Sulatron Kick out the jams and get your freak flag flying with two new releases from Sulatron. Zone Six are a mindbending mixture of members of Electric Moon, Modulfix and The Pancakes (who also get together under the name Krautzone) playing spiralling hypnotic psychedelic madness in free-form jams that have been condensed down to these four blistering tracks. Komet Lulu’s bass kicks us into the title track, its […]
Album review
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4AD Nobody ever sounded like the Cocteau Twins, a band so startlingly original that they spurred a lot of imitators; they took the jangle of indie to a whole different level, an otherworldly soak that no doubt inspiring the shoegrazery verve that would follow in their wake. By 1985 they already had three albums under their belts, but their sound was still evolving to ever-more luscious territories, concocting […]
Rocket Sprawling its way across three sides of vinyl and two CDs, Infinity Machines is Gnod at their most epic. There’s a lot of it and can feel initially daunting to step into it as you realise the weight of expectation, and the fact that your brain has to disseminate so much music, creep up on you. So I’m going try my best at reviewing such a large […]
RVNG Intl. The slow evolutions of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (AKA Lichens) and Ariel Kalma are curling my head to perfection, all long sustains and modular gurgles mingling gently with the environmental ambience of aviary tweets, bubbling brooks the call of the wild. The saxophonics climbing through most tracks like a waking body stretching in span-like evocations, coupled with the blissful smoothness of simple melodies that would make […]
Cardinal Fuzz (Europe)/Captcha (North America) White Manna’s previous album Come Down Safari was an almost lilting psychedelic trip to the outer reaches, like a 1968 Nepalese bhang shop of lysergic loveliness that wasn’t a million miles a way from bands like Lamp Of The Universe in its recreation of bedroom Ganges travelling. What White Manna have delivered with Pan, though, is a totally different beast. If Come Down […]
Rural Isolation Project What’s often advertised as noise-rock tends to be just noisy rock. It’s usually very straight forward and just a noisy use of instruments. Lovely as this can be, I find it refreshing when Austin noise-punks Quttinirpaaq‘s third Rural Isolation Project LP is said to be “bleeding-noise industrial electronic rock”. This is the solo project of Matt Turner, who also joins forces with King Coffey from […]
Software Recorded over the space of ten years up until the early part of the current century, The Baltika Years gathers together a selection of recordings that Ben Zimmerman made almost entirely from samples he manipulated using software running on the now long-defunct Tandy DeskMate computer operating system. Working around and within the limitations of the music software available on DeskMate (such as 22 kHz 8-bit audio), Zimmerman recorded […]
Bureau B Dub is the very beating heart of music made with electric bass and drums, the low end and rhythm pared back to bare essentials as the bedrock of form, then modified with various levels of drenching in echo and other effects. It’s no wonder that a technique developed most prominently in Jamaica in the 1970s went on to enhance and then pretty much take over huge […]
Karl Gently grooving guitars weave in and out of focus, playful in their interaction and sporadic dialogues with each other. At times they align, generating a collective groove that rolls along with the free spirit of Krautrock. In other moments they separate, creating backdrops for each other casting light and shadows, or providing minute detailed explorations of sonic material, until once again, they reunite and take on a […]
Pica Disk Jim O’Rourke has released albums of jazz, noise, electronica and rock music. He has collaborated with artists such as Thurston Moore, Derek Bailey, Mats Gustafsson, Merzbow, Nurse with Wound and Fennesz, just to name a few, and has produced albums by artists such as Sonic Youth, Wilco, Stereolab, Faust, Tony Conrad, The Red Krayola, Joanna Newsom and US Maple. He mixed Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album […]
4AD Punk had vaporised into a new beast by the tail end of the Seventies, ripping out of its tri-chord skin into something altogether sleeker and weirder. Luckily for us pleasure-seekers, a then-unknown inquisitor going by the name of Ivo Watts-Russell was scouting around for talent for his fresh-faced label 4AD, mopping up all the post-punk verve he could get his hands on. In retrospect, he had a […]
Pulver und Asche Drawing on their collective backgrounds in electro-acoustic composition, electronic music and free improvisation and with a general avant-garde interest in pushing at boundaries and generally mashing things up musically, El Toxyque, Luca “Xelius” Martegani and Zeno Gabaglio do their best to evoke the spirit of TS Eliot‘s The Waste Land on their second album as Niton. Through the application of cello, self-built instrumentation and a […]
New Nihilism Jarosław Leśkiewicz‘s (AKA Naked On My Own) first CD as Opollo delivers ten tracks of wool-gathering shoegaze ambience which pulse, glide and drone at the listener, prompting the attainment of theta wave-heavy states of consciousness, or perhaps more simply nudging them towards a kind of wakeful sleep state. As with the best of this kind of thing (Leśkiewicz is obviously a fan of both Brian Eno […]
Universal Music Has it been twelve months already? Twelve months since Conchita Wurst swooped into our hearts and planted a big blue, pink and white flag in the heart of Europe for the second time in Eurovision‘s history. I realise that for a lot of people Eurovision is some chintzy, end-of-the-pier nonsense, but when you can have someone advocating trans* politics in front of millions of people across […]
Crónica Ma.Org Pa.Git is the fifth solo release from the Norwegian sound artist and experimental musician Alexander Rishaug. Here he is exploring the space and the acoustics of a church organ and the hiss, overtones and feedback of an old tube amp and electric guitar. The album consist of two long pieces, recorded in the Norwegian seaman’s church in Rotterdam. Even though the material is heavily processed and […]
4AD (UK)/RVNG Intl (USA and elsewhere) About two thirds of the way in to Holly Herndon‘s Platform, on the track “Lonely at the Top”, there comes an intimacy so disarming that, on first listen, I was unsure of what I was hearing. Platform is Holly’s second album; I reviewed her first album, Movement and, though I liked it a lot, I found it a little too disjointed, calling […]
Miasmah “Naught” is a great start with its verby bass plunges and clip-winged percussion from The Necks’ Tony Buck. James Welburn‘s music brings to mind the grim determination of early Swans or the merciless grind of Godflesh, here coupled with the distant hum of nose-diving Stukas. The minimal muscle underneath grinding away like a clogged artery, extra drones weaving in, gathering like a Godspeed venture sans the orchestral […]
Acrobat John Coltrane then. I’ve not really listened to a great deal of ‘trane. So it’s probably pretty stupid to review a 4-CD box of stuff that’s likely for the jazz collectors market, right? Except, y’know, jazz is a thing that exists in the cultural memory, so if it’s just written by and for folk who are already in, it kind of stops being a live culture and […]