Thrill Jockey I’d waited for an opportunity to listen to this album where I’d have some uninterrupted space and so the epic Megabus journey that started at 03:00 in the morning was the perfect place. I got on the bus, walked to the top of the stairs, plonked my self down at the back and was greeted by a wonderful centred perspective view of empty bus seats and […]
Album review
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Rocketgirl “Bound for Magic Mountain” is a whopping start. A neonised cascade choked full of bouncy goo and bleeping keylines breezes through your head like a mechanised kiss. The guitar kingpins transmitting a massive joy in kegs of wah-wah and laser, everything tilting to the max, smothered in copious effect shadowing. This has the cool scent of somebody totally enjoying what he does, mingling the past with present. […]
Bureau B Conrad Schnitzler’s late ’70s and early ’80s period is difficult to pigeonhole within his larger body of work. By this point he had moved on from the early expansive drone pieces that featured on his first three releases and begun to amalgamate rhythmic patterns along side more condensed song structures. His Peter Baumann-produced 1978 album Con touched upon pop signatures but also allowed typical Schnitzler areas […]
Rune Grammofon The Swede Mats Gustafsson (The Thing, Fire!, and also appeared with Sonic Youth, Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann, etc.) and the Canadian resident Colin Stetson from the US (Arcade Fire, and has also appeared with Laurie Anderson, David Byrne etc.), met for the first time on stage at the Vancouver Jazz Festival in 2011. The performance was recorded, and the result is these four tracks on Stones. […]
Sacred Bones A band who have obvious influences aplenty, Föllakzoid embrace, upgrade and expand upon the sound of motorik percussion and rippling fx-laden guitars. No matter where they draw from; they let loose five long-form tracks on their second LP which may owe substantial debts to places and times a long way removed from twenty-first century Chile, but which are nonetheless presented in a highly engaging manner. […]
Attack Attack 1979. A young snot-nosed punk steps up to a microphone, shouts “GO!” and a national treasure is born. The punk is Justin Sullivan, New Model Army the national treasure, and the “GO!” the unleashing of the hounds which heralds “Christian Militia,” the opening track on their classic mini-album Vengeance. 2013, and Vengeance is back (has been since the end of 2012, in fact) and it’s now […]
Fire Being a late explorer of Pere Ubu, my first encounter with them was The Tenement Year album from 1988, and I was sure I had found a pop band, but with something out of the ordinary still. Going back into their discography – to more experimental releases such as The Modern Dance or Dub Housing, not to mention the boxed set Datapanik in Year Zero, which also […]
Monotype I’ve been struck by this band’s mysterious flavours since hearing them on numerous compilation LPs from the early ’80s, and then much later, on the Tionchor CD back in ’98 which gathered them all up in one (very odd) listening experience. ‘Nouvelle Concrète’ that was, and continues to be, inspired.. inspiring, with this collected umbrella of Passagen as a pathogen no doubt infecting a whole new generation […]
Turquoise Coal/Pure Pop for Now People An LP put out by both Turquoise Coal and Pure Pop for Now People and due for release on the day of the lovingly-hyped Mayan fauxpocalypse*, Ectogram‘s seventh album finds the band on fine avant-indie form. They’ve always managed the trick of melding their love of melodic songs with the further reaches of the weird and wonderful, but in Ectogram’s case it’s apparent […]
Dissolving As synthesized sci-fi goes, this does a really good job, drawing its inspiration from a Philip José Farmer novel of the same name. That Seventies Panther pulp cover of scarred red and Space 1999 data font of the inlay warming you to this homage to those late ’60s/early ’70s explorations into the electronic unknown. A distinct doff of the cap to Tangerine Dream‘s pioneering vision, this is […]
Bureau B I first came across this album in a particularly smelly charity shop in the middlings of the ’90s. Sandwiched between some mouldering ’70s fodder, the massive sans serif Palais Schaumburg red of the slightly worse for wear cover, screaming out 2buy me now, or you’re gonna regret it!” I didn’t know anything about them at the time, my expectations were for some noisy, at the best […]
Unsounds The Ex has been around on the edge of Dutch punk and improv since 1979, veterans in the explorations of sounds and music on the wide outer side of mainstream. So when the modern energetic avant-jazz-improv duo of the US saxplayer Ken Vandermark and Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, who has been performing together since the year 2000, meets up with The Ex guitars of Andy Moor and […]
Les Disques Victo The meeting of five titans of noise and experimental music onstage at the Victoriaville Festival in May 2011 was an occasion for a well-formed on the hoof composition from the five performers involved: Richard Pinahs of Heldon fame; Merzbow; and Wolf Eyes. While the latter have frequently been lauded as being in the same league as Throbbing Gristle, their albums and live shows have been […]
Cleopatra Cover version albums are always an odd thing. People will either complain if tracks don’t sound close enough to the original songs or sound too different from the original versions, so bands who do them are always in a no-win situation. The best things to do is to try and ‘own’ the tracks themselves and make them yours – after all, some bands covers have outstripped and […]
Ektro Following on from their debut album Meronia (originally released in 1994) come two more remastered and re-released albums from 1997. For a goodly chunk of Meronia, Circle seemed to be wanting to show themselves as Finland’s very own Loop-worshipping post-metal dudes on a mission to out “Arc-Lite” the template of heavy-riffing guitars in collision with the metronomic sound of Munich, Cologne and Düsseldorf some twenty years earlier, all […]
Photek Productions I was surprised to hear that Photek had released a new album – somewhere along the line I had heard that he had hung up his Sennheisers. When Freq asked for a review it was with some trepidation that I took it on. When someone has withdrawn from the scene at the top of their game, the inevitable question is whether their return will be triumphant […]
Agitated Anyone wondering what kind of album Mugstar would follow up the far-out and extra solid Lime and the soundtrack to Ad Margineum can now find out. Lime was the point at which all the ideas heard floating around (and sometimes above) …Sun, Broken… and Mugstar coalesced into something greater than the sum total of the band’s reference points (of which let’s just mention Hawkwind, NEU! and The Heads […]
Fingertips Oud Vibrations. It’s a pun, you see? You do? Good. So, the fluff is that these are two of the earlier ventures by jazz hands into Arabic lands and this is a two LPs on one CD of two chaps who worked with Arabic stylings. There’s a faint sense that they’re both jazz sorts borrowing from Arabic ideas, but it’s essentially two fairly different records. So, I’m […]