Play Loud! So here we are in London’s salubrious East End, in a period between the wars and reflecting a very different area to the one we know now. Except kind of not — London’s always been a mix of people, so no great surprise that ’20s London had Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews rubbing shoulders with white working class Londoners, singing songs about Copenhagen or the Netherlands. This […]
Album review
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Staraya Derevnya (CD) / Raash (cassette) / Steep Gloss Russian – Israeli – UK collective Staraya Derevnya dish up a refreshingly eclectic aesthetic where anything and everything has musical potential. A free-form exploration that’s open ended and primal which reaches into the unpredictable to pluck out some smouldering gold.
Kranky This is the second album for Julie Carpenter‘s Less Bells pseudonym and furthers her explorations pairing drifting electronics with choral vocals and the application of tension. There is a whimsical feel to the electronic wash that opens the album and cymbals glow with a kind of spectral sheen, but there is a sort of tension to the sounds due to an inertia that prevents the track from […]
Deutsche Grammophon The brothers Eno‘s Mixing Colours album was released at the start of the global pandemic of Covid-19, when most countries were in a state of lockdown. From reactions I read online, its soothing tones certainly helped many people through that difficult time, as it transported them to somewhere else away from the confinement of their living rooms and gave them a semblance of peace through a […]
Fire It is hard to believe that Kristin Hersh and David Narcizo have been playing together now for over thirty-five years. 1985 was the year of that extraordinary debut that reset the expectations of female rock bands, and it has been thirty-five years of that visceral rollercoaster that is Kristin’s psyche: the automatic writing, those songs as an expression of a connection to humanity that seemed at times to […]
Beats In Space / RVNG Intl It has taken seven years for the Dukes Of Chutney to follow up 2013’s Domino with a full-length album. In that time on their long, strange trip, they seem to have infused sounds from numerous countries into a personal patchwork that plays like a series of mysterious and alluring postcards, drawing you out of your cosy living room and requesting that you join […]
Disciples I’d like to imagine there’s some Freudian primary school where aspersions are cast heartily on people’s unconsciousness, though one wonders the effects of Oedipalising on ‘your mum’ jokes. Phew describes this album as “an unconscious sound sketch” and, for all the half-finished-ness that might imply, she’s got a thoroughly glittering musical psyche and intuition.
Group Mind The idea of music based on the elements immediately makes one think of mimetic, programmatic music. Air, water and fire have real-life sounds we can expect to hear reflected, but should the music try to imitate them? And what does earth sound like?
Give Me Monaco There is a cool elegance to the beats on the debut Give Me Monaco album that belies the dancefloor capabilities and rhythmic intricacies of the tracks collected here. Their producer, Leigh Redding, has been striving to translate thoughts and feelings of singularity and twisting them together to make a cohesive whole from seemingly disparate elements.
All Saints Spinner is an oddity, even in Brian Eno’s vast back catalogue; the music was originally conceived as the soundtrack to Derek Jarman’s film Glitterbug, a posthumously released compilation of old super 8 film that had been gathered together as the director was dying of AIDS.
Courier Sound After my recent question of “where else would you find such a thing?” for Alien‘s recent 23 tracks in 23 minutes release for the wonderful Courier Sound label, head honcho Stuart Bowditch has decided to ask fellow traveller and long-form electronic artiste Eumig to attempt a similar undertaking. As somebody who is more attuned to stretching pieces out to see where they will eventually take him, […]
Mute Despite impressions of the “are they still going?” sort, Erasure records are always worth a bash. Arguably, unlike a lot of their synthpop contemporaries in the ’80s, they’ve consistently respected the format. A bunch of songs, not too long, no faffing about with excessively long instrumentals. Pop discipline, that’s the order of the day.
Ndeya To consider Jon Hassell’s career to date is like the Pentimento of the title; a layering of ideas that slowly emerges to create something different to the earlier form it started from. Structurally, his work is not too dissimilar to that of painting, so each new listen reveals something fresh about the performance, much in the same way that new essences can be discovered when you study […]
Discus The de tian story is an interesting one; back in late 70’s Sheffield, Paul Shaft left new wavers 2.3, who released a record on Fast, to pursue something less structured and more adventurous. Along the way, he came into contact with Martin Archer and between them they pushed the band in a decidedly free direction, playing gigs and pushing boundaries until finally morphing into Bass Tone Trap.
Relapse It’s been five years since Zombi’s last album (Shape Shift) and sixteen years since their debut album Cosmos, so any new release by the band is always an exciting thing. The two members have hardly been idle in the last five years; Steve Moore has released several soundtrack albums and a smattering of 12” EPs, while AE Paterra has had a smattering of releases using his Majeure […]
A Turntable Friend 2017’s Untied Kingdom was the first full length Wolfhounds release in twenty-seven years and its lucid mix of musical vitality and social commentary was refreshing, on point and far more than we may realistically have expected. Three years later comes another album and once again, the intervening years have only gone on to hone their musical prowess, lyrical divergence and vocal abilities.
Prescription The first volume of Coil‘s unreleased Astral Disaster sessions was a revelation, chocked with new perspectives, and even introduced us to some fascinating freshness straight from the cutting room floor.
Ndeya I first became aware of Jon Hassell’s music in the early 1980s because of his collaboration with Brian Eno on the Fourth World Volume 1: Possible Musics album. Then of course a little later he worked with David Sylvian on his rather wonderful Brilliant Trees album of 1983. He was one of the few EG label artists at the time that truly straddled the divide between jazz […]