Casa Nueva Strangely enough, the first thing that comes to mind when listening to Kevin Dunn is just how quintessentially English he sounds – Brian Eno, Wire, TV Personalities – that kind of English. What a surprise then to read the sleeve notes and find out that he actually comes from Atlanta, Georgia. Having known the name but somehow missed out on the music at the time, this […]
Album review
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Conspiracy Ah, already after the first riffs of Wonder, I get a sense of “this is my kind of heavy metal”. Hard and the kind of old fashioned heavy feeling; that sort of heavy feeling from some of the the 80s bands like Dio, that made my body want to slow down, BUT with the speed and intensity of metal hardcore act Converge. As fresh as the Swiss […]
Munster Mid-Sixties garage rock seems in retrospect to have been a grassroots movement on a truly global scale. Forty-five years on, obsessive labels like Munster and QDK Media are still unearthing lost curios, originating from ever more remote and unlikely locations. Who’d have thought that healthy garage scenes thrived in Cambodia and Iran? In comparison, Peru is pretty mainstream by now, a number of compilations having documented the […]
Pica Disk From the Pica Disk website: “Cover by Hair Stylistics is the july edition of Jazkamer‘s ongoing 2010 monthly Compact Disc series. This month’s album finds Hegre and Marhaug joined by Iver Sandøy playing noisecore. Noisecore is a crossover between grindcore and noise music. One could call it improvised grindcore, as its emphasis is on short bursts of blastbeat drumming backed by screaming vocals and heavily distorted […]
PMag Plymouth’s Pocket Magnetic arrive all packaged in dayglo yellow warning signs – kind of Autobahn meets Computer World. The cover certainly holds a clue as to what to find inside, but there’s more to Pocket Magnetic than a low budget menschmaschine. More than Kraftwerk themselves, Pocket Magnetic remind me a bit of Karl Bartos’ 2003 solo album Communication, with which they seem to share at least a […]
Paw Tracks Prince Rama‘s ecstatic mantra-core would have smacked of mere exoticism hailing from any other clime than the Florida Hare Krishna community where this trio met. What we hear in their Shadow Temple album, more so than any of their previous releases, is an expression of a domestic American syncretic Hinduism, which embraces a core Saivism that is at first glance at odds with the Vaishnava Krishna-bhakti […]
Critical Mass In Search of Hawkwind is a tribute album, whereby nine venerable old battle hymns originally cranked out by the veteran psychedelic cosmonauts are re-interpreted by younger, hipper bands, mostly from the US (at least I think so — I’m not actually hip enough to have heard of all of them). There have been other Hawkwind tributes, but they’ve tended to be low-budget releases featuring deservedly obscure […]
Earache Despite having been involved in probably about 90% of all British manifestations of all that is heavy, grindy and noisy in the last twenty-odd years, from Napalm Death to Jesu, Justin Broadrick is still only fourteen years old; or at least that’s how he appears. And given that my job here as a critic, is indeed to judge things on appearances, then to all intents and purposes, […]
Family Vineyard While improvisation and social activity are natural bedfellows, improvisation and relationship can be a trickier proposition. It’s a reasonable – albeit vaguely fundamentalist – argument to say that familiarity is antithetical to improvisation; the former is about learned responses, primed expectations and prior awareness; whereas the latter is about responding in the moment, dealing with the unexpected and being able to create without preparation. As two […]
Drag City The foundations of rock music are built on strata that have long eroded for all but the most credulous. It was initially fun, sexual and swaggering; angry, rebellious and irreverent; energetic, spontaneous and irrepressible; extrovert, engaged and innovative. Decades of mishandling by musicians, record labels, critics and musicologists have caused these qualities to be all but stripped away. Energy and spontaneity have been neutralised by expectations […]
Klangbad Longevity in the fickle world of pop music has traditionally been an undervalued trait and Cluster, now well into their fourth decade as a musical unit, have long been an elusive presence as they’ve sailed through the decades since their inception in 1969 (with fellow electronic pioneer and Zodiak Arts Lab alumni Conrad Schnitzler as Kluster with a ‘K’). Cluster have seen through the ‘heroic years’ of […]
Kranky I have to admit I’d never heard of Disappears before this record landed in my lap, so I looked them up online. (Research, see? Professionalism and that. That’s what seperates us real professional music writer types from the blogroll masses.) A noisy Chicago four-piece, refugees from the sad decline of Touch and Go records, Disappears have found an unlikely home for themselves at glitch-(and drone – Ed.)-merchants […]
AIMsoundCity Lisa Dillan is a vocal improviser originating from the northern parts of Norway. She is a trained and educated jazz singer, but many years ago she moved further away from the jazz, and started exploring the possibilities that lies within improvising with the voice and creating various mouth sounds. When I first watched this tiny woman doing a live performance some years ago, it was a big(!) […]
DIY/unsigned Recording studios are time machines, capable of layering conflicting alternate pasts, warping space into new configurations and building dreamlike gestalts from contrasting times and places. But we could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Engineers and producers have worked diligently for decades to maintain the illusion they’re releasing records made by pub rock bands performing live together in the same place at the same time (live performance being […]
Pica Disk The June edition of the Jazkamer monthly series, We Want Epic Drama, is the first album with the full metal line-up since the highly acclaimed Metal Music Machine was released. Two drummers, electronics and three guitars promises quite an onslaught. However, that is often the case with Jazkamer, two or more members almost always manages to present an impressive wall of sound, no matter what. As […]
Minor Fall Records This is an EP that really wants you to like it from the moment you see the sleeve. It screams “Hey, I’m friendly, we could hang out and play Swingball!” First off you get a really endearing picture of a smiling jukebox as the sleeve art, and then the CD itself is pretending to be vinyl. It’s beautiful packing, it really is, and to an […]
Editions Mego The problem with the notion of Hypnagogic Pop was never the music, and Oneohtrix Point Never‘s superb Returnal demonstrates that fact perfectly. Brooklyn’s Daniel Lopatin makes tried and tested emotive music with plenty of precedent. Tangerine Dream is the most frequently cited, but you could equally choose any number of works by Vangelis or Jean Michel Jarre or Aphex Twin‘s Select Ambient Works
Southern From early avant-garde releases on the legendary Crass records as Annie Anxiety, to guest slots with artists as varied (and awesome) as Coil, Nurse With Wound, On-U-Sound and Collapsed Lung, to her current incarnation as Little Annie, Annie Bandez has been nothing if not prolific, apart from eclectic. Now she and long-term collaborator Paul Wallfisch (Botanics, as well as the criminally-underrated unofficial contender for Best Band In […]