Bureau B I was overjoyed to hear that Peter Baumann was stepping back behind the keyboards to record a new album after so many years. Most people know Baumann for being part of the classic line-up that produced huge galactic-sounding Tangerine Dream albums such as Phaedra and Rubycon during the mid Seventies. And its seems that the death of Tangs founder member Edgar Froese in January 2015 was […]
Gary Parsons
259 posts
London 17 May 2016 This is the first of two sold-out shows for Max Richter at The Barbican and there is a buzz around the audience about how two beautiful and intense albums will translate live. For starters this is no rock’n’roll concert, so there is no-one viewing the entire gig down their phone, in fact no one even takes a photo, which was quite wonderful. The mood […]
Electrowerkz, London 13 May 2016 It’s Friday the thirteenth, the day of bad vibes, things going wrong and surreal killers with ski masks. Some people even refuse to leave the house on this day, in case they accidentally fall over a black cat or walk under a ladder. The thing is, you know when Electric Moon are in town, any heavy bad luck nonsense will dissipate in a glow […]
London 10 May 2016 Tonight initially felt like it was going to be a strange experience. As a Yes fan for many years and seeing them play live quite a few times (oddly, the first time was on the Drama tour) this would be their first London outing without founder member and bassist Chris Squire, who passed away last year. So in a strange way, I wasn’t quite […]
Sulatron (CD) / Pancromatic (vinyl) In the TV series Cosmos, Carl Sagan travelled the universe and beyond in his spaceship of the mind to transport the humble viewer at home to worlds beyond our imagination, taking us into the deep realms of space. While he sat there at the controls of his craft, Sagan would offer thoughts on humanity and how small we really are among the vast […]
London 29 April – 1 May 2016 Desertfest is the place where the stoned immaculate of Britain (and several other countries) meet in one of London’s coolest areas, watch some of the heaviest (and out there) bands over a three day period in five different venues.
Spinefarm/Machine Elf Purson’s second album seems to have been a long time coming for their growing army of fans. With the stop gap EP In The Meantime giving us a glimpse into the direction the band would head towards next, it can now be seen as only a prelude to this multi-coloured psychedelic concept piece that will probably have people deciphering its meaning for the next twenty years.
Instrumentarium Creative Listening is the second album from the South London-based trio, released on lovely vinyl. According to the credits on the back it say it was written and recorded “in strict adherence to the manifesto”, which sounds like something you would see on the back of a Throbbing Gristle or Psychic TV album many years ago. Instead, the manifesto seems to be about the use of electronics […]
London 16 March 2016 I had not been to the 100 Club in many years, so had forgotten what a strange space it is. The fact that the stage is put against a side wall so there is actually more standing space either side of than in front of it is kind of odd. But in the end none of this mattered as I was there to witness […]
London 11 March 2016 I had not been to King’s Place before, but had been reliably informed that the venue was excellent acoustically for folk concerts. The place has an almost Barbican feel about it, and is quite old school in that no intermission drinks were allowed in the venue, which saw people necking them pretty quickly before Vashti Bunyan’s set. The concert hall is beautiful, though and […]
London 29 February 2016 Monday is never the best night for gigs in London. There certain left-over feeling in the air from Sunday and for most it’s the first day of the working week. So an evening of dark esoteric music may not be high on most people’s radar. But this being The Black Heart, there is always a regular group of heavy metal freaks to pack out […]
Carpark The world has changed and moved on since Prince Rama were a three piece with ritual psychedelic overtones and a multi-coloured vision of India running through their music. Since then they have been whittled down to the two Larson sisters, who have taken the band in a very different directions from disco to almost noise music. Xtreme Now pushes this envelope even further out there.
Sulatron Live, Electric Moon always hit you right in the third eye and this album recorded in Battenberg on the second of July (my birthday) in 2011 is a good document of everything the band are great at. So grab your stash, flick through some underground comix, get the joss sticks started and clutch your pocket I Ching and off we go.
Sulatron Let us journey in to the far reaches of space. Let our mind travel through dark matter and push forward the boundaries of human knowledge. What soundtrack should we have for this celestial voyage to the outer regions? Why, Sula Bassana’s new album, of course.
earMusic It was the late Seventies when I discovered Yes via a friend of mine. At first I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. There were all these complex time signatures and chord sequences flying around from my stereo that at times it felt like music from another world. Soaring over all this alien music was the voice of Jon Anderson, high in its register, seeming almost […]
Rocket It’s the shortest day of the year and Hills’ Frid album is bringing some summer warmth on a midwinter’s day — blasting, beautiful, fuzzed-out freak beat psychedelia from Gothenburg’s finest. “Kollektiv” is like a slab of 1969 all rolled up in a glorious joint of mellow psychedelic madness. From its fuzzed out opening to its sitar-laden exit, this is . It so perfectly captures a certain era […]
The Arkive/Beggars Banquet Gary Numan’s Top Of The Pops performance of “Are Friends Electric” was the Bowie “Starman” flashpoint for my generation (those creeping around the 50s age bracket). In school the next day we had many discussions about it, the weird music, the weird look, etc; it was like Kraftwerk but darker and, to be honest, just seemed alien to us. That performance changed lots of people’s […]
London 26 November 2015 This keeps on happening at the moment: two great gigs are on the same night. A couple of weeks back it was Graveyard versus Pentagram and tonight it’s Uncle Acid versus Om. It says a lot about the exponential growth of the doom/stoner/occult rock scene in the last couple of years that these two shows could coexist with each other on the same night […]