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 […]
album review
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]