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 […]
Album review
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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 […]
Bureau B You know that you are in for a mysterious journey when the artist’s name Baal and Mortimer turns out to be a pseudonym for one Alexandra Grubler. Her ability to fuse sparse electronics with disembodied but somehow compelling vocals is really rather impressive, and for each of the thirteen vignettes compiled here, the mood changes subtly, often hesitant, the sounds hiding in shadows, stretching and pulling […]
House Of Mythology As their debut’s successor, Téléplasmiste‘s third album To Kiss Earth Goodbye tones down the spacey dronescaping, that Time Machines-like purr, of the previous LP in favour of a more transitional tingle where dancing structures free up the space, openly invite an otherness to come and play.
Editions Mego The panoply writ “disruption” was cursed paratactically; or better, pastiche’s ante-noumen should imperatively be considered hypotactically. That is, without hesitation or compunction — res ipsa loquitur — but also mured qua violence (a tendril disavowed ‘twixt Richard of St Victor / Libidinal Economy).
10 To 1 Australian expat Mark Kluzek‘s The Doomed Bird of Providence has been producing thoughtful, melancholy travelogues for the weary of heart for the best part of ten years. These often focus on colonial times in his native Oz, but on Rumbling Clouds of War Hover Over Us, the journey described is even more personal to Mark and much closer to home for us.
Infrared Metalheadz veteran J Majik follows up 2019’s well received Full Circle with a three-disc album, Always Be, which continues his melding of old school drum’n’bass with a certain experimental scattering of sounds across the banging beats, making it a little more than just a raucous dancefloor filler.
Bureau B The opener “Electric Garden” on Bureau B‘s re-release of Conrad Schnitzler‘s 1978 album Con sets up a wonky forest of purr-cussive sirens that mercurially glisten, shapes that gently ricochet the headphones in buttery artificiality, form-filled but formless, bending that Karlheinz Stockhausen concrete into something less stoic and more playful.
Tapete Symbiosis is Nathalie Bruno‘s first solo album-length outing as Drift.. After membership of Leave The Planet and Phosphor, and her Black Devotion and Genderland EPs, Nathalie decided to lock herself away and search within to complete a collection of tracks that would hold together as an album. it is fair to say that on the strength of Symbiosis, she has succeeded in that plan.
Bureau B A splinter from the original Faust family, Gunther Wüsthoff presents a selection of his solo work as Total Digital via Bureau B. The title is one which the first three tracks encompass superbly in a triptych of machined doodles, pre-fixed by “TransNeptun”, a series far removed from planet Faust as it is humanly possible.
Courier Sound The latest release from The Spermaceti Organ, on a lovely cassette from Courier Sound, is a crazy, lurid yellow in an orange outer case; a vibrant and vivid release that is somehow the opposite of the distant light-smeared visions evoked by the sounds.
Discus Martin Archer must be one of the busiest men in music. Not content with running Discus, every other release seems to have some involvement from him, covering so many different styles and moods it is remarkable. Here we find him teaming up once again as Das Rad with Nick Robinson and Steve Dinsdale for another improvised excursion into noir-ish soundscape territory. Adios Al Futuro is the follow […]
Bright Shiny Things It might be that “landscape”‘ is as much defined by borders as it is landmass. Jobina Tinnemans‘ music (arguably) has a dual relationship with landscape — when we say the landscape of electronic music, we might mean IDM, electronica, soundscapes, field recordings (etc), each with their own borders. Tinnemans is clearly not beholden to such impermeable notions of border.
Fabrik Birmingham’s Fabrik are releasing their second album of rolling, experiential grooves on the back of a previous track, “Black Lake”, being picked up for use as a podcast theme in the States. Via stateside crowdfunding, they have put together a physical release for this album that is packed full of slinky vibes and evocative soundscapes, twisting around the beguiling vocals of singer Hayley Trower.
Play Loud! Excellent! More Limpe Fuchs goodness leaks out of Berlin-based Play Loud!, this time stretching back to the late seventies when she was an integral part of a duo called Anima-Sound with her husband Paul. Collecting together a series of live recordings made during the 1977 festival at Castle Moosham in the Lungau region of Salzburg, Austria, Im Lungau is an artefact saved from the brink and […]
Somewherecold Judging by the sleeve notes, the latest release from Alex Keevill‘s The Microdance has clearly had a difficult gestation, but the end result seems to have been well worth the sweat and tears. Over the course of fourteen tracks and more than an hour, we are taken on an emotional journey that hints at a kind of alt-rock direction, though Our Love Noire does rather plough its […]