Cooking Vinyl Ever since The Orb’s first album The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld you could almost feel that somewhere down the line this collaboration would take place. The Orb have always added dub themes to their music to add to the blissful wholeness of the dance experience and to get the people on the floor . On this album you get The Orb at their dubby best with […]
Gary Parsons
259 posts
Latitudes In the pagan world there are important times of year called the solstices and also various moon and planetary cycles that affect mankind on his journey around the shining orb of the sun. Sometimes musicians from ancient tribes would tap into these energy patterns and create music to conjure up atmospheres, forms and shapes of the elder gods who once resided here. Sylvester Anfang II’s music over […]
O2 Academy, London 23 May 2012 Ah, the British summertime, the time for festivals, too much sport on the TV, beer gardens and BBQs. But not this year, for the past month it had rained everyday, festivals would have been mud baths, sporting events cancelled and beer gardens and BBQs were just a faint and distant memory as rivers of water run through the streets. Then the Ozrics […]
Ritual Productions The drone is king, it calls from the high mountain tops, it echoes in the valleys, it is the sound of ancient ritual or the smell of incense from temples, long may the drone exist. Bong have had number of releases over the past couple of years, many of them in limited editions; this is their second release on Ritual Productions and consists of two tracks […]
The Borderline, London 29 April 2012 It had been raining solid for 24 hours. The streets of London were filled with a babbling brook of water that the sodden masses had to navigate to stop them from getting drenched further and all the while more fell from the sky to dampen peoples Saturday night. As I entered The Borderline the place was already beginning to fill out early. […]
Symbolic Insight This is a debut album by Colorado duo Sonolumina. The album mixes ambient music with world music and trance. Between the duo they play a mixture of traditional instrumentation such as flutes, violins and trumpets as well as Indian tablas. The whole comes together in as well. “Fire” features drones and electronic percussion that sound like the beginning of a journey into foreign lands. “Sona” is […]
Monty Maggot The Plague is [post=omenopus-time-flies text=”Omenopus”]‘ sophomore album, a double disc worth of songs that takes us on a whirlwind of an emotional rollercoaster ride across its two silvery surfaces. Disc one (or rather the first disc I placed into the machine, as I have the feeling you could play either disc first) contains the four part concept piece “The Plague.” This is a twenty minute opus […]
Neurot/Supernatural I was wondering, as I took my copy of Topographic Oceans off the turntable, why the dark overlords at Freq Towers felt that I should review the new Ufomammut concept album that will be released in two instalments this year. I scratched my chin a slid the CD from its case and pondered to myself about this. Hmmmmm……… Oro seems to be based around some sort alchemical […]
Noh Poetry Astralfish are Bridget Wishart and Don Falcone, who here create cosmic melodies with a whole host of special guests including Daevid Allen from Gong. With sixteen tracks across its shimmering disc we should venture forth into the beautiful beyond to tell you all what glories there are to behold. The opening track “Far” includes Allen’s gliss guitars and has a other world feel similar to the […]
The Borderline, London 23 March 2012 The Deviants blasted out of the underground psychedelic scene in 1967. While Syd Barrett was taking the Pink Floyd into outer space and Jimi Hendrix was making his guitar wail to all the ‘foxy ladies,’ Mick Farren’s gang of urchins were singing the hymns of squat-land. With albums such as Ptoof!, Disposable and 3, the troubadours of Notting Hill sang proto-punk anthems […]
Riot Season With its pun title based on the Syd Barrett Pink Floyd album, the new Acid Mothers album seems to be one of their most scorching psychedelic yet, but in a very traditional way. The opening track “Chinese Flying Saucer” has Led Zepplin’s “A Whole Lotta Love” stamped all over it, from the opening riff to the faux Robert Plant vocals to the bizarre middle instrumental lead […]
The Borderline, London 13 January 2012 “Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.” Like the spaceship in Ray Bradbury’s book about to blast its cargo to Mars, Space Ritual have a constant feel of the summer, their music warming even the coldest of winters evenings. The sense of free festivals and long warm days hangs in the air and a mystical pan […]
Brixton Academy, London 18 December 2011 Brixton is a place that has changed a lot over the past twenty odd years. It feels very different now then when I lived (well squatted) there in the late eighties, at that time the riots had calmed down but there was still a sense of unease . It now feels less tense and has quite up-market café culture and some of […]
Shepherd’s Bush Empire London 11 December 2011 Ok, I admit it…..I missed Hugh Lloyd Langton’s set because I was in the pub watching Hawkwind covers band Hoaxwind and enjoying them way too much. They played a superb set of Hawkwind classics (including “Needle Gun” which I had not heard in years and sounded amazingly good), and were fantastic great fun and sounded quite amazing. If you have not […]
Umbilical Ok, where do I begin? This is a monumental release! Yeah, I like that even though it feels somewhat understated. Hmmmm, all right lets start with a bit of background info; Omnia Opera first appear in the mid-Eighties new psychedelic boom that spawned venues like The Deptford Crypt and big one-off festivals like Acid Daze and watched Ozric Tentacles shoot to fame. A little later Delerium Records […]
Monty Maggot Over the past year or so Monty Maggot have steadily been releasing high-quality albums including a marvellous [post=allies-and-clansmen text=”free album”] that could be seen as a taster for future releases. Its certainly a label that deserves support for the diversity of artists they are looking to put out. So what is there to expect from the album by Nineteentwelve? A lot of cracking tunes, that’s what! […]
Corsica Studios, London 17 November 2011 I’ve probably seen Acid Mothers Temple play at Corsica Studios more times than any other venue in London and they always seem at home and relaxed on stage here. This I’ve sometimes felt is quite odd, as Corsica feels like one of those venues that is struggling to find its own identity. It caters for the Hip crowd but also puts on […]
Malicious Damage After last year’s cosmic collaboration with David Gilmour, [post=orb-featuring-david-gilmour-metallic-spheres text=”Metallic Spheres”], The Orb come back down to earth with a bump for their new album C Batter C. It’s effectively a soundtrack for a film and an exhibition that was held in Brixton in London at the end of last year. But do the separate pieces stand up on their own, without the aid of a […]