Symbolic Insight This is a debut album by Colorado duo Sonolumina. The album mixes ambient music with world music and trance. Between the duo they play a mixture of traditional instrumentation such as flutes, violins and trumpets as well as Indian tablas. The whole comes together in as well. “Fire” features drones and electronic percussion that sound like the beginning of a journey into foreign lands. “Sona” is […]
Album review
2424 posts
Monty Maggot The Plague is [post=omenopus-time-flies text=”Omenopus”]‘ sophomore album, a double disc worth of songs that takes us on a whirlwind of an emotional rollercoaster ride across its two silvery surfaces. Disc one (or rather the first disc I placed into the machine, as I have the feeling you could play either disc first) contains the four part concept piece “The Plague.” This is a twenty minute opus […]
Neurot/Supernatural I was wondering, as I took my copy of Topographic Oceans off the turntable, why the dark overlords at Freq Towers felt that I should review the new Ufomammut concept album that will be released in two instalments this year. I scratched my chin a slid the CD from its case and pondered to myself about this. Hmmmmm……… Oro seems to be based around some sort alchemical […]
Noh Poetry Astralfish are Bridget Wishart and Don Falcone, who here create cosmic melodies with a whole host of special guests including Daevid Allen from Gong. With sixteen tracks across its shimmering disc we should venture forth into the beautiful beyond to tell you all what glories there are to behold. The opening track “Far” includes Allen’s gliss guitars and has a other world feel similar to the […]
Important Most bands when releasing a collection of otherwise placeless split vinyl album tracks and remixes end up with a selection of shorter pieces compiled into what often ends up as some sort of a grab-bag of odds and ends. Not so with Nadja, who fit just four tracks on each CD of this two-disc set of recordings from 2007-08, and who also manage to make a coherent […]
Striate Cortex Striate Cortex seems to have gone, in just a few years, from another ‘yet another’ label putting out tiny editions of unheard of artists (or ‘no-audience underground’ as radiofreemidwich have it) to having a pretty heavy catalogue of exquisitely-packaged things. I can’t claim to be a completist but I’m seeing a lot of names on their discography of bands and people who are making great sounds […]
Thrill Jockey Let’s talk about SPACE, baby, let’s talk about you and me. As Salt’n’Pepa didn’t actually sing, but should have done. Let’s talk about all the BIG things and the LOUD things. Yeah. And like that. Space is many things to many people. To Lovecraft, for example, it was a constant source of terror. But then, so were most things. Poor guy. To Douglas Adams, it was […]
Earache A-side – “You suffer…” FDR stands for full dynamic range. Remember that, I’ll come back to it in a minute. This is one of those records that I’ve had a million conversations about. Heavy crust/grind/metal/metalcore peeps will claim various things about it – it’s not the best/ it’s the best/ it’s not the first/ it’s the first/ Carcass did it better/it’s better with triggered drums/ it’s better […]
Mute Breath was bated at this, apparently, but not mine. I mostly dislike collaborations, even when I try to like them, even when I love the collaborators. Collaborations regress towards the mean, like motionless wrestling or mutual strangulations in the back of army trucks (a personal joke, one intended only for my future self to smirk about; sorry). I blame everyone: Mike Paradinas and Richard James as Mike […]
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 embarrassing) name. Where the former had drums and bass to pin down Jason Spaceman and Sonic Boom‘s interlocking internecine […]
Terp The Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love has made a fast and hard-hitting impact on many recordings in the national and international scene of free-jazz and improv these last years. Whether as a band member of [post=peter-brotzmann-live text=”Peter Brötzmann”]’s Chicago Tentet, the assembly of some of the leading musicians of today’s free-jazz, or in the powerful Hairy Bones also including the said German. Also worth mentioning are the remarkable […]
(Not on label) Buh…yeah. -rock suffixes are lame. But this is good. GOOD I tell you. Ole’ timey two guitars n’ drums-core. Possibly fans of that K Records fallout . Y’know, Sleater Kinney, Urusei Yatsura, that kind of thing. But instrumental. No vocals and no need. And it’s steeped in a lot of those dreadful and dreary tags that make you think of dogshit music students yet to realise […]
L-13 Recordings A split 10″ EP (and/or mini-album, perhaps – but anyway, its hand-stamped sleeve covers up a hefty chunk of vinyl, and the Gestetner-printed notes add an extra frisson of retro-cool to the packaging) from two of the ever-prolific Pete Bennett‘s bands is one of those things which only comes along once in a while. Sure, there are downloads (offered to buyers of this disc too, as […]
Thrill Jockey Well, you knew this was coming. Dorwytch hinted (OK, explained) that Alexander Tucker was moving closer and closer towards a kind of English pastoralism and now he’s got to Third Mouth, where the drones and buzzes move still further away from the longer forms of his early albums and head towards smaller, yet exquisitely designed, packages of psychedelic folk. This is like someone’s swallowed Rob Young’s […]
Fire Right yeah, so – Pulp. WHAT I REMEMBER of the time of Different Class is that there was a bit of a sense of them being very much a “ooh, follow your dreams, keep plugging away and eventually you’ll make it” thing, in terms of what the press were saying. Which was nice of them. As if to say ‘even if your entire output is utterly shite, […]
Leather Apron MELVYN BRAGG – Good morning. Today on In Our Time we’re going to be looking at the Steampunk era, a time which often seems to be shrouded in a fog- or possibly even a smog, ha ha, of mystery. With me today is Dr Deuteronemu 90210, emeritus professor of Musical Archaeology at the Institute of Awesome. Dr 90210, it wasn’t all that long ago. Why is […]
Important “You never seemed to be waiting for me, but we kept meeting at every turn of the paths, behind every bush, at the foot of each statue, near every pond. It is as if it had been only you and I in all that garden.” A man and a woman meet at a social gathering in a magnificent baroque chateau. He claims that they met the year […]
The Null Corporation/Mute Reznor and Ross may have seemed a weird choice to score The Social Network, essentially a movie about courtrooms and codings; almost as weird a choice as Fincher was to direct it. But that worked out OK, didn’t it? So it’s no surprise that when reunited with Fincher, but this time on a movie about sex, violence and serial killing, the result is one of […]