Beggars Arkive Was it really forty years ago that I popped into my local Our Price record shop on my way home from school to pick up a copy of Tubeway Army’s “Are Friends Electric“?
Album review
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Zehra Cross-genre collaborations, eh? They’re sometimes banging, sometimes embarrassing. Gnawa trance from west Africa meets luminary of free jazz doesn’t fill one’s heart with hope, but rest ye assured, this is much closer to a banger.
Important At some point it’d be nice to talk about a composer who’s a woman without reaching for the term “overlooked”. But here we are. Éliane Radigue fits that pattern well: gorgeous tonalities, sensuous, modest, quietist… disinclined to shout about herself, letting the music do the talking. She operates somewhere on an axis between musique concréte and minimalism, primarily working with Buchla synths and generally being affiliated with […]
Hubro Just looking at the cover of this album with Oyvind Skarbø and his musical friends and colleagues dressed as a school marching band gives you a vague idea of what to expect inside. They have quite serious looks on their faces, but the uniforms are a bit ill-fitting, as if they were borrowed and not taken too seriously. They are clutching various instruments that make them look […]
Babymetal Nine years into the fold, third album, first without Yuimetal. Where are we at with Babymetal? Well. Basically, the thing that was bangingest about the earlier stuff was that it was an astonishing mess. Stock metal riffs, abrupt major keys, hoover synths, super cutesy choruses and children way too young to have the slightest idea what they were up to.
Cobblers Diagonal don’t trend to release albums in a rush, this being their third since 2008; but once they are in the studio, the ideas come pouring out. It has been seven years since The Second Mechanism and since that time, two original members, Alex Crispin and Daniel Pomlett have returned to the fold, the band once again becoming a six-piece. In the past few years, life has […]
Riot Season The cover of The Cosmic Dead‘s new album Scottish Space Race appears to be making an impassioned plea for national independence, depicting as it does a Scotland that is so independent it has become an island away from all the bullshit going on in the rest of the UK. And right now I can’t exactly say I blame them. But it’s not a political album. It’s […]
Om Swagger There are some pretty eccentric ideas out there, certainly regarding music; but Ian Shirley, the editor of Record Collector, may well have come up with one of the wildest. Kraftwerk must be one of the most revered names in modern music history, and Ian has asked the internationally reputed Ebony Steel Band to interpret some of their better-known tracks in the joyful Caribbean style. I mean, […]
Hubro Considering the island of Lanzarote is renowned for its sunshine and blue skies, this latest collaboration between Jo Berger Myhre and Ólafur Björn Ólafsson is filled with melancholy. Most of this has to do with Lanzarote being the last placed that Ólafur spent time with Johann Johannsson before he died early last year. Apparently, the two of them played a gig in a cave on the island, […]
Zonedog Inaugurating the new Zonedog label with a slice of Disrupt ambience, Jan Gleichmar sets the controls for territories beyond both the heavier basslines of his Jahtari releases and the story-led drama of his Omega Station LP, exploring the concept of mood music for a starcraft’s virtual recreation room on this occasion.
Escape From Today / Dunque Paolo Spaccamonti has been a major player in the lively Italian avant-garde scene for the last ten years or so, collaborating with the likes of musicians Stefano Pilla, Mombu and Ramon Moro as well as Ben Chasny, Jim White and Jochen Arbeit. Not content with musicians, he also collaborates with photographers and video artists, so it is no surprise that his latest opus […]
Thrill Jockey Once again, Thrill Jockey are confounding expectations with the debut album from new soul wunderkind Sequoyah Murray. Hot on the heels of this year’s Penalties Of Love EP, the album finds Sequoyah crafting all sorts of .
Constellation It is hard to believe that Fly Pan Am have been away since 2006. Always Constellation‘s joker in the pack, their latest album carries on their rich tradition of genre-hopping, song sabotage and listener discomfort as if N’écoutez Pas were only yesterday.
Upset The Rhythm In their quest for world domination, Upset The Rhythm are going great guns with their release schedule. The latest two tasty treats to arrive are from opposite ends of the sonic spectrum and from both sides of the Atlantic.
(self-released) Brighton’s Emperors Of Ice Cream are a totally DIY band who, having worked their way through other local scene bands covering noise, improv and freak-folk type stuff, have settled on the Emperors for peddling an open-minded take on the kind of wonky indie scrawl at which the British were so good on the mid to late 1980s.
Rocket Composed of British-Iranian musician and composer Kavus Torabi (of Knifeworld, Guapo, Gong and Cardiacs fame), Coil and Téléplasmiste’s Michael J York, and Steve Davis (yes, snooker’s number one of yore, now fully bewitched by all things modular), The Utopia Strong‘s self-titled debut LP is a light and airy piece of work.
Trace Recordings Mark Beazley picks the Trace Recordings artistes with great care, and it is easy to see why they have chosen to release the first album from bass and voice duo Being. Not only does the bass couch the restless and emotive vocal in a dreamy gauze, but the overall sound draws the listener closer into the pervading melancholy.
Sunhair Music Germany seems to be producing some of the world’s top space and acid rock bands at the moment. Certainly the wonderful Electric Moon and its various offshoots have lead the way over the past few years, giving a wide catalogue of interstellar titles that have taken the blueprint from older bands and expanded it further outward. Acid Rooster are a band that has sprung up up […]