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.
Album review
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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 […]
Cherry Red This has been out a couple of months by the time you’ll read this. Do we worry about release cycles any more? I’m not too worried. Though there’s a strong chance that the core Fall fan, especially the sort to salivate over studio slurry, probably does worry. Bless his male-pattern CAMRA farts heart. Speaking of salivating over slurry, here’s the latest iteration in “the new normal”. […]
disillusiondotdotdot Brighton-based musician Karl MV Waugh presents four drone explorations on Winter In A Void: A Choice Of Delirium, a series of long-form sustains which atmospherically armature, fizz with an over-arching physicality.
Rune Grammofon For Master Oogway‘s second album, they find themselves aptly on Rune Grammofon, home of many jazz outliers for whom pigeonholes are not to be regarded. The simmering tension that opens Earth And Other Worlds on “Heracleion” is a case in point; a gentle sax line indicates a slow build of something, cymbals and the ghost of guitar fizz in the background, making themselves known, scatting and […]
Carpark It’s been thirty years since the last album, but the music of Sonic Boom has remained a constant on my record players since I was sixteen, and this beautifully measured record is a return to the forms; it doesn’t particularly sound like any of his previous records, but it is unmistakably the work of Pete Kember.
Resipiscent I can’t believe Thomas Dimuzio has been producing sound for over thirty years and is still finding ways of taking the listener on sonic journeys; they are not always comfortable, but are invigorating and filled with new modes of expression. Perhaps that is the beauty of modular synth work; the possibilities are endless and one could be making soundscapes from now until the end of days and […]
blindblindblind The first side of I Feel Like A Bombed Cathedral‘s W LP unfurls as if picking up from where Amaury Cambuzat’s last solo outing ended. A sound that slowly blooms in the ear, the muted grey/blue hues of the cover and its emergent greens curling round its gathering complexity as the thumping heartbeat at its core is steadily eroded.
L’invitation Musicale Adrien Durand‘s Bon Voyage Organisation are covering all bases on their follow up to 2018’s Jungle, Quelle Jungle? From experimental soundscapes to rhythmic locomotion to dancefloor-tinged funky soul, there is something for everyone.
Intravenal Sound Operations St Galás of the plague. Obviously now is the perfect time for a re-issue of this most excruciating of records. Insofar as the general fuckedness of everything is front and centre and needs a soundtrack.
Crammed Discs The Aksask Maboul story is an interesting one. Formed on 1977 by Crammed Discs supremo Marc Hollander and Vincent Kenis, they recorded two experimental and now hard-to-find LPs, covering all sorts of genres, before merging with the Belgian band Honeymoon Killers and releasing another couple of diverse albums in the ’80s.
Cooking Vinyl With its cover and title looking and sounding like a Crass record from the eighties, this is very different Orb than the cosmic warriors that bought us The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld all those years ago. Abolition Of The Royal Familia has a message in its notes of Extinction Rebellion‘s fight to save the planet; a worthy theme, and certainly one worth shouting about.
Thrill Jockey The photograph of Jim White and Marisa Anderson in the studio that adorns the inside sleeve of The Quickening says a lot of what you need to know about this album. The pair face one another, playing in real time, but they are intent on their instruments.
Happy Robots The trio who comprise Mood Taeg are the musical arm of a wider artistic collective that includes video and graffiti artists, DJs, photographers and painters. Over the course of the thirty-odd minutes contained on their debut LP Exophora, you feel an obvious love for all things motorik and German-influenced, but reflected in a modern and rather charmingly effervescent style that brims with repetitive joy.
Tenor-Vossa (CD) / 1972 (vinyl) Given the deluxe gatefold treatment, Breathless’s 1986 debut LP The Glass Bead Game is being plucked out of relative obscurity to shine once again.
Nahal The Ondes Martenot is one of those instruments that’s absolutely lovely, but has struggled to find an identity for itself. It’s in the realm of early electronic instruments, and it’s consistently used for swoopy spacey things and occasionally in the work of Olivier Messiaen.
Thrill Jockey As Ripley Johnson strips away colleagues and friends, going from the four-piece Wooden Shjips to the two-piece Moon Duo and finally to the solo Rose City Band, so the enjoyment factor seems to increase as if, in reality, this is what he would choose to do.