Play Loud! What a pleasure this LP is, a refreshing skew of anarchic jazz / freestyle surgery and falling downstairs momentums. There’s a manic urgency that makes AIDS Delikat one of my favourites of the Tapetopia series so far. Recorded at the end of 1984, Christmas market sounds intersperse the action. The ping(ed) recoil of air-gun darts mingling with festive barrel organs, weaving between the goods, the fruit […]
Michael Rodham-Heaps
459 posts
Rocket This has a weird energy, a smokey commune bonfiring prog, hippy trippiness and the more esoteric end of the musical spectrum. A flamboyant mirage angeling the experimental itch of the Ya Ho Wha 13, King Crimson and Comus (and a hell of a lot more). The Holy Family‘s head architect David J Smith has gathered together a host of like-minded travellers, including The Utopia Strong’s Kavus Torabi, […]
Blindblindblind I’m not overly familiar with Le Days’ output, but I’m really liking the stark majestics Daniel Hedin is conjuring up on We Are Nowhere, a double album of emotional outpourings buried in roomy reflection and shoaling silver. As you all know, I love a bit of musical introspection, and this provides a plentiful platter to all that is broken or bent out of shape.
Zam Zam A splinter from the family Gnod, AHRKH AKA Alex Macarte, spiders a delicate thunder here on a Bliss Waves (From The Heart Realm) in trio of tracks that meditatively pull, sparkle with a caressive light.
Atlantic Curve I’m loving this album’s cinematic sizzle, the slow sanguine accompaniment that grows round Lisa Gerrard’s voice, full of subdued simmer and deep-diving delight, then the drums kick in and spread the panoramics wide open. Rocky adrenalines that sparkle the headphones surrounded in quantising amber and torn turquoise, an aesthetic that has me hopelessly hooked as doubled-up gusts of echo breathe from within.
Lava Thief Born from a Richard Brautigan poem of the same name, The Silver Stairs Of Ketchikan is a solo outlet of Thought Forms ringleader Charlie Romijn Barr. It’s always been an intimate, profoundly personal quest, often wrought in the improvised moment. Anybody that’s been lucky enough to see her live will testify to the witchy atmospheres she conjures, the abstracted emotions laid bare in looped violin, cello […]
Akkajee The candle-lit whispering of Lastenkerääjä‘s title track invites you into Akkajee’s folk senabilites, fills the space like a spidery Egon Schiele sketch waiting to be coloured in. Its plucked spine and conversational flow maybe tip-toeing round the baby collector it sings about, an old codger that throws naughty children into his sack, a scary prospect that the duo then decide to crayon over in a bright Midsommar […]
blindblindblind Wooo, this two-track live album from French instrumental duo Cantenac Dagar is straight off the bone, with no overdubs or studio trickery marring its sizzling sincerity. The crank-handled smack of those beats rupture a refreshing rawness on “Saique”, all dirty’n’distorted stepping into this abrasive banjo shadow. A gnarly screechy beast bowed by Stéphane Barascud taking a coarse grain sandpaper
Miasmah James Welburn certainly conjures up a sense of epic with this new LP, Sleeper In The Void. The reactive pleasure that is “Raze” ritually burning through your mind like a restless phantom, then plunge-pooled into a corrosive bath of grainy noise, twisting Soliloquy For Lilith-like on bassy parabolics and flickers of percussive recoil until the drama is daggering divergent colours and serpentine mirage.
Zam Zam The synth duo of Kevin Valentin and Benjamin Moutte have a proper appreciation of their wares, something that the ominous plunge of the opener on their new Surprise Barbue album Kabukichō solidly demonstrates. It mindscapes a lovely tensive herald, spiralised in jewelled splashes and a subtle creep of melody that glitters its periphery. A drama that twists in “Cerf-Souris”’s unfurling keystrokes as a sweetened glaze of […]
Three Lobed Leaping off Headless’s comfy sofa, those Sunburned peeps are more frazzled and distinctively vocal with this year’s follow up release Pick A Day To Die on Three Lobed Records. The sleek-lined kiss of the previous LP seems to be left to unravel more, to tail-spin adventurously as Jeremy Pisani’s flinting frets carve its introverted entry point, while a Basho barbecue of crystal chord called “Dropped A […]
Bureau B I know very little about Die Welttraumforscher. They’ve (or should I say he’s, as all this is a predominantly solo affair of Christian Pfluger) been going since 1981 as one of Switzerland’s most enigmatic musical projects, sung almost exclusively in German. Luckily for a newbie like me, Bureau B have produced not one but two retrospectives devoted to the band — one covering the early days […]
(self-released) That guttural bleakness punctuated by a lone-slap of reverbed timpani is impressive — a real sit up and listen asthetic tied to a wine-glass hum and a circle of Galás gulls that drag you into a ritualised scrape of brutalist electronics and scatter-cushioned skin. Lay In The Salt Of The Soil‘s opener “Yet I Am” fills me with same the primal shivers I felt when I first […]
Disciples The beginnings of a thing are rarely seen, beyond its creator and co-conspirators, an initial spark so easily buried in the bushfire it nourishes; so it’s something of a privilege to soak up the plenitude of ideas that would give His Name Is Alive their distinctive play of light and shade. These recent archival finds have certainly been an eye-opener to the creative force that underpins the […]
Buried Treasure Named after a sunken granite reef in the Celtic sea, Haig Fras takes this remote place as a source of inspiration, to sonically spill in a subterfuge of folding texture and swifting aquatics bleached in a Derek Jarman-esque gleam. Part Urthona, part Téléplasmiste, Neil Mortimer and Mark Pilkington seamlessly blend a perfect whole here, giving a salty glimpse of things to come (I do believe).
Rocket I liked Pharaoh Overlord’s last release, but this newbie is on a whole different level. They’ve turned down that motorik dial a touch, to let in a banquet of euphoric synth work wrapped in a barrage of skewed disco flavours. A groovesome cocktail easily demonstrated by “Path Eternal’”s Giorgio Moroder romp
Zona Watusa One of the many highlights of last year’s Delaware Road festival, the Somerset collective R.E.E.L. (Rapid Eye Electronics Ltd.) have got something here on Music For Psychedelic Duelling to graffiti over 2020’s gloom in the shape of two thirty-minute mutating stabs full of brawling pyrotechnics and toppling tautness.
Dais Moon’s milk was flowing strong with Coil’s transition from London to the Weston-lands. An eerie musicality crept over them on 1999’s Musick To Play In The Dark as future and past co-existed, the altar of white rainbows and unquiet skulls soaked up the coastal mists of their new shoreline residence, the tidal purr no doubt whispering new secrets into Jhon Balance‘s ear. A dark and immersive path, […]