Substantia Innominata The latest instalment in Cédric Peyronnet‘s series of cryptically titled releases as Toy.Bizarre manifests as part of Drone Records‘ lovingly assembled Substantia Innominata imprint, arriving wrapped in a delightfully warped 10″ sleeve which not only manages to make brown and sepia look stunning ( a rare trick), but would also make a great poster as a result. The vinyl inside is clear, however, and each side […]
Linus Tossio
208 posts
Bureau B A companion to the album he and Hans-Joachim Roedelius recorded together, released as Selective Studies Volume One in 2013, 1D takes sketches and solo parts that Lloyd Cole created as part of the process, but that were ultimately unused for the record as a duo. Composed entirely using a modular synthesizer, and instrument that Cole was learning to use as he went along, the eleven tracks […]
Tigertrap The live-wire pairing of drummer Thomas Fuglesang and electronic sound-mangler Jussi Brightmore have come on leaps and bounds, deservedly gathering admirers as they have done so, since their debut album, Silent Cenotaph. First released in 2011 , it’s now finally been blessed with a Tigertrap vinyl edition, wrapped up in as suitably bizarre a gatefold cover as its music deserves and Brightmore could devise. The duo push […]
Drone Pressed on four different mixtures of coloured vinyl and its sleeeve graced by vibrantly lysergic geometrical paintings by Pete Greening, Drone-Mind//Mind-Drone 4 is another landmark release from the label whose very name defines their purpose more than most others. The fourth instalment of Drone Records‘ LP-length explorations of meditative instrumentals of all sorts from across the globe brings to light six new pieces by a quartet of […]
Zoharum (CD)/Sonic Meditations (cassette) From the ominous drones and splutters of “A1V” by way of the decidedly Harmonia-like curlicues of “Crawling Through Crystal Skies” — all twinkly echo trails and meandering electronic rhythms — to the freefall wafts of guitar feedback and multiple effects units orbiting each other in a docking pattern, Solar Drifting does exactly what the album title suggests, conjuring imagery which hovers and glides from […]
Clouds Hill Nisennenmondai are a group whose stage performances are inevitably exercises in hypnotic repetition and mesmerising fascination, so it’s interesting to see just how well it translates to the live album format. As indicated by the title, the disc was recorded as part of the label’s series of such events in front of an audience at Clouds Hill‘s Hamburg studio (the set length limited by the available […]
Ektro Shot over two nights in February 2011, at the Dynamo in Turku and the next day at YK-Klubi in Helsinki, Silta is one of the few Circle DVDs1 released so far which give the viewer a close approximation of the live experience of this most uncategorisably outré of bands. The Dynamo footage which forms the first part is filtered in sepia tones and framed within an oval […]
Haunter Source of Uncertainty is one of those records which pushes the boundaries of expectation quite a bit further than a cursory glance at the list of influences might suggest. So maybe there is techno, electro, Detroit and Berlin-style electronic music in here, and certainly a sense of experiment that is worthy of the term; but Giovanni Napoli’s second Haunter Records release as SOMEC follows on the heels […]
Bureau B Dub is the very beating heart of music made with electric bass and drums, the low end and rhythm pared back to bare essentials as the bedrock of form, then modified with various levels of drenching in echo and other effects. It’s no wonder that a technique developed most prominently in Jamaica in the 1970s went on to enhance and then pretty much take over huge […]
Pulver und Asche Drawing on their collective backgrounds in electro-acoustic composition, electronic music and free improvisation and with a general avant-garde interest in pushing at boundaries and generally mashing things up musically, El Toxyque, Luca “Xelius” Martegani and Zeno Gabaglio do their best to evoke the spirit of TS Eliot‘s The Waste Land on their second album as Niton. Through the application of cello, self-built instrumentation and a […]
Interstellar Based on sounds recorded above and below the surface in the Lofoten Islands, Angélica Castelló‘s compositions on Sonic Blue create an imaginary underwater exploration on the theme of the effects of human sonic intervention in the aquatic soundscape. While both whale and water sounds have been a staple of the new age relaxation industry for decades, Castelló constructs an altogether deeper and different listening experience on Sonic […]
Zoharum The fourth re-release of the Hybryds back catalogue by Zoharum expands at length on their 1991 composition, adding in three more pieces of music, two more parts of the title track and a bonus piece from the same era. Together, they now make up a full album’s worth of largely unheard material. The late Eighties and Nineties saw an upswell of music that aimed for some form […]
Rocket Recordings On In Black And Gold, various intersections between the hypnotic grooves of space rock, kosmische music and freewheeling ’70s hard rock — a template already successfully mapped out by the likes of Circle in their several incarnations over the years — are held up to be examined with curiosity by Hey Colossus and weighed carefully in the balance. The band set about their task with suitably […]
Ritual Productions It’s made abundantly clear across Of Ruin‘s 45 minute running time that this is not a record for listening to at a desk, probably not really on headphones and certainly not on tinny laptop or mobile phone speakers. No, it needs — demands and commands, even — blasting out from the sort of huge stack of amps found at the average metal gig, but only so […]
Zoharum As forbidding and icy as the cracked and scratched surfaces which adorn its sleeve, Austeros opens with shuddering dry heaves of bass which threaten as much as they signify an ominous portent of glacial things to come. Like a heavier doom-laden cousin to Thomas Köner‘s equally resonant arcticscapes, Inner Vision Laboratory sketch out and fill in the detail of sound stages filled with slow — very slow […]
Zoharum Having previously appeared on the label’s From Earth to Sirius compilation in 2011, Expo 70 mark their full album début on Zoharum with not one but two CDs, one a reissue and another a brand-new offering. With a shade under fifty albums alone in his discography, it’s interesting to discover where Justin Wright takes his expanded one-man band on two disparate examples of his ongoing mission to construct […]
On-U Sound/Tectonic One of the genre’s key figures joins forces on Late Night Endless with a genuine wizard of the mixing desk to put the dub back into dubstep (something which it has probably needed for a long time
Staubgold Collected from two years’ worth of home two-track tape recordings made between 1982-1983 by Liquid Liquid‘s percussionist, Reel To Real gathers together Dennis Young‘s sketches of sometimes engagingly naïve acoustic songs alongside frenetic percussion workouts and occasional synth frenzies which prefigure the arrival of drum and bass in their clattery pace. The demo-like quality of most of the material makes for an occasionally intimate and sometimes plain […]