One of the most flamboyant, original and exciting of synthesists in the world of modular synths and beyond, Thighpaulsandra has been pushing the boundaries of electronic music as a solo performer and as a member of Coil, Uruk (as a duo with Massimo Pupillo) and UUUU (with Valentina Magaletti, Matthew Simms and Edvard Graham Lewis) or while working with Julian Cope, Spiritualized and more in ways both weird and […]
Michael Rodham-Heaps
459 posts
Sub Rosa A celebration of Mr Burroughs’ Western Lands, for the The Acid Lands, the Prague-based Opening Performance Orchestra spike the punch with their choice of narrator, and I’ve got to say the choice is a solid one. Iggy Pop’s husky bloom coherently curls into Burroughs’ talismanic trails, romances the roll of those words with a lived-in authenticity (and a touch of roomy reverb).
Thrill Jockey Conceptual pranksters Matmos invited ninety-nine musical souls to do what thou wilt, with the blank canvas of the cover of the resulting The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises In Group Form an inkling of the freedom involved. Complete freedom? Well, not quite – the Matmos boys introduces a tiny condition in there to spice things up — any rhythmic rumpus created needed to bend to a 99 […]
Faustus As on Daona‘s startling debut album The Secret Assembly, this duo love to weird you out, inject you with a swaying unease and mess with your expectations. The vaporous vampires and ghostly cinematics that glue up the action on Nightside Of Eden are like midnight’s children creeping the architecture a glint in their eyes that’s nothing to do with the moon.
Sub Rosa I absolutely love this type of thing. I’ve had a real appetite for everything electroacoustic ever since hearing Karlheinz Stockhausen at a formative age, and diving straight in to Agitations, the first track is a satisfying monster. “Abscission One” is an immersive aperture your mind falls right into, a mirage ride of mutating drone whose chaffing frictions visually burn, elliptically bend in a figure of eight […]
Sub Rosa The group responsible for last year’s (rather excellent) Noise Of Art CD continue their no melody, no rhythm, no harmony ethos with this release that documents the carrion buzz of thirteen alternating radio sets, vintage ones dating from between 1935 and 1961.
Zoharum The dusty kinetics of Hotel Bravo‘s opener “Hotel Paris” slope into your ear in skipping recoils, navigated by quiet words and whispered replies, periodically broken by a taut Japanese-flavoured melodic and pattering synth-washes. An ambient lamp light falls into the fragmented flux of “When The Chimes End” its stuttering percussives taking the dusty grooves of the first track to milk a purposeful sparseness that bleeds throughout this […]
Upset The Rhythm Well this came as a total surprise; after a steady flow of Normil Hawaiians re-issues from Upset The Rhythm over the last few years, the band now present two newly recorded tantalising glimpses into their sonic future.
Staraya Derevnya (CD) / Raash (cassette) / Steep Gloss Russian – Israeli – UK collective Staraya Derevnya dish up a refreshingly eclectic aesthetic where anything and everything has musical potential. A free-form exploration that’s open ended and primal which reaches into the unpredictable to pluck out some smouldering gold.
Mental Experience Originally released in the ludicrously slim edition of fifty cassette copies in 1984, Clear Memory has now got the re-issue Washington, DC oddities Bomis Prendin deserve, complete with rare photos and insightful (and often surreal) liner notes detailing its making. A pioneering pull, the summery chirps and Casio calico of the first track breezes in with tangled colour, subtly offset by the wet rub of tyres […]
Prescription The first volume of Coil‘s unreleased Astral Disaster sessions was a revelation, chocked with new perspectives, and even introduced us to some fascinating freshness straight from the cutting room floor.
House Of Mythology As their debut’s successor, Téléplasmiste‘s third album To Kiss Earth Goodbye tones down the spacey dronescaping, that Time Machines-like purr, of the previous LP in favour of a more transitional tingle where dancing structures free up the space, openly invite an otherness to come and play.
Bureau B The opener “Electric Garden” on Bureau B‘s re-release of Conrad Schnitzler‘s 1978 album Con sets up a wonky forest of purr-cussive sirens that mercurially glisten, shapes that gently ricochet the headphones in buttery artificiality, form-filled but formless, bending that Karlheinz Stockhausen concrete into something less stoic and more playful.
Bureau B A splinter from the original Faust family, Gunther Wüsthoff presents a selection of his solo work as Total Digital via Bureau B. The title is one which the first three tracks encompass superbly in a triptych of machined doodles, pre-fixed by “TransNeptun”, a series far removed from planet Faust as it is humanly possible.
Play Loud! Excellent! More Limpe Fuchs goodness leaks out of Berlin-based Play Loud!, this time stretching back to the late seventies when she was an integral part of a duo called Anima-Sound with her husband Paul. Collecting together a series of live recordings made during the 1977 festival at Castle Moosham in the Lungau region of Salzburg, Austria, Im Lungau is an artefact saved from the brink and […]
disillusiondotdotdot Brighton-based musician Karl MV Waugh presents four drone explorations on Winter In A Void: A Choice Of Delirium, a series of long-form sustains which atmospherically armature, fizz with an over-arching physicality.
blindblindblind The first side of I Feel Like A Bombed Cathedral‘s W LP unfurls as if picking up from where Amaury Cambuzat’s last solo outing ended. A sound that slowly blooms in the ear, the muted grey/blue hues of the cover and its emergent greens curling round its gathering complexity as the thumping heartbeat at its core is steadily eroded.
Tenor-Vossa (CD) / 1972 (vinyl) Given the deluxe gatefold treatment, Breathless’s 1986 debut LP The Glass Bead Game is being plucked out of relative obscurity to shine once again.