Upset The Rhythm This is frantic, fibrous, a Kat Bjelland-like vocal blender. All hot potato vowel action, roller-coasting a gnarly pickle of a backing. A Meredith Monk cave painting of multi-erupting misrule, spitting feathers and glutinous jelly tangling up and clawing on old school Arto Lindsay-like fret lunacy and buck-a-roo grunts. The bush fire insanity of those guitars fills me with so much joy — that thrown- stapling […]
Album review
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Discus Family Band‘s latest (and self-titled) release, their third since forming in 2015, finds them further exploring their interactions as a quartet and how personal ideas form, and then coalesce when presented to a democracy fully at ease with one another and anxious to express the diversity that jazz welcomes currently. Over the seven pieces presented here, the players take the basic idea delivered by one member and […]
GOD Laibach have been on a winning form since 2017’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, that oozing dark matter and gravelly gravitas of yore gloriously reconfigured, later thrown around on the sonically saturated Wir Sind Das Volk. Now this latest offering, Sketches Of The Red Districts, sees them returning to the conflict-ridden knot of a country that was Yugoslavia, taking from it two points of reference (both from the band’s […]
Discus The three members of Shiver like nothing better than to collaborate separately and are involved in numerous projects. The trio itself has been quiet recently recording wise, but the chance to hook up with Yorkshire-based pianist Matthew Bourne at his house was too good an opportunity to turn down after the hysteria of lockdown, and the quartet used forty-eight hours to lay down , the first of […]
Efpi The Beats & Pieces Big Band has been together in one form or another since 2008 and is doing its best to breathe new life into classic big band jazz. The dancefloor filler of its time, moved the head and the heart, and was filled with a sweeping sense of life and joy. Ben Cottrell‘s collective bring that sense of wonder and momentum smoothly into the twenty-first […]
Universal In the depths of a bleak January such as this, one might very well find oneself tramping across sodden fields, beneath sullen grey skies, breath forming clouds in the cold and clods of mud clinging to your boots, crows wheeling and calling overhead and a line of skeletal trees marking a boundary in the distance. Looking up at the dark, bruised sky, you might imagine that music […]
Magma / NEWS Belgian four-piece Tukan come at their interpretation of kinetic rock music as if some of them have spent a proportion of their time lost in the intense sweep of post-rave dance music. The drifting synths and Balearic keyboard motifs welded to live drums and bass make for an organic, muscular journey. There is a sense of that dance euphoria spread across most of the seven […]
Naïve LA-based Bryan Senti has already placed his debut album Manu online, a post-classical string trio treatise that places minimal Western leanings within a fresh narrative which borrows from the indigenous sounds of his Latin American roots. Finally it is receiving a vinyl release and well deserving of this honour it is, from the of the cover image to the lush black RTI pressing.
Psychic Hotline Tim Bernardes, one third of Brazilian indie-tropicalia band O Terno, chose the start of 2020 to regroup and focus once again on a solo album that took him from the touring treadmill and allowed him to concentrate once again on crafting something that was entirely his own. The sixteen tracks that make up Mil Coisas Invisiveis come straight from the heart and highlight a voice that […]
Discus The second album from Bo Meson this year finds his focus reverting to his own unstructured universe, taking the final opportunity to work with cellist Sarah Palmer before she departs these shores. That impetus finds Bo and the assembled players taking one long improvised run at the assorted material, plucked from various ruminations and ad-libbed like a music hall spectre; dramatic, arcane, sultry and .
Upset The Rhythm Shake Chain are a confusing and disturbing car crash of semi-danceable proportions. Their Snake Chain album opens with the sound of a post-punk band idly observing some horrifying local disturbance and it kind of grown battier from there.
Constellation “Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs eternally.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9 There is a certain comfort in knowing that everything comes back around, from the morning sunrise to […]
Bureau B The mid- to late nineties was a pretty purple patch for German electronica and it coincided with a similar flurry of genre-less electronic based bands arriving from the States. The beauty of the German acts, like those that preceded them, was the lack of obvious Western tradition and unlike the bands from the seventies, a greater access to and greater complicity with the new electronic instruments. […]
Jazzland Not content with the numerous collaborative activities which he has undertaken recently, Norwegian pianist Bugge Wesseltoft and German producer Henrik Schwarz have chosen to release a second chapter in their duo format, the initial one having been released back in 2011. Their interaction of post minimal piano and electronic escapism has been given a further boost by the addition of some well-chosen collaborators.
Nuclear Blast In which Kev Nickells (right) and Harmony Parker (left) listen to Cradle Of Filth‘s 2021 album Existence Is Futile at the same time and share their thoughts and/or review the record by direct message:
Discus Martin Pyne‘s idea behind Ripples, that of duets between his vibraphone and David Beebee‘s Fender Rhodes, had me hooked immediately. The gauzy, shimmering haze of the vibes let loose from formal shackles and allowed to wander at will is accompanied by the sympathetic shiver of the Rhodes, and sounds like a dream made real and spread across the twelves watery vistas enclosed.
Discus Another month and another Martin Archer collaboration. You have the feeling that the man never sleeps, adventures in sound flowing through his veins at all moments. The thing is, the quality never seems to dip even when the variety is so great. Here, he reconvenes with old friend John Jasnoch on bass guitar, percussionist Lee Allatson and Sarah Farmer on violin and electronics. The title of Wasp […]
Bellissima Strip away the commercialism and associations with Christianity, and Christmas is actually rather lovely. In colder climates, coloured lights reflect and refract on snow and ice while friends and family come together over a cosy hearth to exchange gifts and good cheer, insulated against the hoary darkness outside. It’s no coincidence that many if not most cultures in the Northern Hemisphere have some form of celebration near […]