Label: Constellation Format: 2LP,CD Yanqui U.X.O. is a record that demands time and attention to it’s myriad details as they shimmer past in a gathering whirl of music that sounds absolutely and profoundly played, rather than constructed, by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Recorded by Steve Albini with all his usual craftsmanship, this slow-building album coruscates with a stately emotional fire which reflects the band’s personal-political agenda of righteous […]
album review
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Label: Young God Format: CD This has got to be one of the oddest musical surprises in a long time, and an intriguing one too. Devendra Banhart recorded the twenty-one tracks on dodgy 4-track tape recorders, and the hiss is evident throughout — but just adds to the close-up intensity of his songs, played on acoustic guitar and only occasionally supplemented by handclaps, thighslapping and some off-key whistling. […]
Label: Wonder Format: CD Black Gothic letters and skull graphics in gloss black print on a matte black Digipak (although it’s a shame about the barcode’s intrusion on a white rectangle breaking up the black theme). An opening choral Mellotron drone worthy of Popul Vuh‘s soundtrack to Nosferatu The Vampyr. Will it be the heaviest of doom metal or the most brainpan-shuddering of nasty gothic industrial anguish? Not […]
Label: 4AD Format: CD I‘d heard of, but not heard, HNIA and that’s my loss. Still, you can’t be expected to hear everything, can you ? So this turned out to be one of those almost magical and rare recordings that upsets your expectations and surprises you in the best possible ways. It isn’t ground-breaking but it does combine certain musical elements in a refreshing way. I’m a fan. Between them, singer Lovetta […]
Label: Kitty-Yo (Europe) Mute (North America) Format: CD/LP Tarwater return, enigmatic and phlegmatic as ever with Dwellers On The Threshold, charting journeys across an imaginary landscape of shifting borderlands and elusive edges. Opening with the hypnotic and immediately engaging “70 Rupies To Paradise Road”, with words spoken on this occasion by Tone Avenstroup, it is apparent that there is something special about this record. Partly thanks to a […]
Label: Ipecac Format: CD,LP Brimming with fractured beats and an omnivorous musical approach which draws in experimental influences from Industrial, Post-Rock and Jazz as much as from the conscious side of HipHop, Dälek‘s From Filthy Tongue Of Gods And Griots burns with a bright spark of questioning anger, musically as well as lyrically. Having collaborated with Techno Animal, 2nd Gen and Faust on occasion, coming at this outfit […]
Label: Beta-Lactam Ring Records Format: CD, Limited LP Argentinian three piece Reynols have been walking their own particularly strange path for nearly a decade, droning and chugging on a collection of home-made and improvised instruments and guitars, with everything underpinned by the percussive and vocal drive of Miguel Tomasín. Their sound is at first chaotic and then enveloping, with walls of distortion and other effects piled on the […]
Label: Tone Casualties Format: CD Can You Smell The Rain Between? was accompanied by “Enjoy ?” written on the press leaflet. Was I not meant to enjoy it ? Should I have endured an unpleasant hour or so ? The press release sets out to create an impression of something baleful and malign, which somehow made me think of the first Black Sabbath album. Anyway. The Controlled Bleeding certainly […]
Label: Threshold House Format: CD Assembled by John Balance and Peter Christopherson with the early 2002 tour line up of Ossian Brown (from Cyclobe), Cliff Stapleton and Michael York and initially only available at those gigs, The Remote Viewer marks an intriguing shift in the scope of Coil‘s hyper-psychedelic sound. Running on a foundation of Lovecraftian electronics and the sinuous drones of Stapleton’s hurdy gurdy and York’s Breton […]
Label: Snapper Format: 2CD Summoned by that shadowy entity, The Pongmaster, the Ozrics come to you live from the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, a gathering place of eldritch forces. This troupe of space minstrels are celebrating 20 years of tantric trucking. Their vehicle, laden with synthesisers, flutes and guitars, has been unloading at carefully selected sites of festival throughout those years and now a portion of their celebrated utterances […]
Label: Staubgold Format: CD,LP I have to admit that now Faust are probably no longer a touring band I must rely solely on their studio recordings to feed a habit formed in the early 1970s. Their sound may have mutated from the early days to the vast, churning soundscapes of their live work such as Live In Edinburgh 1997 and Faust Wakes Nosferatu, but what it retains is […]
Label: Klangbad Format: CD,LP If any band is ripe for some re-mixing, it is Faust. The elements that combine to form their music have already been through a process involving a stripping down, transformation and reformation both in the studio and in ‘live’ performance. To offer these elements to those who are influenced by and in sympathy with Faust’s working methods seems an ideal situation for both translation […]
Label: Soleilmoon Format: 2CD Shifts is a solo project by Frans de Waard, ostensibly to produce ambient music using interwoven guitar patterns with various added effects and special recording techniques. In this collaboration the Shifts recordings have been taken and reprocessed by Asmus Tietchens and vidnaObmana . Each artist was given the same sound material and then left to their own devices to come up with a `recycling’. […]
Label: Rocketgirl/Mind Expansion Format: CD Füxa‘s sixth album finds Randall Nieman‘s particular take on guitary synth music (or perhaps, synthy guitar music) developed yet further into a sound of drones and melodies which insinuate their way into the background and back again. Aided by the steadfast drumming of Drew Peters and occasional low-key vocal contributions from Stephen Lawrie and Jo Doran, Supercharged will more than likely have started […]
Label: Frozen Empire Media Format: CD Nyugodt lurks somewhere in the grey area between dub and electroglitch musique concrete. Noisescapes mix (at times clash) with fractured rhythms. Sometimes closer to the twisted rhythms of Autechre than dub, sometimes almost completely seized by the seething abrasive textures of manipulated noise, the album seldom abandons rhythm completely. And then, beneath the layers of noise the occasional melody manages to surface. […]
Label: Phantom Code/World Serpent Format: CD The title of Cyclobe‘s second album release soon becomes fitting as the music opens out, expands and contracts, almost oozes from the pores in the breathing walls – but where are they visiting from exactly? Some might suggest grayling spacefarers, others could contend, quite successfully, that the source of the sonic visitations lies closer to the realms of the subconscious, and of […]
Grönland/EMI Electrola/Astralwerks NEU! Guitar arches out like twilit sunshadows and the omnipresent beat is there, new dawn, new dawn. Synthesizer languidly moves backwards and forth, the Sunday eveningmorning that holds in rapt attention at the creation of something new. Six crepuscular tracks? Wcka wcka wcka. Wow wow wow. And so on. Then on to the swelling and pitching of the flanged cymbals, split side by side, side-to-side, riding […]
Label: Mute Format: 2CD Okay, so it may be the wrong time, given recent events, for a band whose name translates as “Collapsing New Buildings” to release an album called Strategies Against Architecture III, but, heedless of a Stockhausen-style backlash, those wonderfully inventive German sonic terrorists (again, perhaps not a good analogy, but what the fuck) Einstürzende Neubauten are at it again, this time with a double CD […]