Consouling Sounds Using only bass, guitar and slew of effects, Dorian Williamson and Jim Field‘s second release as Northumbria starts as it intends to finish, declaring at the outset that it is time to soar and glide. It seems to be just about fuzz o’clock as far as the guitar is concerned, and while the bass is set to Northumbrian winter time, its low-end rumbles are equally content […]
Album review
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Bureau B After the joys of Something Dirty comes this new nugget of curiosity from the Péron/Zappi side of the Faust spilt. Entitled j US t (clever typographic minimalism for Just Us), it’s a twelve-track sketchbook of improvised flavours and some full-bodied wallop that Faust say should be taken, absorbed and remixed into your own musical endeavours. There’s certainly plenty of fertile nooks and crannies to get your […]
Spinefarm Do I believe in witchcraft? What kind of witchcraft? The legendary witch that rides on the imaginary broom? The hex that tortures the thoughts of the victim? The pin stuck in the image that wastes away the mind and the body? The massive maw of pure sludge doom is back. Electric Wizard return with a line-up that won’t go beyond the release of this album to produce […]
Concretism This is an exception to my general rule that music sounds better when it’s slightly wrong. This sounds exactly as it is intended to be. It feels commissioned, considered, skilful. This isn’t normally regarded as a virtue in my world; I’m suspicious of technical brilliance and musicianship seems like a terrible blind alley, redolent of the kind of people who bring those small guitars to parties, ruining […]
Potomak As a commemoration of the first world war, Einstürzende Neubauten could have so easily brewed up a mangled litany of compressed air screams, torn metal and had done with it. The opening track certainly has a good go. Aptly entitled “Kriegsmachinerie,” it’s a track that flash-floods the band’s pyroactive past in the screech of metal against metal. A twisted twilight caught in the whites of Luigi Russolo‘s eyes, […]
Northern Spy Having returned to a simpler production sound for their fourth album, o’death opted to record Out Of Hands We Go’s twelve songs live in the studio with Caleb Mulkerin at the controls. With Greg Jamie’s vocals burning brightly at the band’s heart, o’death bring rock and country instrumentation into close collaboration, mixing in many particular devices of their own devising or finding which they have acquired […]
The Collapse Of Everything Kontakte‘s latest album proves itself to be well worth the two years of concerted effort the duo have put into pushing the envelope of their music. It feels somehow broader, more expansive, even for a band who already knew full well how to bring out the brightly psychedelic edges and sharpen their perceptions on the manoeuvrings of their guitar, bass and electronics. The sense […]
Gagarin Recorded live in New York in November 2009, 1:17 is one of those glorious conceptual pieces in which the premise – in this case, the use and re-use of a 0.7 millisecond snippet of sound originating from a Diskono collective concert in 2000, itself transformed gradually over the years into a one minute seventeen second blast of noise – is almost entirely irrelevant to the appreciation of […]
Labile Drenched in reverb and hissing in on waves of shimmering, steam-like vapour trails, Desire uncurls itself in sinuous ripples and grain-shifting rhythms. While the music fits generally into the shapes and forms of ambient(ish) electronica, Derrick Stembridge‘s supple approach is at once of its kind and thoroughly modern in its detail. The little flurries of effects which modulate and mould every sound are controlled with a precision which […]
Bureau B One of the interesting things which springs first to attention with the opening notes of Adrift is the loping acoustic bass which Tarwater use to underpin their sound. Its liquid tones give a smoothed, if not entirely smooth, basis to the duo’s twelfth album of literate not-exaxtly-jazz, not-entirely-electronica and certainly not-really-post-rock. This absence of conformity to genre is one of Tarwater’s great strengths, and they manage […]
Zoharum Drenched in reverb and flecked with voices from the Eastern aether, Fall of Drums is Robin Storey‘s third or so new Rapoon album in the space of a year, but the first on Zoharum since To West and Blue in 2013 and various re-issues which the label has put out recently. Over four lengthy, stretched-out tracks, the album sets about creating a hallucinogenic landscape of languorous percussion […]
Fire There’s a Dylan Carlson–like Earthiness here, a grungy bristle, the rasping purr of the bass , counter-sunk percussion, all spiralling away on a singe of erosive geometries. “Kali Yuga Blues” is a brilliant thing, something to be savoured, the sensual core of Isobel Sollenberger‘s voice calling from within the thicket, dusted in arterial-sprayed collusion and sliding flute. A sweet promise of the semi-seismic seductions that follow. The […]
Consouling Sounds Recorded live in Berlin in May 2014, with no less than three drummers joining Aidan Baker and Eric Quach (AKA thisquietarmy) as they sweep their guitar drones into places further out than many guitarists are prepared to go, Hypnodrone Ensemble comes across as a band name as much as it is a performance or an album title. With Felipe Salazar (also in Caudal with Baker, and […]
Kranky A sense of place, of space predominates on Ruins, Liz Harris‘s tenth Grouper album (not including the split releases). A music stripped of ostentatious zeal, a bare-boned honesty delving deeper, sure of its uncertainties. A haunting of Sylvia Plath or Woolf maybe, trapped in the gauze of delivery, the patina(ed) reverb of an old upright piano. It’s beautiful soul-searching stuff that works best with no distractions, headphones […]
London London Loving the swagger of the guitars here, the knuckled licks swimming the percussive candour, that tasty swoon clinging to every note. That unmistakable Ft. Lake glow about its gills, the momentum itchy-feet switching, a Hendrix fixation swapped for a pantheon of ’70s muscle with dips into the Nice Day EP‘s “Crushed Upon The Corner” jives. If this was an anonymous white label, a question would be […]
Front & Follow Folk (and folk-influenced) art seems to inherently conjure ideas of both memories and a specific place, like the way that American hillbilly music calls up an image of the smoky green mountains of Tennessee, or the Delta blues recalls swamps, alligators, crossroads and dark deeds. Traditional music, whatever its origins, seems attached to earthy, tactile associations as well as personal memories, if one has attachments […]
A Year in the Country In which the affable retronauts of Howlround limber up their trusty reel-to-reel tape recorders and feed in the sound of the built environment in order to make a fearsome and at times gently life-affirming visit to pastures so old and venerable that they are of course back in style. And what a stye it is – lush reverb and rippling scurries of what […]
Neurot Yob are a band I’ve been kind of meaning to check out for years, after reading about them in a metal mag years ago, so when this dropped into my lap it was — well, not quite a dream come true, but at least the fulfilment of a vague longing. It was also a relief to find that they don’t sound anything like Keith Allen (that’s a […]