Madfish In light of Daevid Allen’s recent terminal cancer diagnosis, this album seems to be an elegy of sorts, full of flashbacks and slurry psychedelic fingers, a precious chance to snapshot a life lived to the full before his ultimate adventure into the unknown. That being said, this is far from miserable, rippling with usual rhythmic goods, the sensuous syrup that’s been scooping our ears for years, not […]
Album review
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Black Mass Rising The music on this album feels quietly all-encompassing; you can tell immediately that it’s Sleazy because over time he’s developed true signatures; there’s sounds here that are indistinct and yet unmistakable. I mean, we know that sometimes Coil’s music was just Sleazy don’t we? We know that Balance is on this album in a way he was on every track that Coil produced and that […]
Staubgold This creaks and groans at you in satisfying amounts. The double bass player pushing against the instrument’s confines in fricative flurries, like somebody scrambling over the tuneful core whilst struggling with an Ikea self-build. Detailed acoustics eating at that see-sawing harmonium, a Klezmer colour sway agitated by electronic mites or a sudden rush of guitar. A vibe that dissolves, tourniquets some tasty twilights. Apertures that sink into […]
Sulatron After their planet-building collaborative album The Papermoon Sessions, the lucky people at Roadburn last year got to witness the glory of both Papir and Electric Moon sharing the stage together for the massive psychedelic wig-out that is captured on this disc. Two tracks sit upon . “Powdered Stars” starts with pure space rock cosmic wibble and big, heavy chord structures that glide over taut rhythms. It is […]
Klangbad Neu! have a lot to answer for. Their best bits can be transcendent, their worst bits lazy and a little pointless and even a little contemptuous. We all have days like that, but . We all loved them despite their patchy output (perhaps because of it) and many attempted to emulate them. Stereolab did it pretty well, I thought, but the Stereolab imitators sounded exactly like a […]
Zoharum As forbidding and icy as the cracked and scratched surfaces which adorn its sleeve, Austeros opens with shuddering dry heaves of bass which threaten as much as they signify an ominous portent of glacial things to come. Like a heavier doom-laden cousin to Thomas Köner‘s equally resonant arcticscapes, Inner Vision Laboratory sketch out and fill in the detail of sound stages filled with slow — very slow […]
Malicious Damage There’s something gratifying about the way that The Orb‘s music has both progressed (in all senses of the word) and stayed within its own vaguely-defined parameters over the last quarter century. Pick any one of the tracks on History of the Future Part 2 or set it to shuffle play, and a certain number of slightly off-kilter vocal samples, blips, bloops and chunky shuffling beats from […]
Turquoise Coal Heldinky‘s Miles To Go Before I Sleep intrigued me — anything referencing Robert Frost has to be worth my time, right? And an influence list boasting the likes of Tim Buckley, Elizabeth Frazer, Annette Peacock and Kate Bush was enough bait to get me to put my hand up to hear the debut LP from the Welsh trio. The vinyl I received in the mail all […]
Zoharum Having previously appeared on the label’s From Earth to Sirius compilation in 2011, Expo 70 mark their full album début on Zoharum with not one but two CDs, one a reissue and another a brand-new offering. With a shade under fifty albums alone in his discography, it’s interesting to discover where Justin Wright takes his expanded one-man band on two disparate examples of his ongoing mission to construct […]
Cardinal Fuzz (Europe)/ Captcha (North America) The latest from the trio of Paul Allen (of longstanding and criminally under-exposed Bristolian psych-rockers The Heads), Gareth Turner and Jesse Webb (both of Big Naturals). The track titles are a selection of place names and dates (“14.10.54 Southend-on-Sea”, “17.7.55 Bexleyheath”) referencing several decades’ worth of UFO sightings around the UK. However, the tracks themselves don’t bear any obvious relationship to these […]
Sulatron Love the way Seven That Spells storm at you in corrugations of drum and hyperactive fret fingers on the second instalment of their Death And Resurrection Of Krautrock albums, staggered momentums that cool into some twilight rebound, a delight as bassy injections flirt with the drums and the guitar noodling some sweet Egyptian-strung ode. Far from the kraut-worshipping you’d at first expect, IO dips nicely into some […]
Sulatron A wonderful new release from Sulatron Records has arrived on my home world, so here I go with trying to interpret the incoming data… Sula Bassana‘s Live at Roadburn 2014 starts with the synthesizer cosmic wind of “Rainstorm” that works up into a thudding big riff as bass and drums roll around under some expressive guitar playing. This is pure freak-out music, the kind that Sula’s band […]
Jazz Village (Before we go any further, a word about the title: you saw the caron on the s, didn’t you? Yes, of course you did. And that immediately suggested to you that Šlag Tanz is pronounced Schlag Tanz and you didn’t have a silly schoolboy [or girl] moment, did you? Good, and furthermore you get the Germanic sense of the word that indicates something like Shock Dance, […]
Phase! The fold-out sleeve holding this baby together is a delight for the eyes. Its over-printed black imagery singing from beneath a golden glow of textured stock inkling at the album’s corroded essence. The struggling definition of the half-buried vocals, that healthy scouring of frustration eating into the machined percussives. Tastes forged in Dead Gum’s “lost decade” and a myriad of other releases, a mood finely-focused and now […]
Crucial Blast This is the record that you put on when you are lying entwined with your loved one, the both of you perhaps shimmering in a post-coital afterglow, the bedroom window open, a warm breeze blowing in the faint sounds of summer. Hang on. Actually, no. Sorry. That’s by The Isley Brothers. Rather, this is the record that you put on when a small selection of your […]
empreintes DIGITALes Music to write science fiction to. L’Envol is the first solo album release from American-born, Brussels-based composer Elizabeth Anderson. She is a prolific artist and teacher, and when I hear the opening of L’envol, I feel somewhat like I am at the beginning of a lecture on electronic music. The sounds are perhaps what you might have expected from the title of the record, (L’envol is […]
On-U Sound/Tectonic One of the genre’s key figures joins forces on Late Night Endless with a genuine wizard of the mixing desk to put the dub back into dubstep (something which it has probably needed for a long time
Sulatron The Night is a CD reissue of Sula Bassana‘s 2009 LP and finds him playing some of his finest space rock on what could be seen as almost a concept album, all wrapped around by Frank Lewecke’s luscious cosmic sleeve design. “In Space” opens the album and has more than a nod to ’50s sci-fi in its lush groove — the feel is more like The Tornados […]