Pica Disk I have had a small break from reviewing the Jazkamer monthly 2010, but this is not me quitting the promise of reviewing every monthly. No, I have been busy running a festival, and was planning on picking up where I left with submitting the August release. But what happens? During the festival I was, as the first person in the world, given by Lasse Marhaug himself […]
Album review
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13th Moon OK, a bit of a lesson in rock history. Well, by “lesson” I obviously mean “completely partial and somewhat half-baked theory put together by me for the purposes of reviewing an album,” but at least it’s not like double geography or something, on a sunny day, when you have to squint at a map of Haverfordwest for an hour and a half until you feel like […]
Tompkins Square The ordinary soldier’s tale is a lamentable one full of dark humour born of hardship and kinship in barracks and battle. Here are 15 such laments ranging from the period 1924–1939 from the USA; in Europe a sometimes overlooked participant in the First World War, with its own continental conflicts and a civil war to draw subject matter from. A CD of songs taken from private […]
Easy Action “Bbbbrrrriiinnggg, bbbbbrrrrriiiinngggg. This is Uranus calling Pink Fairies, hurry up and reform and play some shows. We will pay 50,000 intergalactic credits.” Ok, let’s start from the beginning; you should buy this CD. Not just because the entire royalties go to Boss Goodman, roadie, DJ, producer and chef – and the man who kept The Fairies on the road – but because it has some of […]
Sony After having Steve Hillage play on their first (as well as several other) albums it does make one wonder why a collaboration between The Orb and David Gilmour didn’t happen a long time ago. The Orb had referenced Pink Floyd’s work enough including sampling Richard Wright’s keyboards at one point. Anyway, with a rather polite fanfare here are the fruits of their first labour together. And to […]
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 both Keats and Beardsley; and to an extent, they might be. Or more to the point, he might, […]
Mute Is it just me, or did it suddenly get kinda butch in here? I mean, the amount of testosterone coming out of the discerning listener’s speakers at the moment is really quite intimidating. What with Michael Gira‘s reactivated-and-all-male-again Swans trying to frighten you into an early grave, and Grinderman back to try to “charm” you into bed with a bottle of Jack and a handful of pills, […]
Important The second album-length outing from Lesbian finds the self-professed prog-doomsters reaching further into the upper reaches of the psychosphere on a craft constructed from some seriously heavy sounds and equally convoluted musicianship. Lesbian like to rock, they like to soar, and it’s quite possible they’re rising high over the stratosphere right now. Ten parts doom to three parts pomp, Stratospheria Cubensis is a logical component to all […]
Dirty Water Over the years a lot of the music from the 50s and the 60s has been treated badly by many bands and artists. Squeezing every nerve out of great songs to make them fit in big companies’ Christmas parties, or in extravaganza shows in Las Vegas or other money filling shit-holes over the world. Some exceptions, though, but still too few to be counted, compared to […]
Young God Swans are back, and it’s an event so massive, so inconceivably vast and unimaginable, that the very fact of its occurrence drowns out even the loudest of their tracks. Michael Gira, of course, has never been away, continuously pumping out increasingly diverse and intimate music under the name Angels of Light, occasionally dipping his toes back into that pool of intensity on which Swans used to […]
Kranky “My hammer feels the urge to nail you to the ground / to smash one through your cheek.” Welcome back Boduf Songs, straight off the starting blocks with another ingeniously constructed threat of violence to the listener, with both the compulsion and responsibility for the act located outside of the detached perpetrator and the implication of an animist, ritual significance. It’s a classic Mat Sweet strategy, delivered […]
Rooster When this album was released way back when, in 1996, it was at a moment when electronic music of all sorts was riding high in the charts and otherwise, and stoner rock riffage as produced by a hirsute quartet from Bristol somehow became buried in a slew of trip-hop releases which were apparently satisfying the attention-spans of dope-smokers everywhere. Meanwhile, guitar rock seemed to have been hijacked […]
Ad Hoc Every now and then you come across a product born of such radically alternative starting assumptions that it gets treated with near indifference by its potential audience, as though to even entertain the possibility of its existence could cause the tapestries of multiple musicotheologies to unravel. Infinity by K-Space is one such product: a CD that never plays the same music twice, intertwining ideas from disciplines […]
Ohm Resistance So. THE BLOOD OF HEROES. By THE BLOOD OF HEROES. Both times in caps-lock Billy Mays mode. None of this lower-case crap. That just wouldn’t suit THE BLOOD OF HEROES. I imagine by the time this review goes online it’ll be in bold as well. Which is as it should be. So who, or what, is or are THE BLOOD OF HEROES? What they are is […]
Samadhi Sound There are few musical instruments that are as conceptually pleasing as the no-input mixing board. It is part of a rich tradition in experimental music in which peripheral hardware and audio equipment are repositioned as musical instruments in their own right (turntables, effects pedals and tape recorders could be seen as other examples). It is a controller of sound without anything in the way of a […]
Dirty Water “… kind of record that gets played at the coolest party …where the keg ends up in the pool…” says the press release… I’ve seen that film, but truthfully, never been to a party with a keg, let alone a swimming pool. I do remember a particular glue-crazed house-wrecker where sofas were incinerated, windows smashed and roof squatted like a prison riot, complete with slate thrower. […]
Not The Sixties Improvised music is sometimes more interesting in principle than practice, which so often involves accomplished musicians demonstrating consummate skill or immaculate taste (but rarely both at the same time). The Little Princess Orchestra happily have no truck with such nonsense, approaching communal music creation with the same primal inquisitiveness that Neanderthals must have possessed when they first discovered the joy in banging two stones together. […]
Rune Grammofon What is Puma? This young Norwegian trio started out as a jazz trio, and they all studied at jazz conservatories. They also fit in numerous other projects, such as Jaga Jazzist, Bushman’s Revenge and Westerhus recently joined Nils Petter Molværs‘ new trio. As Intro winners (Norwegian award for young jazz muzicians) in 2006 they where also given oppportunities to go on tour with noise artist Lasse […]