Blue Tapes The latest release from The Blue Tapes House Band has only one disappointing element; the cassette isn’t blue, but white. I don’t know what is going on here and it is fair to say I have no idea what the House Band are trying to do, except drive the listeners crazy. For nearly an hour, pure white noise rolls out
Album review
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Dur Et Doux As your brain tries to get a grip on the multi-perspectives of the MC Escher-like arts, you’re pummelled by the intensity of the vibes on Ni‘s Pantophobie (the fear of everything) LP. I don’t know much about Ni, but I like the souped-up King Crimson metal-headed math rock surprise they are welding here. Pantophobie is a head-banger’s dream of accented angulars and jigsaw shifts, the […]
Rune Grammofon Maja SK Ratkje‘s latest album for Rune Grammofon is a really intriguing piece. Written for the Norwegian National Ballet‘s interpretation of Knut Hamsen‘s breakthrough novel Hunger, it is entirely centred around a modified pump organ. The device was something that she played every night live on stage with the ballet, and that is an incredible feat when you read the spec: “…a modified, wiggly and out […]
Silken Tofu An improvised collision between W (James Welburn) and V (Juliana Venter), the first side of which (“Concave”) goes straight in there with vocal exorcism. A cathartic off-the-bone presentation that has Juliana Venter shrieking satisfyingly into the void.
Archaeological Notoriously diverse sound artist Andrew Liles first met ex-Mayhem vocalist Sven Kristiansen (AKA Maniac) at the 2008 Roadburn Festival and was later invited to join the latter’s group Sehnsucht. A desire to continue performing together saw the pair reconvene at various points up to this current point, when they decided to lay down this remarkably subtle yet faintly disturbing album. I say subtle, because when you consider […]
Zoharum The twenty miniatures on Short Scenes barely push beyond three minutes in length, but each fits neatly into a cohesive whole that makes the album work as both abstract background music and an engaging delight to become lost in. Anne Bakker‘s violin moves deftly from mellow and swooping to staccato and
Discus Martin Archer founded Discus thirty years ago this year and has pushing the envelope of what we might expect from jazz-based music ever since. Describing itself as the adventurous label, two recent releases that dropped through my letterbox are both vivid sonic adventures that use very different foundations as their jumping-off points.
Cleopatra A lot of people were very surprised when the 73-year-old Hawkwind veteran Nik Turner blew our heads clean off with the single “Fallen Angel STS-51-L”, ahead of the release of his Space Gypsy album. It was a Newtonian as all fuck, hurtling ride of a number. It had all of the giddy propulsion of classic space rock. Messy and noisy, but turn on a sixpence tight, and […]
Constellation The opening track on Light Conductor‘s Sequence One nods to the experiments that Spiritualized undertook on their second album and blasts them into space. It involves the simplest of ingredients, but the effect is quite astounding; a six-note repetitive pattern, three lazy notes on bass and other analogue squelches give the overriding impression of a space station slowly revolving.
Tapete I find it really heartening that Stephen Lawrie is continuing his Telescopes trajectory in such a self-contained manner. This latest album, The Telescopes’ eleventh and the third for Tapete, finds Stephen solely in charge of the band’s direction and after the centre of the Earth feel of As Light Return, with its monolithic slabs and black hole circling, there is a return to more song-based structures
Ruton Music The Circle-helmed home of all things hairy and guitar-heavy, Ektro Records has recently taken on a synthetic hue, with key members of the core group of musicians from Pori in Finland (and beyond) picking up their drum machines and keyboards instead.
Tenement George McFall‘s first release under his own name, after stepping out from behind his Clean George IV pseudonym, has quite an intense edge with an arch and literate drive that stands it out from a lot of the synth-based music of the moment.
Rocket Girl I have fond memories of corresponding with head Rocket Girl Vinita back in the 1990s, those heady days of hand-folded seven-inch singles and US imports being posted out from their East London lair for the equivalent cost of a second class stamp in today’s over-inflated mail costs. That the little notes nearly always came from her and would also include suggestions of bands to whom she […]
One Little Indian The beats might be more machine tooled than salvaged these days, but Test Dept still haven’t lost any of that rage or taste for addressing injustice. This return to form is snarling at the usual subjects, the dirty end of capitalism and its bankrupt ideologies.
Enraptured Enraptured Records must be in their twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year now, and although things seem to have gone a little quiet on their front over the last few years, Coldharbourstores are still flying the flag for them and are back after a mere three years with their follow-up to 2016’s Wilderness. With Graham Sutton back behind the desk again
Version Studio Swedish duo A Swarm Of The Sun have been together for a good ten years or so, but this latest album is their first since 2015. Erik Nilsson, guitarist and pianist of the duo, is also chief of Version Studio Records, the group’s label; and vocalist Jakob Berglund arranged the beautifully monochromatic artwork, all snowy forestscapes and misty moods.
4AD Sadly, I wasn’t old enough to see Rema-Rema in the flesh — it was only as a result of being an avid 4AD label nut that I spied this curio in the mail-order catalogue back in the early 1990s, an EP that almost instantly became one of my treasured finds. A squealing black heart of a surprise that I can now some forty years later finally sample […]
Southern Lord After listening to these first two re-issues in a planned series, I can see why Southern Lord would want to be responsible. Thirty years after their initial releases, their legacy lives on in the sound and sweep of various members of the Southern Lord roster both past and present.