Label: Beta-lactam Ring Format: LP Opening with a gurgling faux-didj sheen which soon develops into a four-floored drumkit rhythm of the not-quite title track, She And Me Fall Together In Free Death finds Steven Stapleton expanding the consciousness of his Nurse With Wound project in further psychedelic directions.
Linus Tossio
Label: Beta-Lactam Ring Records Format: 2LP,CD As is only to be expected from someone who contributed so much to the classic Nineties Legendary Pink Dots guitar sound, Martijn de Kleer‘s So Close Yet So Far Out spreads out into psychedelic space as deep as the images from Hubble used on the cover art. Trippy is the word, and then some, though for the most part de Kleer shows […]
Label: Nonplace Format: CD,LP Burnt Friedman‘s latest gathering of musicians from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres brings together the usual Dub influences with a healthy dose of fractured Funk and Souldful vocal stylings and brass arrangements. As such, it’s a heady slice of Post-modern collage and remodelling, from the strangely-parcelled version of the “Fuck Back” 12″ with its laid back, slightly sinister vocal from Theo Altenberg onwards. Proceeding […]
The Buffalo Bar, London 16 March 2003 The Guinea Pig club’s second outing finds the experiment being performed through the strange filter of Hyper Kinako, an Anglo-Japanese power Punk Pop band. As they’ve apparently got classical training to back up their skittish riffs and obscure lyrics, it’s no surprise that the delivery is precise in it’s chaos, a well-drilled cacophony of rattly percussion and reedy keyboards which includes […]
Label: Constellation Format: 2LP,CD Yanqui U.X.O. is a record that demands time and attention to it’s myriad details as they shimmer past in a gathering whirl of music that sounds absolutely and profoundly played, rather than constructed, by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Recorded by Steve Albini with all his usual craftsmanship, this slow-building album coruscates with a stately emotional fire which reflects the band’s personal-political agenda of righteous […]
Label: Kitty-Yo (Europe) Mute (North America) Format: CD/LP Tarwater return, enigmatic and phlegmatic as ever with Dwellers On The Threshold, charting journeys across an imaginary landscape of shifting borderlands and elusive edges. Opening with the hypnotic and immediately engaging “70 Rupies To Paradise Road”, with words spoken on this occasion by Tone Avenstroup, it is apparent that there is something special about this record. Partly thanks to a […]
Label: Beta-Lactam Ring Records Format: CD, Limited LP Argentinian three piece Reynols have been walking their own particularly strange path for nearly a decade, droning and chugging on a collection of home-made and improvised instruments and guitars, with everything underpinned by the percussive and vocal drive of Miguel Tomasín. Their sound is at first chaotic and then enveloping, with walls of distortion and other effects piled on the […]
Label: Threshold House Format: CD Assembled by John Balance and Peter Christopherson with the early 2002 tour line up of Ossian Brown (from Cyclobe), Cliff Stapleton and Michael York and initially only available at those gigs, The Remote Viewer marks an intriguing shift in the scope of Coil‘s hyper-psychedelic sound. Running on a foundation of Lovecraftian electronics and the sinuous drones of Stapleton’s hurdy gurdy and York’s Breton […]
The Garage, London 8 June 2002 Circle look worryingly like they’re going to play pub-Rock covers of Judas Priest – but fortunately nothing could be further from the truth. Finland’s finest space rockers (with the emphasis on the rock) have all the churning drive of Hawkwind at their psychedelic wind-tunnel best, with all the extraneous Blues influences stripped down to the bare rage of fuzz and phaser set […]
Trash @ The End, London 11 February 2002 The End is a fairly bad venue for a live gig. The room where Bobby Conn is playing tonight is wide but not deep enough to hold the capacity crowd who have sweated their way into the bar area to witness Chicago’s favourite Judeo-Christian Edutainer develop his own particlar brand of FM Radio cabaret Art-Rock. Add in the lack of […]
Label: Rocketgirl/Mind Expansion Format: CD Füxa‘s sixth album finds Randall Nieman‘s particular take on guitary synth music (or perhaps, synthy guitar music) developed yet further into a sound of drones and melodies which insinuate their way into the background and back again. Aided by the steadfast drumming of Drew Peters and occasional low-key vocal contributions from Stephen Lawrie and Jo Doran, Supercharged will more than likely have started […]
Label: United Dairies Format: CD One of Nurse With Wound‘s most assuredly out there recordings in a career constructed from such moments, Santoor Lena Bicyle takes many of the elements of rhythm and groove Steven Stapleton and collaborators have been working on over the last few releases, condenses them, mashes them up again and throws half away to produce a further chapter of derangement. With Aranos on board, […]
Label: Ralph (America)/EuroRalph (Europe) Format: DVD, CD (soundtrack only) There have been plenty of strange and powerful musicians and groups out there for many a long year. Captain Beefheart, Coil, Wesley Willis, Ken Nordine and so forth, each extending the realms of taste and disrupting the boundaries of what exactly constitues music and art . Then there are The Residents. Through thirty years of wilful obscurity and cutting-edge […]
Arts Café, Toynbee Hall, London 3 July 2001 One of the things about getting older is the urge to mellow out, to chill into a fully-realised state. Warn Defever has been skimming the surfaces and wading into the depths of music for over a decade now, and his frequently disparate collision of sounds and genres onto each His Name Is Alive record has been whittled down into a […]
Label: Speakerphone Format: 7″ Tucked away on this seven inch disc of transparent red plastic is one of Black Heart Procession‘s mini masterpieces of melancholic glorying in the sadness of things in general and the passing of time in particular. “Love Sings A Sunrise” coasts on a slow-turning beat and a lambent shimmer of electronic detritus, with Pall Jenkins‘s mournfoul voice declaiming his lost love as the band […]
Label: ROIR Format: CD,LP Raz Mesinai‘s fourth album as Badawi soon kicks into the urgent strains of “Evocation”, a piece in the same frenetic style of his earlier Final Warning EP on Asphodel, riding on the clink of bells, the rumble and rhythm of the self-sampled and realtime Middle Eastern instrumentation of his Jerusalem background. Inflected with the dry shimmer of the Sinai Desert occasionally leavened with the […]
Cargo, London 28 February 2001 It only seems like, ooh, five years since Rough Trade were celebrating their 20th year as the Indiest of Indie shops; tonight’s gig in the cavernous railway arches which are the hyper-trendy Cargo venue showcases some of recent years’ emergent electronic and guitar-droning artists. First up is the geekly-chic Duplo, who continues in jump-cut noise Electro style even through his towered-up PC crashes […]
Label: M Records Format: CD, LP The indefatigable Ryan Moore keeps up the Dub pressure with this, his seventh album release as Twilight Circus, purveyor of fine Seventies-styled Dubs to the kids… and beyond. One of the first impressions of Dub Voyage, as is only to be expected, is the bass. Tons of the stuff, and warm, gloopy booms of it; while the LP starts off gently enough, […]