Spezialmaterial From the opening drone and chiming guitar trills of “Lovelight,” it’s evident that Zurich’s Hard Coming Love are big, big fans of West Coast psych, Spacemen 3, and among others, of course, The United States of America, the second track of whose similarly self-titled album provided the band’s (slightly […]
Linus Tossio
208 posts
Room40 “Oansome” is a word coined by Russell Hoban, American author of the triumphantly bleak post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker, set in Kent after a nuclear war has ravaged the land and left the survivors scrabbling to survive and speaking in a language as changed by the Bomb as the landscape […]
United Dirter Sweeping in on modernist orchestrations, Rupture is a very different kind of Nurse With Wound collaboration, though there is plenty which harks back to Steve Stapleton‘s tape-loop manipulations of orchestral music both in Nursey guise and with Current 93‘s earlier harshly overbearing recordings in the pre-Apocalyptic Folk days. […]
MVD Visual This is the DVD and Blu Ray edition of a performance of Raw Power by Iggy & The Stooges‘ at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in September 2010, not long after the untimely death of founder member Ron Asheton. The CD edition included all eight songs (albeit reordered) from […]
Lumberton Trading Company As part of the Lumberton Trading Company‘s limited edition subscription series (others in the set include Glass Out – with vox from the late Jhonn Balance; the ever-crackly Main; Brian Conniffe; Human Greed;and Jean-Hervé Péron plus guests) of 12″ singles, Cindytalk – (AKA Gordon Sharp) teams up […]
(self-released) Cozmic Onion Express are one of those bands it would be far better to see live than listen to on this record. There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with it at all; in fact it’s a great introduction from one of the most zanily accomplished head-messing bands in London right now. […]
Agitated Taken – kidnapped, stripped, re-educated and reborn, even – from Mugstar‘s heavyweight slab of spacerocking goodness [post=mugstar-lime text=”Lime”] and given a thorough going over by Robert Hampson of Main and Loop fame, “Serra” reappears in a 39 minute extended format on clear green vinyl (split in two parts) and […]
Essence Music A welcome re-release in lavish packaging for Aidan Baker‘s 2007 CDR-only effort, complete with remastering at the hands of the deservedly legendary James Plotkin. Noise of Silence finds Baker in muttering loopy mode once again, with ominous, faintly mechanical sounds trilling, sussurating and billowing around what could be […]
Rotorelief From the moment Bryin Dall starts singing “I Feel So Lonesome I Could Cry,” it’s evident that this is no ordinary selection of Hank Williams covers. With everyone (and probably their dog) who ever played a guitar seemingly having tackled their own version of the Hank Williams œuvre, Dall’s […]
Drag City It’s fair to say that the motorik template is now so firmly embedded into popular music that a waft of Klaus Dinger‘s beloved rhythm can trickle over the PA in an mid-range department store pretty much anywhere from John Lewis to Galeries Lafayette via Macy’s and no-one browsing […]
ConSouling Sounds Rippling with softly-struck piano strings echoing through a slow accretion of sonorous drone fragments, the opening minutes of Lost in the Rat Maze finds Aidan Baker stepping briefly into the brightly-lit fresh air from the more weather-beaten fuzz and feedback soundscapes of Nadja and some of his other […]
Beta-Lactam Ring Swooping up from the depths of infrasound, Tecumseh bring a faint whiff of glitch and a hint of industrial shiver to the emergent doom on Return to Everything, and the electronics thicken into string-driven rumbling among the encroaching wall of full-spectrum FX. The metal starts to kicking properly as […]
The Underworld, London 18 April 2011 From the very first beer-waving introduction to the crowd eagerly awaiting the return to what would seem to be their favourite London home from home, Weedeater arrive in cheery mood, lapping up the adulation and ripping straight into a fearsome “God Luck and Good […]
The Scala, London 12 April 2011 Sabbath Assembly is the rather surprising spin-off from noise-manglers and avant scribblers the No-Neck Blues Band. Surprising why, exactly? Not just because they show that, yes, they are actually good musicians, but that they can also play tight, Seventies-style power pop of the sort […]
Dekorder Branching out into conceptual composition with Ensemble Intégrales, Felix Kubin acted as a sort of central engineer/conductor for this piece, with each instrument recorded live with no overdubs in separate rooms at the Westwerk cultural centre in Hamburg under Kubin’s supervision, and the results edited by him down into […]
Enraptured The most obvious thing to say about Autopia in the first instance is that Eat Lights, Become Lights are unafraid of putting their influences to the fore, wearing them proudly as signposts to a whole series of strands of underground music across the decades, and as with their live […]
The Lexington, London 19 January 2011
It's a red-light night tonight at The Lexington, north London's finest whiskey bar and excellent venue to boot. Red décor and red lights make for a surreally-flattened visual experience, as if watching tonight's bands during one of the more blood-soaked sections of Suspiria. But there's no gothic horror show from Eat Lights, Become Lights - their take on psychedelic immersion is far more in the Düsseldorf tradition, as befits what is effectively Klub Motorik's house band.
The Lexington, London 5 November 2010 As a night taking its title (Death to Trad Rock) from John Robb‘s book about the Eighties underground music scene in the UK, and held on the 405th anniversary of the gunpowder plot to destroy Parliament, it’s not surprising that there’s an atmosphere of […]
Conspiracy Two oddities from the pacific North-West USA’s favourite oddball ethnodelic forgers of all things conjured up from an alternate world music scene. Side one’s “Themes From The Motion Picture Man With The Green Gloves On” is a slice of solemn gamelan’n’drone in their usual temple of the weird mode, […]
Beta-Lactam Ring Records It might be thought that with a title like Nostalgia Ever After that Sand Snowman would be revivifying old-school folkies with a penchant for replicating the sound of chiming bells and hippydom sat cross-legged around lava lamps while the bong slowly bubbles over paisley dreams worthy of […]