Important Warning: much tl;dr within. Minimal squee. Tread ye carefully. Initial thoughts on Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis‘s Chamber Music CD were something like: why would you put those two together? It’s an odd pairing. People really fall in love with Morton Feldman. He makes, at turns, utterly inscrutable, glacial, cold, dark, wrecked music that’s not so much impenetrable as it is a funeral for tonality. But note […]
Kev Nickells
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Mute / Cherry Red Thirty years a classic. A record that’s hugely saturated in my childhood — it might be my favourite Erasure album, or it might be the one that I heard most through my sister’s walls in the late 80s. There’s not much I still listen to from when I was a bairn, but Erasure sit in that category right next to Dolly Parton and The […]
Svart The band name is (possibly) a play on their instruments rather than their trade — it’s a trio of Finnish men playing on a bunch of junk instruments — a repurposed laundry rack, a wash tub bass, that sort of thing. It’s mixed by Einstürzende Neubauten‘s Alexander Hacke who, as you’re probably aware, knows a thing or two about ekeing elegance from repurposed industrial shrapnel.
Discus Ron Caines, for those who don’t know, is a bit of an unsung hero in some circles. He’s probably best known for East Of Eden, way back when, but he’s something of a renaissance man — accomplished visual artist, composer, free musician, gurt Bristolian… Sadly, Caines’ discography isn’t as fulsome as it should be, which is the case for way too many players outside of big fancy […]
Dry Cough I’m not sure if it splits cleanly down the middle, but I tend to think there’s two types of heavy music — music that sounds like the smell of melted plastic, warped doorframes and scattered glass of a burnt-out building, and stuff that’s clean. Happily, this falls into the former category. A bass sound that’s less bass teacher with a neat ponytail and more holding to […]
Mute Laibach doing The Sound of Music. If those words hold any meaning for you, you’ve pretty much already heard this album. You’re probably already aware that this is a bunch of studio recordings inspired by a performance they did in DPRK.
ABKCO I’ve always fucking hated The Beatles and I know that our Ma once said, in a louche fashion, that she preferred The Rolling Stones in the ’60s. I’m going to assume that was because of the better tunes and, like, generally being nicer to look at. She’s not really a one for your rock stuff, our Ma
Anthology This is a CD to go with a book about that library music there used to be. It’s about curios, you see? So here we have another sense of curios. I like the Rolling Stones, say, but it’s just such a thing from another time for me. Curio. This is probably more directly obviously a curio. Library music. Curio.
Brighton 2 November 2018 A story of intrigue, a tale of great mystery. A band of psychedelic travellers. A man so consumed by unctuous emissions that it was described as cagoule-like.
“” — Lisa Jayne Following the release of their latest Void Axis CD via Fourth Dimension and Foolproof Projects, Lisa Jayne and Andy Pyne sat down to discuss the album, their music, art, methods, origins and sources of inspiration with Kev Nickells. The interview is presented as two audio recordings
Newhaven Fort, East Sussex 22 September 2018 Ahhh, that relentless rain! After a blazing summer it’s great to get back to some genuine English weather, isn’t it? And boy, it rained all day, meaning a lot of the improv parade ground goodness at Fort Process‘s 2018 edition got secreted away, upping the happen-upon expectation to rise that bit higher.
Glitterbeat Stella Chiweshe is somewhat of a legend in certain circles — a real global advocate for mbira music as well as a feminist icon — playing mbira at a time when colonial (then) Rhodesia forbade it, establishing a woman’s music festival in Zimbabwe, and all that good stuff. Of course this isn’t why you should buy this record. You should buy it because it’s lovely and you like […]
Beggars Arkive A case study in writing reviews on the cheap: – where possible, try and ensure that the audience is already familiar with the music. The upshot of this is that everyone’s already made up their minds — your writing is only ever manifesting an individual’s preconceptions about that band. Whether fatuous or heartfelt (probably both), the caprice that #musicjournalism is anything other than vainglorious ballast and […]
Ahead of this year’s Fort Process festival, headliner Rhys Chatham kindly lent his words to some questions posed by Kev Nickells. For this edition of the festival, he’ll be bringing a performance of his solo work Pythagorean Dream. Kev Nickells: So the first thing I’d like to pick up on is a point from the last interview I did with you — there was a bit where a distinction […]
Self-released Been sat on this for ages like an absolute fuckstand, but it’s a grower. Or perhaps a seeper, in the sense of the dreadful mould problem in Brighton, or the inexorable vortex of death. That kind of deal. You’re probably not familiar with Sam Cutting, but if you are it’s either as the kind of singer-songwriter that doesn’t have you screaming
Transgressive tl;dr: does this sound like the best thing you’ve ever heard? If you answered yes, read on. If it doesn’t, kindly fuck off or listen to it again, you feckless wank. So here’s the good news: it’s the album you wanted because you listened to “It’s Okay To Cry”, “Ponyboy” and “Faceshopping” already. In fact, this review is most likely an abject lesson in the fatuous
Cherry Red Arcane shibboleths wasn’t necessarily the core of The Fall, but they were often the grist in the coal mill. I’ve bloody prevaricated on this review for yonks, which is ridiculous as it’s The Fall album I’ve probably listened to most since that fateful week in 1997 when I bought a record and was mildly outraged at what an incoherent mess it was.
It’s May, so it means that it’s time for Kev Nickells to get the Eurovision ball a-rolling with the annual round-up of what’s grot and what’s not. Gay Christmas comes around so quickly and by the spirit of Judy Garland we are once again blessed with another bumper bonanza of Eurojoy this year.