O2 British Music Experience 25 October 2011 I had never been to the O2 before, but had heard lots of horror stories about it. Apparently it had poor sound, bad visuals, over priced drinks, and terrible for people with vertigo. Luckily enough I was not headed for the main arena – that joy was to be for Cliff Richard’s blue rinse brigade – I was going to the […]
Gary Parsons
259 posts
Universal Egg I originally received a copy of this album a few days after the end of England’s summer riots. The town where I grew up had been one of the worst hit; I watched a business that had been there for over a hundred years burn to the ground as I frantically tried to contact family and friends who still lived there. An element of fear still […]
Arka Sounds OK, so the thought of the world trance music wonders Suns of Arqa doing a cover versions album of Leonard Cohen songs didn’t at first leap off the page or even into my CD player at first. However, after the first initial shock of this venture the album works exceedingly well and creates . It would be pointless to compare the tracks to the original songs […]
Sargent House Well, what can I say…..I was going to start off this review with the same two words used to review Spinal Tap’s Shark Sandwich album…..You see I’ve been a Boris fan and collector for quite a few years, this at times has been quite a hard and infuriating task. They have either constantly recorded two mixes of their albums or added one track on to an […]
GEO Gagarin’s sole member Graham ‘Dids’ Dowdall, has played with various cult and avant-garde and electronic musicians over the years including Nico, John Cale and Suns of Arqa. This polymath of musical activity may go some way to explaining the patch-bay electronica of Biophilia as it majestically slides through 11 tracks of uneasy ambience. At times it’s hardened-edge electronics seems to have more in common with Ben Frost’s […]
Neurot The Valley Path is a spiralling one track mini-album that last just under 40 minutes (that would have been a full length album in the old vinyl days). The track opens with doom laden three note riff with sad sounding vocals that put it more in the vein of Boris and Om as it sludges its way to a wonderful psychedelic guitar solo that sonically uplifts the […]
Parallax Sounds Brian Ellis is the guitar player with the band Astra, whose album The Weirding was one of the best of a batch of progressive rock revival albums released last year. It swept majestically over musical fields covered by Yes, early Genesis and King Crimson. On what appears to be his sixth solo release, Quipu, Ellis touches upon and expands on all these elements to make an […]
Nascente Zion Train began around 1988 and was one of the late John Peel’s favourite live bands. Their music was an essential soundtrack to the free festivals and (new age) traveller scene of the early 90s, their heavy dub sound influencing bands like Back to the Planet to add dub flavours into their songs and inventing a whole new sub-genre of ambient dance music. These guys are important, […]
The Purple Turtle, London 19 April 2011 It’s Sunday, it’s sunny, so a 6.30pm start time for a gig seems terribly early, especially when you have the choice between a sweaty venue or a cool pub beer garden, oh well….. Also putting on four support acts before a main band on a Sunday when public transport is hardly at its greatest (even Lori S from Acid King pointed […]
Monty Maggot OK, let’s start up here with a massive amount of respect to Lee Potts for putting this together. For from the above website, all you have to do is pay the P&P and the disc will wind its way to you from the cosmic reaches of outer space to brighten up your day. The album starts with the Omenopus track “Call Your Name,” a beautiful melancholic […]
The Borderline London 25 February 2011 “We are the survivors, the eternal survivors……” This phrase may have crossed Nik Turner and the rest of his Space Ritual cohorts minds at some points over the years. But here they are still playing some of the best darn space rock this side of the Andromeda galaxy. Before I start reviewing the tracks played I must make a special mention about […]
Robot Elephant/Homeopathic Collecting Acid Mothers Temple releases can leave you very light in the wallet area (I know this from experience) due to the volume of their output . So there is quite a minefield of material out there to negotiate, some amazing, some a little like the band treading water. As I know AMT well it was going to be interesting to hear what Stearica, a band […]
Static Caravan In 1977 I got hold of a copy of Jean Michel Jarre’s Oxygene – and if you would like to get the 21st century version of this album you could a lot worse than buy the new Steve Moore album… Well, there’s one thing you have to say about Zombi man Steve Moore, he must have a very healthy bank account judging by the amount of […]
Bureau B Ok, as most of the people reading this will know Faust were one of the most important bands of the 1970s Krautrock movement and have an incredible important body of work behind them. Also at this moment in time there appears to be two Fausts, so this is Jean Hervé Péron and Zappi W Diermaier’s Faust aided and abetted by Gallon Drunk‘s James Johnston and Bender’s […]
MiG/Captain Trip After spending the last few years playing live with Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard, Klaus Schulze thought it was time to get back to playing some ‘pure’ Schulze live and this is exactly what this double disc delivers. Schulze had not played in Japan since 2003 and these shows were set up by a fan of the man. It seems as if Klaus took this on […]
The Forum, London 17 December 2010 This is Earth calling, this is Earth calling…… It’s mid-winter, snow is on the ground and Arctic winds blow and London is bought to a stand still by Tube strikes and 2cm of the white stuff (no not the “Right Stuff”). Beaming down from their planet, Hawkwind are on their usual winter solstice space ritual tour and tonight is its final night. […]
The Scala, London 11 December 2010 The first time I saw The Orb play live was at the time of the release of their album Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. At that time the techno/ambient/trance scene was at an all-time high with a plethora of new bands using psychedelic images and pushing at making the underground become overground. The Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” drifted through the spring and summer […]
Neurot Run Thick in the Night is USX‘s (as they are sometimes called) fifth album and the first I have heard and I’m really quite impressed… The album begins with the 13 minute opus “In the Night” witch starts off with a guitar and keyboard drone reminiscent in sound to that of The Doors‘ “The End” before the track catapults into the main section of big power chord […]