Label: Planet µ Format: CD This album rocks like a solid gold bastard. This is how Hardcore should be. It’s dirty and brutal to the nth degree. Hellfish will have you bouncing off the walls with this corrosive sonic collage. Hardcore Techno has it’s origins in Hardcore Rave and Gabba – that wonderful amphetamines-only Dutch creation. The sound has much more of a Rap influence here though. So […]
Album review
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Label: Nonplace Format: CD Ahh, Burnt, you have done it again, wooing the worlds of the cocktail-spping Lounge devil and Electronica studio boffin alike with your splendid charms, equally divided between raunch and drum roll science. How long before the Galactic Prize For Extreme Cleverness will have the name B Friedman inscribed upon its shining sides? This is not a piss-take – Plays Love Songs really is that […]
Label: Eskaton Format: 2CD,2LP Presentation is important. This is an element that Thighpaulsandra understands very well indeed. This double album is packaged in a lavish sleeve which folds out to reveal a epic photograph of the man himself standing by the seaside dressed in really groovy Druid gown, throwing a spell with his magic wand. On the inside sleeve there is a picture of Thighpaulsandra floating a few […]
Label: Caciocavallo Format: 2CD As might be expected, Robin Storey‘s take on drum & bass is somehwat denser than the usual clatter of hyperspeed breaks, rolllllls and rewinds. Instead, the two discs of Cold War Drum ‘n’ Bass are crammed with unfurling meditations in rhythm and texture, linked by the ideas of paranoia and mutually assured destruction of a childhood surrounded by the hardware and attitudes of unfought […]
Label: Force-Inc. Format: CD,3LP Auch‘s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye was by all accounts one of the albums which brought the glitch to the wider dancefloors filled with the minimal Techno put out by Force-Inc and similarly-inclined labels. Here it gets demixed further into the realms of attenuated, deracinated clickety-snips and thumping grooves alike by eleven co-creators (plus one crackling self-mix) of electronic bleeps, belches and occasional blasts. No-one gets a track title, just […]
Label: Submergence Format: 2CD The psychedelic rock freak out is not dead, despite rumours to the contrary, and Flourescent Tunnelvision is here to prove the point, ramming home on a coasting scrawl of fuzz, wah, delay and phasers set to half-past stun; the amps probably go a long way over eleven, too. The full benefit of this collection is naturally to be gained at the maximum volume the […]
Label: Mego Format: CD One of the elegant possibilities proposed by this record is of the recursion of loop upon loop; as skeins of glitch or oscillator pulse become intertwined around, along or through each other, they work into the backbrain and get the blood streaming to electronic time signatures derived as much from the sine wave frequency as from intervention by Ilpo Väisänen. One of the legacies […]
Label: Threshold House/World Serpent Format: CD,LP Coil, man. What the fuck can you say about Coil that even comes close? Whether they’re slowly frying your brain with drones and disturbingly unidentifiable sounds (Time Machines, for example, or the wonderfully bizarre Elph album Worship The Glitch) or beating the shit out of you with percussion and noise (much of Scatology) they plough a furrow very much their own. A […]
Label: Creation Format: CD,LP “The time to rise has been engaged” – REM It has occurred to me on more than just this one occasion that giving our seers and soothsayers money to throw about is often not the best thing for them. Witness the fate of Roxy Music and Johnny Rotten, Jefferson Airplane, Sly Stone, The Rolling Stones, Kurt Cobain and (most recently) Van Morrison and Prince. […]
Label: God*Factory Format: CD How to make a milk shake, the Laboratory Of Sonic Discovery way: Ingredients: Milk, soya or otherwise as preferred; Vanilla ice cream or non-dairy substitute; Soft fruit such as bananas or strawberries; 1 litre jug (preferrably non-shatter or plastic); CD player; Amplifier; The largest speakers available, preferably with a rating of 100 watts per channel or more; 7 Songs/77 Frequencies CD Method: Warn neighbours […]
Label: Thrill Jockey Format: CD It all starts very well with “American Kooter”‘, funky in more ways than one and it reminds me of early Cabaret Voltaire; yes! “Now you die, Thriddle Fool” delightfully homicidal Electro or “Strong Sensations” – a riffing orgy the other side of Ritchie Blackmore‘s hair curlers. But besides that it all gets a bit lazy. But so it should be, because this is […]
Label: Mute (USA)/Wonder (Europe) Format: CD,2LP Perhaps the best chill out album for the Fall of 2000, Kreidler have produced here a lovely self-titled musical edition of what sounds to me like a big after-dinner Disco mint for post whatever you might have been doing earlier. Calm and uncomplicated, Kreidler runs through eleven tracks of pleasant but not in the least bit boring Electro-Pop which is a welcom […]
Label: Nettwerk / Sub-Conscious Communications Format: CD Okay. Let’s get this straight. The back cover is composed entirely of acid blotters. The pictures of Phil Western and cEvin Key on the inside are just a bunch of eyes. And the tracks are called stuff like “Muscaria” and “Ayahuasca”. Yes, kids, it’s an album about – call the cops – DRUGS. And really mental ones at that. A lot less abrasive than much previous Download output, and a lot […]
Label: M Records Format: CD, LP The indefatigable Ryan Moore keeps up the Dub pressure with this, his seventh album release as Twilight Circus, purveyor of fine Seventies-styled Dubs to the kids… and beyond. One of the first impressions of Dub Voyage, as is only to be expected, is the bass. Tons of the stuff, and warm, gloopy booms of it; while the LP starts off gently enough, […]
Label: Label M Format: CD Charming the snake of Jazz, the pipes lead the tones on a dance of hitherto unheard-of proportions. Bongos and drums – bongs and drugs? Methinks not. “High on life” seems more the fit. This is one of those recordings from the “outre” days of releasing – something so strange and unexpected that it is immediately endearing and entearing. A jaunty voyage. The sounds […]
Label: Caciocavallo Format: CD Hank and Slim, two good ol’ boys who lurched from legendary Bluegrass status and back into the trailer parks of Obscurity, Tx, making Country music take the dark experiemental route. Or Robin Storey and Nigel Ayers deconstructing the sound of the airwaves and the pedal steel into droning peyote-fuelled washes of moody Mid-West ambience? Rumours that the latter are true cannot still be confirmed, […]
Label: Soleilmoon Format: CD Structured around bursts of wheezing Drum & Bass breakbeats, Nigel Ayers‘ latest missive from the borderlands of music broadcasts at a frequency attuned to a zeitgeist-surfing mix of attenuated rhythms, (implied) anti-monarchism and community space travel. All this and an origami sleeve which builds into a peculiar design (instructions enclosed) and Futurist Antiquarianism makes for a rounded album which develops Nocturnal Emissions‘ edgy sound into […]
Label: Ash International [R.I.P] Format: CD+LP Benny Nilsen‘s second record as Hazard comes as a CD and LP set (or at least the first thousand pressed do), with six tracks on the 36-minute digital unit and two more on the 35-minute vinyl. Odd as this might at first seem, the different media suit the resulting pieces quite well; having quiet glitchy runs of excoriated environmental sounds and thin […]