Thrill Jockey For The Sea And Cake‘s eleventh album and the first since 2012’s Runner, the band has slimmed down to a three-piece following the departure of bassist Eric Claridge. I can find no obvious reason for his departure nor information as to who has taken over the bass playing duties, but regardless, the band’s sound is still that same unique mix of gossamer vocals, Caribbean-inflected guitar melodies […]
Album review
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LM Dupli-Cation I remember years ago catching A Hawk And A Hacksaw playing various little venues in Bristol. At that point, it was just Heather Trost and Jeremy Barnes and they were plying a kind of Eastern European street music, Jeremy sitting down playing the accordion with a drumstick taped to his hat and a large drum between his legs, knocking out a rhythm as Heather patrolled the […]
Upset The Rhythm Zesting the zeitgeist, the Instamatic fun on this baby is a gooning lime balloon that’s crammed with ideas. Emotionally volatile adverts that stick it to the line-towing yawn, cricks its neck over the environment
Sound On Probation It’s been proven by experimental research carried out at Yale University in 2005i that extreme ambient / drone music stimulates the part of the brain called Shatner’s Bassoon, which is the brain centre dealing with time perception. At certain highly-resonant frequencies, to the listener a second can feel like a month. It almost sounds like fun
Consouling Sounds OK, a brief history lesson. In the fourteenth century, a man named Tamerlane, who dreamed of restoring the glory of Genghis Khan‘s Mongol empire, laid waste to big fuck-off tracts of Europe, Asia and Africa. Calling himself “the Sword of Islam” and “the Scourge of God”, Tamerlane built towers from the skulls of his enemies.
Play Loud! Locust Fudge is a duo comprising Schneider TM‘s Dirk Dresselhaus and his old Sharon Stoned compadre Christopher Uhe. It seems they last put an LP out about twenty years ago, after which Dirk concentrated on the gradual and rather elegant electronic deconstructivism of Schneider TM.
Rocket Drawing its title from the concept popularised in Robert Anton Wilson‘s Illuminati-series novel The Cosmic Trigger, Gnod‘s Chapel Perilous embarks on a hepped-up journey through the outer and inner spaces of the mind, here expressed through the medium of guitars and other instruments rammed through amplification turned up to at least 23.
Grönland After Robert Görl and Gabi Delgado spilt up DAF back in 1982, for one reason or another, Robert lost all interest in music. He travelled to New York intent on taking up acting, but was required to leave after his visa expired. Once back in Germany, he was detained due to having missed military service and escaped by the skin of his teeth to Paris on a […]
Zoharum (CD) / Sonic Meditations (LP/CS) Originally released as mini CDrs on different labels in 2009, Expo 70‘s Justin Wright was joined for these two lengthy sessions by Matt Hill from Umberto on both bass guitar and at the drum machine controls. And what flights of psychedelic fantasy they are, drifting and floating on ever-flowing waves of looped guitar and recursive effect pedal washes that uncurl, largely in homage to […]
Feeding Tube / Public House Daniel Wilson, who operates under the nom de plume Meadow House, is one of the great English eccentrics. As well as being part of improv quartet Oscillatorial Binnage, releasing the intriguing Radionics Radio and acting as Resonance FM‘s composer-in-residence for 2014, he has operated a mediadropping scheme for the last twenty years.
Tonometer Music Christian Skjødt‘s Illumination LP was commissioned for an installation of the same name he constructed at the Botanical Garden of the University of Latvia in Riga in 2014. Released on 10″ clear vinyl and digitally, each side is exactly twelve minutes long, and captures a slice in time from the ten solar-powered analogue circuits which he had installed to resonate around the dome of an eighteenth century […]
Trace It is clear from the title of the album, the tone of the cover imagery and some of the track titles that Mark Beazley and Michael Donnelly may not be treating us to another blissful series of plangent, bass heavy soundscapes. Blurred images of police lines and war shots offset by high-class partying are set against a blood-red sky.
Schoolkids / Scrawny After thirty years of playing together with the odd break here and there, Buffalo Tom seem to convene every five years or so to throw down another bid for supremacy over the few bands that are left from their post-hardcore brethren.
Stolen Body After being fortunate enough to catch The Evil Usses‘ barnstorming set at last year’s Bristol Psychfest and being thrilled and bewildered in equal measure by their previous three releases, including the loose as a goose cassette Giblets, I was really looking forward to seeing what these Dartington alumni had to offer, and in which direction it would boldly spring.
Bureau B There’s not enough trumpet in music nowadays, something the brilliance of the opening track firmly re-adjusts. “Le Coeur Léger, Le Sentiment D’un Travail Bien Fait” is a collaborative with FaUSt that gets Jean-Hervé Péron giving it the Reeves and Mortimer pub singer swerve to some trilobiting tendrils of tuneage.
Front & Follow Paul Snowden (AKA Time Attendant) and Maybury capture the surreal sensuality of Penny Slinger‘s story in shuttering drone and distempered decay. The merest sense of rhythm lurking in a marginalised menagerie of modular synapse and scissored sizzle.
Leaf Laurence Pike is quite the musical polymath and one of Australia’s leading exponents of experimental drum-based music. After a number of collaborations with the likes of Australian jazz legend Mike Nock and Jack Wyllie from Portico Quartet, as well as releases by his bands PVT and Triosk, this is the first to find him heading out under his own name.
Grönland Where to start with Holger Czukay? His is a name with which any self-respecting music fan will be only too familiar. Holger had a career that started in 1960 with the introduction of the Holger Schuring Quintet, then time spent as a student of Karlheinz Stockhausen