Crammed Discs Brussels in the early ’80s must have been a really cool place to be, with Marc Hollander starting up Crammed Discs just as Tuxedomoon arrive, spreading their stateside art rock sensibilities across the city. Lurking in a bar in the centre was Benjamin Lew, tinkering with an MS-10 and producing his own from found sounds and an experimental outlook. Meeting Tuxedomoon’s Steven Brown was a match […]
Album review
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Rednetic The eleven tracks spread across the latest release from 4T Thieves apparently owe something to Boards Of Canada; but having never listened to that act, I can only say that the woozy soundscapes and lethargic trip hop beats captured here have a real effect on the listener, their odd textures and slipperiness bringing to mind the sort of lonely, sweeping, slow motion vistas of Bowery Electric.
Lumberton Trading Company After Siôn Orgon’s brilliant Black Object comes this freshly minted dozen. Dust is a mini LP whose first track takes no prisoners, births this baby in muscled metal, words dark’n’glistening, then slamming a singular technoid, a ballsy brilliance that surrounds itself in a jaded tinsel epitaph.
Fallen Moon John Sellekaers‘ latest Feral Cities album is a series of drone-based soundscapes that fit well with the brooding but slightly abstracted cover image. There is a sense of solitude that runs through Arcs And Layers, but the sort of solitude that is bracing and life-affirming. The jittery opening to “White Heat” echoes around your head as the unstable bass looks for a way of settling down. […]
Here we are then, a big ole' retrospective of Faust's... if not golden era, then certainly their best-known stuff. "Canonical" krautrock. And of course krautrock is a silly term at its silliest in reference to Faust -- the German band featuring least Germans, singing in French and English and German
Upset The Rhythm Here’s another tasty treat from those excellent Upset The Rhythm peeps. Dark World is a twenty-two track exposé of Normil Hawaiians’ early verve, showcasing a formative pool of edgy punk / post-new wave that would finally mutate / mature into the arty haemorrhage that was their debut More Wealth Than Money and beyond. Back then things were quite fluid, sponge-like, a many-tentacled beast collected here […]
Thrill Jockey The bringing together of Montreal’s Big|Brave and Portland’s The Body has produced a gratifying collision culminating in a series of tales taking in slow, ancient folk and creeping, hypnotic post-metal in equal measure, laying them bare and then piling noise and heartache into the mix to provide an album that enthrals ever more with repeated listens. On Leaving None But Small Birds, this temporary seven-piece has […]
Relapse In a world ridden with plague, what could be more timely than black metal? And in a world facing impending climate catastrophe, what could be more timely that deep ecology? And in a world regulated by time, what could be more timely than timelessness? Fortunately, there’s a band who do all three. And a new album by Wolves In The Throne Room is just the kind of […]
Intimate Inanimate After the languorous drift of the recent collaboration with Daniel Blomquist, Aria Rostami has turned up the tempo and returned with a series of glichy, dancefloor friendly, sub-techno grooves that are as easy to consume curled up on the sofa as in an early morning warehouse club scenario. What sets these tracks apart from the usual IDM type electronica is Aria’s willingness to back the beats […]
Erototox Decodings Thomas Dimuzio‘s love of the Buchla synhtesiser is well known and here, on the precursor to Sutro Transmissions, we find his initial forays into that universe, that limitless dimension that means every release is a new journey or a new series of travels into the unknown.
Freestyle Dan Berkson‘s journey through music has taken him a long way and through a lot of styles to wind up producing this classic jazz album. Forming a funk band, playing in Chicago and then moving to London producing deep house 12″s, he eventually re-connected with his first instrument, the piano, just as the vibrant London jazz scene was kicking off.
Buried Treasure Delaware Road supremo and all around electronic whiz Alan Gubby has been producing pieces under the pseudonym of Zyklus for the best part of forty years, which is an incredible feat, let alone all the other pseudonyms and collaborations. ‘ Stimulacra compiles twenty-three tracks from Zyklus’s oeuvre dating from 1983 to 2006, some of them perfect incidental snippets at under a minute and others looming far […]
Zam Zam / La République des Granges / Permafrost / Murailles Music From the Tesla crackle of the intro to that extending shadow of organ creeping on throughout, the weird melodics here on Rien Virgule‘s La Consolation Des Violettes feed a widening crescent of expectation. A rich invitation that stirs up a Giallo sensibility, akin to Goblin, but with more lurk in the suspense department. That repetitive and […]
(self-released) I was intrigued to learn of ambient jazz duo Nelson Patton‘s deep involvement with the genre defying artist / singer Lonnie Holley and there is some obvious bleed between his brand of impressionistic, dreamlike song-writing and the slightly woozy, eyes half-closed atmospheres of Universal Process, their latest album. Although only just released, the pieces were written and recorded a couple of years ago, pre-pandemic, so it carries […]
Two albums linked by a label (Discus) and a player (Matthew Bourne ) and possibly joined by being somewhere in the fallout of jazz that’s not quite jazz. Neither sounding particularly alike, and that’s as it should be. Mzylkypop – Kiedy Wilki Zawyja? There are other words that precede it but, as is right and just, the first proper word on Mzylkypop‘s Kiedy Wilki Zawyja? is “Kurwa”. Which […]
Yew As a child, I had an image of how the future was going to look and I have to confess that forty-odd years later, I am pretty disappointed. Everything seems to be smaller, more compact, less shiny and interesting and space is almost ignored. The sounds on Losing Circles that Thomas Dimuzio and partner in sound, Double Leopards‘ Marcia Bassett, conjure up are exactly how I imagined […]
Sub Pop I think this didn’t leave the CD player for a good ten listens when it came through. I wouldn’t say I was one of those Low fans. I was mostly indifferent for the last twenty years or so. But Double Negative really was a massive shot in the arm. Either for me or the band, who knows. This feels massively like a companion piece to Double […]
Carton / Coax Visual artist and sound sculptor Jean Francois Riffaud has taken his RIFO alter ego on a guitar odyssey hanging primarily on tonal repetition and hypnotic rhythmic interaction. Running through five inter-related pieces that spur one another on like an enthusiastic relay team, the guitar on Betel is treated with anything but reverence and at times is barely recognisable. The utterly basic hypnotic rhythm that prepares us […]