Label: Sprawl Imprint Format: CD Assembled from the now-usual urban sprawl of sounds which make up the inspiration for much of Electronica’s current output, Me Shape is Simon Pyke‘s contribution to the clockwork maelstrom which characterises this apect of late Nineties music, and of which The Sprawl Imprint and club are particular exponents. Built up from two years of sound recordings and live sets, the album is filled with coiled energy, prowling into view as the […]
Album review
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Label: Caipirinha Format: CD Datach’i sounds like a deranged child given a selection of technology, old and new, to play with, abuse, and generally mess up sound with. From the get-go, it’s a stream of blurting noise, scrawled low-end mania and samples to reinforce the infantile world of an unsatisfied toddler (on PCP?) – who has heard that they now know their ABC, but are as happy with […]
Label: Tone Casualties Format: CD,LP Is this what it’s like to wake up with Mr. Czukay every morning? Well, anyway, Holger’s come back and the general consensus is that he’s looking camp as ever. Good Morning Story is a nice wake up call, sampled generously with lots of Can and it shows. Mr. C. claims this to be his first time playing with an ordinary sampler, rather than […]
Label: Soleilmoon Format: 3xCD Bundled together as a boxed set, these three releases bring together the three artists concerned in pairs on each CD via postal exchange of recordings, with the aim of creating a whole which draws more than merely the sum of its parts together. Packaged in appropriately earthy, decaying hues of green, brown and grey environmental close-ups, the set will also be released as individual […]
Label: Domino Format: CD,LP Mouse On Mars‘ sixth album continues to expand on their almost self-defining genre of energetically marvellously nice Electronica, spinning outwards from the opening processed acoustic guitars into to the humorous-interuptus whoopee-cushion funk of the highly appropriately-titled “Yippie”, and all points silly from there. Neither “nice” nor “silly” are meant a s platitudes – MoMars are decidedly both. Take the skewbald Vocoder loop of “Super […]
Label: Spunk! Format: CDS Trans Am must be the most versatile trio ever to call themselves a band. Who Do We Think You Are? is a terrific little six song showing of this as our boys slip slide right through thirty years worth of musical genres in less than an hour. A fast glance to the almighty (if slightly irritating) vocoder and little dips here and there in […]
Label: Chalice Format: CD, LP Coil have been on a long strange journey into a peculiarly English Pagan folk music, at once urban and ancient, Modern and eternal – and the recent addition of Thighpaulsandra to their collective (un)consciousness has only made things more intriguing. His main contribution to this latest mail-order only album shines through on the Ashra (or even Tangerine Dream…)-like electronic headtrip of the evocatively-titled […]
...long pieces of almost continuous splurges of distortion and dirtily-feeding back pickup-noise, amplifier hum, scuzz, detritus...
Label: Korm Plastics Format: CD Jonathan Coleclough has been a musical associate of such soundscrapers as Organum and Colin Potter, and Windlass is his first CD beyond a limited edition release on Robot Records. The album makes extensive use of Ambient drones to darkling effect, and has all the spectral hallmarks of the chilly wastes of post-Industrial head music. The welling bass tones lurk in murky, but warm, […]
Label: Warp Format: CD,LP Plone are apparently intent on creating timeless electronic melodies; it seems they might have succeeded. For Beginner Piano has ten such examples to offer for posterity, and the spread of influences from John Barry to Lee Perry via the chirping bleeps of their labelmates are evident from the opening tracks “On My Bus” and “Top And Low Rent” onwards. The charming little keyboard melody […]
Label: DHR Format: CD,2LP Lurking behind the Atari Teenage Riot pastiche cover and name is of course none other than Alec Empire, but in ever so strange a mood as to be simultaneously at his most inspired and deranged. Sourced entirely from the programmable music edition of a Gameboy, We Punk Einheit! takes the machine to its limits. Bleeping and blipping like a demented games console circa 1983, […]
Label: Staalplaat Format: CD Stepping to an appropriately martial, mechano-deconstructed beat, The Tape-beatles‘ Good Times weaves a mix of political speech snippets, training-film educational banalities delivered with the wooden certitude of a rigid economic concentration on accumulation of capital and the promotion of that greatest lie of all, free-market competition, into a sometimes thumping orchestral soundscape. Delay is the key, as fragments of a cultural canon splinters in […]
Label: M Records Format: CD,LP Ryan Moore‘s fifth solo album as Twilight Circus is billed as “Dub-Rock-Electronica,” which is about an accurate decription as needed – but with the emphasis as ever on the bass. Moore (who also plays bass with The Legendary Pink Dots, and is likely to batter audiences with inflatable hammers, while dressed in feather boas) has drawn a lot from the UK dub scene […]
Label: Klangbad Format: CD,2LP The big Krautrock album of ’99? Well, it’s certainly caused a lot of excitement in those circles. Fresh from turning London’s Garage into a gas chamber and ejecting long-time figurehead Jean-Hervé Peron, Faust land in the recorded arena with Ravvivando – twelve tracks of uncompromising noise of vintage quality. Phew! Original members, Hans Joachim Irmler and Zappi Diermaier have assembled four cohorts to continue […]
Label: WEA Format: CD,LP More Dub-based at heart than anything else, Bengali Bantam Youth Experience shows a musical development from Black Star Liner‘s début Yemen Cutta Connection which results in a more streamlined experience, with crisp production letting the bass reverberate around and under delicate keyboard tones, Bollywood strings and all manner of Eastern percussion. There’s some upbeat skanking beats on tracks like “Low BMW” and the laid-back […]
Label: Staalplaat Format: CD Originally released in 1993, The Grand Delusion takes as its themes the very idea of the American nation as a construct of media and cultural signifiers, especially as contextualised by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent events of the Gulf War. As a work of what The Tape-beatles mockingly trademark as Plagiarism®, the record also served as the soundtrack to their […]
Label: Asphodel Format: CD,LP The Heretic of Ether is one of those albums that comes out of the blue, hovers overhead and arond the ears and works its way into the subconscious. Seemingly a concept album concerning the life, death and re-birth of one Gashka Gavör, Moroccan Bedouin (or Badawi) heretic of the title, it makes a timeless quest romance in musical form which buzzes with passion and […]
Label: Silly Boy Lemon Format: CD Dave Brooks has had an interesting musical career, involving a court case taken against him by the local authorities over his playing his bagpipes on Hampstead Heath, a charge he defended by contesting that the pipes are a weapon of war, not a musical instrument. During the compromise which was reached in settlement, it was observed by the judge that bagapipes only […]