Constellation “Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs eternally.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9 There is a certain comfort in knowing that everything comes back around, from the morning sunrise to […]
J Simpson
63 posts
Bellissima Strip away the commercialism and associations with Christianity, and Christmas is actually rather lovely. In colder climates, coloured lights reflect and refract on snow and ice while friends and family come together over a cosy hearth to exchange gifts and good cheer, insulated against the hoary darkness outside. It’s no coincidence that many if not most cultures in the Northern Hemisphere have some form of celebration near […]
Important Imagine, if you will — you are driving through a vast flat featureless landscape. It is snowing so hard you can barely see, spirals of snow and frost whorling on your windshield. The ground undulates, ever so slightly, the rise-and-fall the only hint of motion, of any life at all. The swells come together, faster and faster, higher and higher, until the frost-bitten landscape becomes like a […]
Rage Peace Ex-Prince Rama frontwoman Taraka Larson returns with her debut solo album, trading in digital exotica for freakout psych garage jams to excellent effect. Prince Rama, also sometimes known as Prince Rama Of Ayodhya, encapsulate a certain particularly far-out strain of late 2000s / early 2010s psychedelia. Darlings of the blogosphere from the very start, they represented a unique moment when particularly weird music was breaking out […]
El Studio 444 and REBOOT Q: What do you get when you cross a twee pop No Wave band, a post-industrial noise outfit, and some Universal Indians, what do you get? A: Nowhere close to anything you’d expect, whatever that might be. “Is that supposed to be some sorta joke?” you may be asking yrself. No, more like a truism, a reminder that the subtle, magical art of […]
Cleopatra Nouvelle Vague‘s Marc Collin adopts a fly-on-the-wall approach with Le Choc du Futur to transport you back in time to a synthetic studio in 1978, peeling back the years to remind us why electronic music truly matters. It’s difficult, if not perhaps impossible, to truly maintain a perspective on the past, especially in regards to technology. Technology that is now commonplace, like holographic projectors or virtual reality, […]
Habibi Funk Habibi Funk‘s Jannis Stürtz unearths a true lost classic of Lebanese folk rock on Mouasalat Ila Jacad El Ard. Lebanon, 1976: A vicious civil war, spanning fifteen years with over 120,000 casualties, is just beginning to rage. The weakened state was invaded by Syria, an occupation lasting until 2005. Dissidents were forced to flee, leaving their homelands and residing in exile. Lebanese folk singer Issam Hajali […]
Important / Cassauna On Arrival Vibrate, Italian post-rock magicians Larsen conjure the rhythmajick of Z’ev in a sprawling twenty-five-minute chamber rock meditation. If you were to observe the floorplan of the Temple of Amun at Karnak, Egypt’s sprawling 250-acre edifice, you might assume it was built willy-nilly over the span of its nearly 2,000 year construction. After all, how could there have been a premeditated construction plan for […]
Chocolate Monk On their second album, Psanck turn in a sprawling yet concise document of impressionistic free improv and modern minimalism, transporting you to some mud-spattered Welsh village to witness an ancient, timeless ritual.
English Heretic English Heretic is an on-going multimedia exploration of various occult threads of British lore — everything from the polished chrome dystopias of JG Ballard to pagan pageantry, all corn rigs and jigs. He draws in tendrils of Crowley‘s 93rd current, mixing with Patrick Keiller‘s situationism and Julian Cope‘s wide-eyed megalith worship. On The Underworld Service, English Heretic unearths the zombified corpse of 1969 into 1970 — […]
Disco Gecko The Sound Of Absence “If a tree were to fall on an island where there were no human beings would there be any sound?” – George Berkeley Have you ever wondered what happens when you’re not around? What Somewhere Else might look like? To look through someone else’s eyes? The limits of knowledge is one of the most frustrating things about being alive – the fact […]
Other Ideas On this beguiling collaboration between Craig Tattersall, of The Boats/Remote Viewer and Thomas Shrubsole (Sub Loam, Jesus On Mars), the pair rouse the question what it means to be free. In doing so, they show us that this freedom is alive and well in the musical underground. For much of music’s recorded history, i.e. the history of western civilization, the tendency has been to further the […]
Clang Frank Benkho takes us on , using a daisy chain of synths and sequencers on this gem from Clang. For the longest time, it seemed like electronic music and improvisation were mutually exclusive. This was the day of the push-button performance, where electronic artists were basically just playing their records off of stored patterns on their machines or DJs concocted carefully constructed breezeblocks, with every transition being […]
More Than Human Board a hovercraft to ride the autobahn of yr dreams on this lovely fissure from Ekoplekz, via the good sonic alchemists at More Than Human Records. 2014 has been a big year for Bristol’s Nick Edwards, following two of his highest-profile — and highest production value — releases on the braindance juggernaut Planet Mu. Mike Paradinas, AKA µ-Ziq, worked head-to-head with Edwards in sequencing the […]
Stone Tapes The Dark Is Rising When it comes to art that is inspired by the horror genre, it can fall into two camps: 1. Art that references horror tropes and classic works of that genre, or. 2. Art that seeks to recreate the sensation of watching, reading, or listening to those works. With Carmilla (Marcilla)/Spectral Visions, from purveyors of classic British doom, Moss, the band goes more […]
Front & Follow Folk (and folk-influenced) art seems to inherently conjure ideas of both memories and a specific place, like the way that American hillbilly music calls up an image of the smoky green mountains of Tennessee, or the Delta blues recalls swamps, alligators, crossroads and dark deeds. Traditional music, whatever its origins, seems attached to earthy, tactile associations as well as personal memories, if one has attachments […]
Tigertrap Rhythm is probably the earliest organizing factor of music, going back to when humanity were beating on rocks and picking up sticks. The rhythm defines what kind of music something is, whether it’s a romantic rockabilly ballad or a classical scherzo; or an aimless ambient drift in its absence. Rhythm is of a piece. With the proliferation of digital recording and the prevalence of pre-recorded loops, there […]
Artemisia On Celestite, the fifth LP from Olympia, Washington’s atavistic warriors Wolves In The Throne Room, the Weaver brothers have done probably the least black metal thing imaginable, and released a record of modular synth soundscapes. And while the keepers of the trve kvlt flame are undoubtedly at home, sharpening their battle axes and planning a jihad, Celestite points out some interesting layers of the modern musical milieu, […]