself as the successor to James Joyce. The play’s […]
Esoteric He is the God of Hellfire, and he brings you FIRE! No really, he does. Back in his 1968 prime, Arthur Brown really wasn’t fucking around. Watch the contemporary Top of the Pops footage of the finest Yorkshireman ever to leave the Dales, his flaming helmet burning like Osiris reincarnated in Manchester, and then try telling me that Alice Cooper – and a whole generation of latter-day […]
Tin Angel Green and grey, the grass and the concrete, the juxtaposition between the natural world and the man-made built environment that must now co-exist with it, ideally in harmony, yet in practice all too often in conflict. Across the 11 tracks contained within, New York-based Canadian cellist Julia Kent builds a beautiful tone poem in which to explore the tensions inherent in humanity’s relationship with the world […]
L.M. Duplication In the early 1980s, Ivo, founder of the 4AD record label (historic home of acts including The Cocteau Twins, The Birthday Party and Pixies, and current label behind Camera Obscura, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Tindersticks and Scott Walker), was given an audio cassette by razor-cheekboned Bauhaus frontman Pete Murphy. Although it was an umpteenth generation copy, and probably sounded like it had been recorded through an […]
Sonic Youth Recordings I can still remember the electric thrill that jolted through me on first seeing the picture of Sonic Youth on the rear cover of Bad Moon Rising: clustered around that Ed Gein Halloween scarecrow, under a bruised mid-Western sky, the look of sneering distain on Thurston Moore’s face beneath his thatch of blond hair, awkward yet threatening in his combat jacket. The feeling was crystallised […]
Drag City It’s easy to forget how dismal the nation felt when the early High Llamas albums appeared. Like an unwanted, puke-spattered drunk still hanging around at the morning-after clear-up of a party, the fag end of the (last) Tory government had clung on for years after Thatcher was driven away from Downing Street for the last time with tears in her eyes. It was an exhausted, morally […]
Crammed Discs To borrow the imprecation that Debbie Harry once sang so passionately in 1978, “Picture this.” However, rather than a sky full of thunder, or for that matter Debs’ telephone number (wistful sigh…), try instead . For a finishing touch, decorate the neck and body of this Heath Robinson musical contraption with band names (in the manner of a rock band’s kick drum), slogans and even designs […]
Aurora Borealis 12th February 1923, Cefalù, Sicily – Evening. Aleister – God I hate Mondays, they’re so dreary. Aud, why don’t you put something on the gramophone? Surely you must have brought some of the latest sounds with you from London? Raoul – Yes, great master, I have with me a choice selection of discs. What can I tempt you with? Some Coil? Horse […]