Sacred Bones In the great taxonomy of rock, Alan Vega was kind of like a platypus. ‘What? That can’t exist in nature!’ A Catholic Jew (a combo not known for its over-frequent presence in demographic cross-breaks), a veritable Methuselah when punk broke (he was already forty, though pretended to be a decade younger) and a pioneer of the electronic sound when all around was guitars, one would struggle […]
Album review
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Opa-Loka It seems to me that Philippe Petit‘s mission in his artistic existence is to make us re-appraise the way that we listen to music, sound, noise, however you wish to describe it, and to try and rewrite the rules, using sounds and forms that are so outside of the general sound world that they feel like transmissions from another planet. It is as if he has tapped […]
Constellation I was really looking forward to seeing Fly Pan Am come to Bristol last year. On the strength of last year’s C’est Ca, it was bound to be a storming show — and then lockdown hit, so although we didn’t manage to see them, instead we have ended up with another album and what a beauty it is. Conceived as a musical narrative accompanying the acclaimed contemporary […]
Ear Music “Some people have a landscape written in their bones”, sings Justin Sullivan on Surrounded, his incredibly long-awaited follow-up to 2003’s Navigating By The Stars. (But cut the guy some slack, he’s been busy fronting New Model Army, one of the hardest-working bands in rock until Covid made it hard for bands to work. Still, they managed an epic fortieth anniversary live stream, so it wasn’t all […]
(self-released) Drummer Jochen Rueckert uses his Wolff Parkinson White alias when he is in the mood for subverting the romantic notion of the soulful vocalist tugging the heartstrings of the listener. This he does by surrounding the singer in question with a barrage of sonic accompaniment that tests the strength of the singer’s ability to put across an emotion. Following on from last year’s collection Small Favours, which […]
Spoon / Mute The live CD is a precarious beast. Cementing the band’s reputation or besmirching it with cash cows. Or somewhere in between — servicing the more obsessive of a band’s fanbase, kneecapping the bootlegger. I’m often cautious — for a band like Can, how much is it adding to know that they could turn out the goods live? Well a fair amount. There’s a lot of […]
The Leaf Label Fernando Corona has been pushing the boundaries of recorded sound as Murcof for some twenty years or so now and for this latest, he is reunited with The Leaf Label; a fitting home for his restless innovation. The work on this double album was started four years ago as pieces for the Geneva-based dance company Alias. The fact that it was produced for such a […]
Atlantic Curve I’m loving this album’s cinematic sizzle, the slow sanguine accompaniment that grows round Lisa Gerrard’s voice, full of subdued simmer and deep-diving delight, then the drums kick in and spread the panoramics wide open. Rocky adrenalines that sparkle the headphones surrounded in quantising amber and torn turquoise, an aesthetic that has me hopelessly hooked as doubled-up gusts of echo breathe from within.
Constellation Godspeed You! Black Emperor are a very self-contradictory band. They draw you in and push you away at the same time. The arcane press releases, the obtuse packaging, all designed to confuse as much as entertain or educate. That exclamation mark in that unwieldy name. Everything about them says “difficult”. But then you bung them on and and they couldn’t be any easier to actually listen to.
À Tant Rêver du Roi Kong‘s sole album has taken thirteen years to finally be issued on vinyl, and its muscular insistence and discomfiting tension is great to have back in circulation. I can’t remember who suggested that the trio was the ultimate expression of the rock format, but these three certainly brought noise as well as the mania and the telepathic interconnection. It seems extraordinary that Snake […]
Cinema Paradiso WARNING – Contains filmic spoilers, conspiracy theories, adult themes, and chimpanzees. ADVICE – If you need a spoiler warning, that can only mean that you haven’t seen The Parallax View. Well, what the Sam Hell are you waiting for? It’s a masterpiece of the second golden age of Hollywood. Go and see it. Immediately. You can thank me later.
Archaeological / Dio Drone The latest collaboration from these two denizens of the underground is quite a change from their previous release due to its live format and it being the only current recording of them performing together. When the Archaeological folk requested their appearance at the eighth Dio Drone Festival, people were perhaps expecting them to tackle pieces from Darkening Ligne Claire, but instead a wildly unexpected […]
(self-released) Debut record from a Brighton-based duo doing something oddly nostalgic. In a way that’s possibly not obviously nostalgic. I don’t know how many readers are familiar with that time in “post-rock” when it was more associated with Tortoise and being quietly cerebral than big instrument rockist gestures, but this is fairly close to that. Similar to that time as well there’s a kind of parity and austerity […]
Upset The Rhythm For me, Upset The Rhythm are turning into a kind of post-modern 4AD or Too Pure, the sort of labels on which you could take a punt and pretty much guarantee that what you had purchased would be good. So far, UTR have had an excellent hit rate, always managing to find the kind of interesting, whimsical and unique acts that make the listener sit […]
Lava Thief Born from a Richard Brautigan poem of the same name, The Silver Stairs Of Ketchikan is a solo outlet of Thought Forms ringleader Charlie Romijn Barr. It’s always been an intimate, profoundly personal quest, often wrought in the improvised moment. Anybody that’s been lucky enough to see her live will testify to the witchy atmospheres she conjures, the abstracted emotions laid bare in looped violin, cello […]
Crammed Discs That most dashing of European labels, Crammed Discs, is celebrating forty years in the industry, and in keeping with this are engineering a series of reissues, of which the first volume of their Made To Measure albums is at the front. Made To Measure served as an adjunct to the main label, releasing albums that were slightly out of the ordinary, often affiliated with other forms […]
KrysaliSound Benjamin Finger is a rather prolific electronic artist based in Oslo and one who has spilt his largesse across numerous labels in the last ten or so years. KrysaliSound is the latest recipient and Auditory Colors is a miasma of drifting tones, mystery vocals and snatched, hallucinatory moments. There are many instruments at play here as well as field recordings, and “alien objects” that move the pieces from […]
Akkajee The candle-lit whispering of Lastenkerääjä‘s title track invites you into Akkajee’s folk senabilites, fills the space like a spidery Egon Schiele sketch waiting to be coloured in. Its plucked spine and conversational flow maybe tip-toeing round the baby collector it sings about, an old codger that throws naughty children into his sack, a scary prospect that the duo then decide to crayon over in a bright Midsommar […]