Fourth Dimension When invited by Fourth Dimension man Richo to do something outside the ordinary, Richard Youngs accepted the challenge of making a dub album from the perspective of someone who doesn’t like reggae. So, with the aid of boxes of tricks borrowed from occasional collaborator Luke Fowler, he set off on an eight track odyssey into space echoes and spring reverberations to produce Primary Concrete Attack. The […]
Album review
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Zoharum Dating back to a tape release in 1998 and a later CDr edition from 2005, Dreaming Muzak has now been given the deluxe re-release treatment by Zoharum and arrives in a lovingly-produced three-panel gatefold CD sleeve, remastered, like the recent Maeror Tri (which includes Troum‘s Martin Gitschel and Stefan Knappe as two of the trio) editions, by Łukasz Miernik. Sometimes oppressive in the extreme, if Part 1 […]
Alphabet Business Concern Saw the Cardiacs back in the ’80s when music TV as a worthy proposition. A university challenge spotlight highlighting bruised and bloody faces like a visual rewrite of “Bohemian Rhapsody” oozing with insane carnival colours. The kind of memories that stick with you in crooked smiles and water-squirting lapel flowers, the music as arresting as the spectacle glaring with zombie-esque madness replete with jerky arthritic […]
Mute In a world inundated with live recordings and DJ mixes, what makes a release stand apart from the barbarous hordes? The fact alone that this is mnml mastermind Richie Hawtin‘s first record under his Plastikman guise in a decade, since 2003’s Closer, means that people will be paying attention, no matter what. The question is, does this record stand on its own merit, or does it flourish […]
Oblique (vinyl)/Daymare (CD) Given how the ubiquitous comparisons to the American desert-scape were for Earth‘s classic Hex: Or Printing The Infernal Method, it’s a minor miracle that this is the first soundtrack for Earth’s main man, Dylan Carlson. Fittingly, it is a Western soundtrack for the movie Gold, released in 2013. Gold focuses on German prospectors that travel to the Yukon in 1898, at the height of the […]
Michael Rodham-Heaps tackles a trio of recorded documents from London’s Café Oto released for wider consumption on the ever-expanding Otoroku label… Decoy with Joe McPhee – Spontaneous Combustion This one grabs my attention first, the gritty screen-printed abstracts go well with first half of this tasty double, recorded back in twenty eleven. It’s a fragmented fermentation, loose dot-joining limbs avoiding the unusual scuffle cuffs jazzy improv seems to […]
Bureau B Negativland still keep me chortling to myself whenever they pop up on random play. In fact random play seems designed for Negativland, has given them a place in the canon that might otherwise have excluded them – I don’t remember playing their records that much before MP3, though I liked having them and was eternally glad that they were there, in the background, chipping away at […]
Baskaru Inspired by the tuning up of an orchestra prior to a performance, Rutger Zuydervelt (AKA Machinefabriek) assembled Stay Tuned first as an installation in Canada and then the Netherlands in 2013. Using 153 musicians from the worldwide avant-garde to each provide a drone in A (or a vocal warm-up), each speaker arranged in the installation played the loops endlessly while visitors wandered among them from sound to […]
Organized Music From Thessaloniki Another tiny offering from Seth Cooke, the man behind Pneuma‘s panoramas. He certainly has a talent for pulling surprising stuff from unusual places — who’d have thought pneumatic drills could sound so exotic? This latest offering on the intriguingly-titled Organized Music From Thessaloniki label is no different, a combo of no-input holler and decaying field recordings set under the moniker of Sightseer. The track […]
ATP Even though the members of Eaux have been making music together since 2006, originally as the post-rock band the Sian Alice Group, Plastics seems entirely of the moment, firmly rooted in the present, in its anachronism. That’s not to say Eaux are bandwagon-hopping, rather that they are an example of something in the air, a cultural tendency, a drift. They can be seen as a microcosm of […]
Gonzo Multimedia F Scott Fitzgerald famously once declared that American lives had no second act. Thankfully, Don van Vliet, throughout his career an exception in so many ways, was one exempted from this rule. For, following the musical big bang of 1976, Beefheart – truculent, dissonant, and decidedly not a member of the flaccid hippie ranks against which Punk rock had raged – gradually began to assume something […]
Idioblast There’s a cryptic, arcane nature to the goods Theme offer up here; which strike me as Coil-like in a lot of ways — that corkscrew of dualities, those discordant magicks, the word-choked secretes, repeat ectoplasms weaving dissident truths. “Enough is Never – Parts 1,2 & 3” begins in a cornucopia of effect-driven phrase-roasting on a skeleton’s ribcage, Richard Johnson‘s withering words tangling slipping — “NEVER ENOUGH,” a […]
Damnably Shonen Knife tend to massively divide opinion. And, contrary to what you may have been told by the well-meaning, there ARE opinions which are right and opinions which are wrong and worthy of no respect. Some people find their Ramones-drenched girlpop infuriatingly twee- these people have the WRONG opinion, and should be pointed and laughed at in the street. Others think their particular brand of kawaii-core (yeah, […]
Northern Spy (N. America)/Ponderosa (Europe) I sort of lost touch with Arto Lindsay‘s work after Mundo Civilizado, the second album in which he swapped his usual oblique guitar trademarks for the sweet whispering of sensual nothings into your ear. A Brazilian-focused crooning wrapped in a spicy salsa of re-circuitry and upbeat topographies. Disc one of this new Lindsay compendium takes this easy on the ear perspective, twelve songs […]
Software I’ve heard it said that for art to truly succeed, it needs to run the risk of failure. If there is no antagonism, if everything is completely predictable, it glides right off of you without making an impression. Compare Tropic Of Cancer to drugstores full of pulp romance, for example. When an art form is rote, completely succumbing to convention and formula, you might be able to […]
Bureau B Kreidler’s latest album continues their post-kraut-rock meets techno melange — a kind of bastard love child of Neu! and Carl Craig — which emerged on their 2012 album Den. ABC is a genre-bending and -blending collection of tracks built around consistently strong keyboard and guitar riffs with driving percussion. ABC was recorded in Tbilisi, Georgia and the east meets west vibe of the studio’s location rubs […]
Exotic Pylon Dark ambient music is particularly effective at evoking strange, surreal, subjective visions. Synthetic tones and natural field recordings, swathed in echo and cavernous reverb, are stripped of context, and freed from the brutal confines of Western tonality. It borrows a lot from cinematic sound design, particularly of a horror/sci-fi nature, but it’s untethered to visuals to concretize it, and tie it to down to a particular […]
Versatile For my first few listens of Zombie Zombie‘s soundtrack to Narimane Mari‘s film Loubia Hamra, I very deliberately didn’t make any attempt to find what the film was about, so I could do an experiment with myself and see what images the album brought to mind. Turns out it’s either a stunningly inappropriate soundtrack (which I doubt, somehow) or I’m just stunningly bad at judging films by […]