Label: Universal Egg Format: CD,2LP Originally recorded in 1993-4, around the time when messers Cod, Tench and Perch were at the forefront of squeezing as much out of electronic music and reggae as possible and remixing the two into a new style of digital dub music where the drum machine didn’t so much crash mechanistically as step to a more human heartbeat, Secrets Of The Animal Kingdom In […]
Album review
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Label: Chalice Format: CD,2LP 1. As I reclined in my sketchy little world and allowed the gasses to go to my head, I became overpowered with the notion that I was being carried away. Silly flashes of Communion-like images of alien beings lifting me and placing me against soft chrome and spraying my skin black metallic and an underlying fear that maybe, just maybe this could all mean […]
Label: Digi-Dub Format: CD The sounds on this recording were originally derived from pieces of detritus found at the Skrot Centralen scrapyard in Uppsala, Sweden, and composed into the Scrap Bodies soundtrack for the Su-En Butoh Company for their world tour of the dance performance. Lee Digidub and friends – Dodo, Liquid Acrobat, Egon Zoo, King Bimble – have taken the basic samples and put them through their […]
Label: Touch & Go Format: CD,LP Let’s give Three” the moodiest album of 2000 award. If we are passing out any awards that is. Black Heart Procession capture gloom and wrap it up in matte-coloured cowboy Goth like nobody’s business. Unfeigned resignation to everything is the raison d’etre and the low level chronic depressive sound topped up with teardrop pianos and rimmed with just right amount of experimental […]
Label: Universal Egg Format: CD Part of the Universal Egg series in which Zion Train showcase some rare and out of print tracks in association with their favourite influential artists, The Inspirational Sounds Of Muslimgauze draws on the Staalplaat limited editions Jaal Ab Dullah, Izlamaphobia, Fatah Guerrilla, Mullah Said and Azzazin. And what a selection – “Azzazzin II” meshes Industrial clang with ominous analogue filters and some quite […]
Label: Domino Format: CDS,12″ “What Is It With You?” clicks into life with a flurry of timestretched rimshots, snare trills and attenuated vocal samples which really could have been disastrous in their religio-ethnodelic wavering, but aren’t in the least bit. In fact, this is such a shockingly sonorous trip into the Drum & Bass vault that it’s scary. Strings rise and fall, distended voices weave in and out […]
Label: Domino Format: CD,LP The Third Eye Foundation are now so far away from the guitar-feedback and bare electronic percussion days of their first recordings in method if not sound that they’ve become everything which the fusion of post-Rock and/or Isolationism with Drum & Bass promised. Deep swirls and scrawls of filtered and boosted samples settle across the familiar base of breakbeat tricknology, turning it into something other […]
Label: Mute Format: CD Holger Hiller‘s first album in a long time is a self-titled melange of the musical styles he developed in the Eighties and Nineties for Mute, plus a load of new tricks picked up along the way from his time as producer, remixer (including a stormer on Can‘s Sacrilege in association with this album’s producer Christoph Kaiser) and even writer of muscic for adverts in […]
Label: Nettwerk Format: CD While we’re all waiting for the Legendary Pink Dots to come back, and for Skinny Puppy to repeat last year’s German reunion with a local gig for local people, cEvin Key, Edward Ka-Spel and associated LPD and Download crews have crafted another Tear Garden album, and it’s a blinder. You know the score – a gothier Dots, maybe, or a more psychedelic Download, or […]
Label: Conspiracy International Format: CD Surely Ms. Cosey is the empress of electronic bliss. Time To Tell (2000) is nothing if not the most complete guide to a woman who stirs, blends and folds her life and art more comprehensively and with more sincerity than just about anyone else I can think of involved in modern performance and media manipulation. This re-re-release (with additions and enhancements) of Time […]
Label: Nonplace Format: CD There’s got to be something in the water in Köln – so many weirdly talented musicians who mangle Electronica, Dub and World musics into a bizarre hybrid music of sensational grooviness and quirky humour… or maybe they all just took notes at the sleeve of noted resident Holger Czukay after all. For this release, Burnt Friedman (what an apposite name he has…) is in […]
Label: CEE Format: CD Caste collects together five years’ worth of guitar-based noise sculpture from Colin Bradley and Julian Coope, both once involved with the intriguingly angular Spleen. Their work as Dual is densely textured, layering spluttering gushes of string-wrenched gasps into feedback drones the like of which haven’t been properly explored in this guise since Main went further into the digital relams of CD-R mixing and live laptop processing. That Isolationist sense of marking the outer reaches of possibility […]
Label: Sonig Format: LP Recorded live by Markus Popp and Jan Werner, Improvisors takes their studio-bound sampoling, glitching, cutting and skipping CDs into an edgier space. As ever, the estranged whirr of motor-driven sound put in its place and then removed again makes for distracted listening. Sometimes it even becomes uncomfortably ripped from the context of linear sound. They push it into one shape, and it comes out another. The stutter of effects and source […]
Label: Universal Egg Format: CD Zion Train affiliates The Tassilli Players have always offered up intriguing themed Dub CDs, from their debut Great Sporting Moments in Dub via their guide to Outer Space to the interactively-designed Wonderful World Of Weed In Dub (this latter wasn’t a CD-ROM in that interactive sense – each track was designed with different varieties of weed in mind for the listener to consume […]
Label: Wavetrap Format: CD From the opening storm-warning of drones ahead, Iron fulfils all the promises its churning digital riffology and humorous dedication to “Heavy Metal fans all over the world” could possibly fulfil. Staccato loops click and swarm from one ear to the next, and possibly invite the application of a third. Deliciously dirty splutters and organic wafts of processed feedback or sample residue distract from the […]
Label: Virgin Format: CD,2LP Sad to say, this self-titled return after all those years in over one and a half decades really isn’t all that interesting; at leats, not as much as it should be, especially considering that the Industrial Funk pioneers have got a legend in the shape of Pharoah Saunders for a couple of tracks. It’s all so easy listening now, by comparison to what the […]
Label: Sub Up Format: CD Well I am supposed to listen to this CD and be amazed at what technology can bring to life in the antiquated traditional sounds of Cuban music today. While the production techniques of Holger Hiller are undoubtedly very masterful, what impresses me most is that they do nothing to water down the sumptuous vocals that obviously take their strengths from a long-earned heridity […]
Label: Durtro Format: CD So the story goes that David Tibet of Current 93 found this act in some seedy New York drag cabaret and was so knocked out that he brought them to his Durtro label and released this CD as soon as possible. Well, it is little wonder that Antony & The Johnsons would cause such a stir. Thematically the most “Goth” music I have come […]