Fourth Dimension This is not fun, nor is it meant to be. Compassion And Vision sounds vile, nasty, deliberately difficult to listen to — and all the better for it.
Album review
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Cherry Red / MVD Audio / New Ralph Too It’s been nine months since my last foray into the deep Residential past and, subsequently, I have been sitting quietly, listening intently for the call of the Eskimo. It seems to make perfect sense that it has only now sounded forth with the onset of winter. Sadly, however, for all devotees of the band, that lonely lacuna has recently been punctuated […]
Thrill Jockey Sarah Louise is a guitar player from North Carolina who, over the course of a short but busy career, is doing her best to make you believe that she is using anything but a guitar to fabricate these vibrant, nature-influenced modern folk pieces.
three:four A rusty gate harmonica to vocals crazy paving the interlocking elastics. Loving the wonky symmetry of Orgue Agnès‘s debut LP release A Une Gorge, a perfumery of geometric criss-cross and percussive prowl bristling your bonce.
Odin The Trondheim Jazz Orchestra is a many-headed beast that has been going since the early 2000s and changes personnel from one album to the next to keep their approach fresh for each collaboration. The orchestra draws from a collective pool of players, and it would seem that one particular member takes the reins for each release. This time around it is bassist Ole Morten Vågan, whose compositions […]
Grönland Two years after Radio Wave Surfer was released, Holger Czukay found himself in the studio again with a revolving cast taking in Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit, Sheldon Ancel and Jah Wobble, as well as vocal interjections from U-She and Romie Singh. It seems fair to assume that the album was recorded not long before it was released, putting it some five or six years
Beggars Arkive OK, let’s start with the fact that this is a beautiful vinyl issue of an album that was only ever available on CD. Its gatefold packaging is wonderfully done and the 180-gramme vinyl mastering in gorgeous ruby red plastic makes this a collector’s item if you’re a fan of the band. Compilation albums are always difficult to review
Fylkingen Verbal Brainwash is a mammoth triple CD set collecting the experimental works of Åke Hodell from 1963-1977, using what he termed “text-sound composition”, along with radio dramas presented in that period on Sveriges Radio. This is a revised and updated edition of the collection, re-released by the Fylkingen experimental music and art collective in Stockholm
New Heavy Sounds Transmaniacon have been rather quiet since 2014’s hard rocking The Darkening Plain, but their return to the fray is quite an impressive collaboration. They have taken one of fantasy/horror novelist’s Ian Miller‘s post-apocalyptic street creations Suzie Pellet and constructed a cranked-up guitar fest of a concept album around the tale of her life and the lengths to which she has to strive to survive.
Discus Ron Caines, for those who don’t know, is a bit of an unsung hero in some circles. He’s probably best known for East Of Eden, way back when, but he’s something of a renaissance man — accomplished visual artist, composer, free musician, gurt Bristolian… Sadly, Caines’ discography isn’t as fulsome as it should be, which is the case for way too many players outside of big fancy […]
Rare Noise The line-up for the self-titled Anguish album is quite a treat and certainly an unexpected one. Just listing the ingredients; two parts Dälek, two parts Fire! Orchestra and Hans Joachim Irmler from Faust would cause a thrill of delight from most alternative music enthusiasts. Recorded over the course of just three days at Irmler’s studio, the result is a dystopian study in paranoia and a creeping […]
Important Éliane Radigue‘s Geelriandre / Arthesis loves time, luxuriates in it. Its frequencies gradually slip its grasp, or your perception, in that slow luxuriating bend to the goods that eats into your consciousness, subliminally cuts, the eerie exponentials creeping up on you like the textural dance of a Max Ernst painting. Solemn, solar, tumouring an odd timbre that percussively curls on tight jewels of Cageian prepared-ness
Odin We often have a particular image of northern European jazz, particularly that from Norway and Sweden, as being just a little clinical. I can see why people would want to discover something new and put some distance between them and what is seen as the old guard of jazz, but the Hanna Paulsberg Concept manages to keep a foot in both camps, pushing the body of jazz […]
Grönland Holger Czukay is a name with which any self-respecting music fan will be only too familiar. With a career that started in 1960 with the introduction of the Holger Schuring Quintet, through time spent as a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, on through the years spent honing Can into the extraordinary machine that it became and then the best part of a forty-year solo career which was the epitome of inclusion with […]
VMS Columbine are a group of rappers from Rennes who have captured the spirit of French adolescence. They have recently released their third album, Adieu Bientôt, and are blooming into a rather well-known band. They describe themselves as “absurd, naive and deep” and their music mixes synths and guitars to create their own universe.
Brutture Moderne The mysterious GDG Modern Trio is a band about which I knew nothing and the album that arrived with its Soviet-influenced modernist cover art sits there on the desk looking inscrutable. It transpires that the album was recorded in Ravenna and consists of three members of Italy’s burgeoning alternative music scene
Svart When Throat‘s latest album and their first for Svart arrived, I must confess I was a little put of by the sticker on the cover proclaiming them to be “The princes of Finnish Rock”. I guess I had a certain image in my head, which thankfully was completely eradicated by putting on the CD.
Consouling Sounds Thisquietarmy have been seriously prolific over the last ten years, scattering a good thirty or so albums into the musical universe across an array of different labels. However, this latest via Consouling Sounds is the first to find Eric Quach expanding TQA into a three-piece. The inclusion of Charles Bussieres and Marc-Olivier Germain allows the trademark sound