Handmade Birds Right from the offing, “Dancing On Ledges” is a difficult listen, plies a remarkably fucked-up notion of ambience, shooting your lobes in sherbety shards, like a redux of “Everybody is Christ” from Cindytalk‘s Camouflage Heart (which is 30 years old this year), its heavy drones daggering you brilliantly into submission as the uncompromising vision jousts it through with lathe-like screams. Discernible licks of bass give you […]
Album review
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Planet Mu Ekoplekz‘s Four Track Mind isn’t necessarily Unfidelity‘s evil twin – more like its astral double that departs the flesh for regions unknown. And since Unfidelity was already well beyond the Oort Cloud, that’s pretty far out indeed. The music was culled from the same process that yielded Unfidelity, released in March of this year, which means two double LPs in less than 12 months for the […]
Play Loud! Just guitar, bass and drums — it’s a simple tirade but Guru Guru pushed beyond those limitations, expanding out into a universe eaten into with discordant joys, and zim-zoned tresses of effect-soaked goodness. There’s chord ego in there, yeah, but what Seventies band didn’t cling to that tattered flag — but for these guys it was just a starting point which hooked into a whole lot […]
All Saints I first became aware of Jon Hassell’s work mainly through collaborations with artists such as Brian Eno on the Possible Musics album and with his work with David Sylvian on Brilliant Trees onwards. City: Works of Fiction are three intertwining albums that has Hassell stretch his palette in many different directions but still remaining in very much art house territory. The first album is Original Fiction. […]
Narodowe Centrum Kultury Poland fared worse than most in World War 2; the fields and woods are still littered with macabre reminders of the grim extent of Nazi ideology. By August 1944, sensing the Nazis were losing their grip on Europe, thousands of poorly-armed residents of Warsaw decided enough was enough and fought back. Things went quite well to start, much of the city falling under partisan rule […]
Tuff Enuff I was going to write something about this being “conceptually perfect,” but that feels a bit disparaging — it’s a tribute act, and it’s obviously important that a tribute act get their ideas right — but there’s a lot more thought gone into this than just “women playing the Monks called the Nuns! Brilliant.” But I’m going to come back to the actual record in a […]
Gonzo Multimedia Newly released on Gonzo, this album captures the Steve Hillage Band live at London’s Rainbow Theatre in November 1977, and as such invites immediate comparison with the established classic Live Herald, which dates from the same period, and indeed one track, “Electrick Gypsies,” is actually taken from the same gig as the one presented here. Aside from that single overlap, however, there’s much less similarity between […]
Màgia Roja The era of the late ’60s/early ’70s has been whitewashed through the rosy lenses of hindsight. Baby boomers waste no time in reminding us theirs was the greatest generation, with the best music. The era where everything was being invented, the future was being ushered in. It was all happening, man. This perspective distorts the fact that for much of his life, Jimi Hendrix was playing […]
Riot Season This is full hippy in every good way. Hyperdrive hippy. Hippy in excelsis (not in Excel). Godz-driven, primal, ballistic-psychedelic, balls-to-the-wall, throttled/throttling. It’s the hippyish, proggy album that other people think they’ve made. There’s a massive meandering Alice Coltrane cover on here that sounds like it could be/should be terrible but works brilliantly. There’s devastating stoner stuff, and pushes into you. There’s awkward movements in just the […]
Red Wharf It’s hard to get a handle on this word wise; I was really tempted to leave this as a three letter review – just “wow,” with maybe a few exclamation marks for good measure. Indeed I think this impression was cemented in the first two minutes and didn’t seem to waver in the slightest for ExcitoToxicity‘s whole duration. I know I’m incredibly biased towards Stapleton and […]
Recorded Fields Editions Subtitled Selected Pipe Organ Works 1983-2014, Robert Curgenven‘s LP finds him pushing the instrument (with the aid of a few others) in all kinds of intriguing directions. As Circle and Mamiffer ably demonstrated on their recent album for church organ, it’s quite amazing what sounds can be drawn from one in the right hands with a sense of adventure. Presented as four pieces over the […]
Exotic Pylon Bloodhounds is folk poetry. Paul Snowdon is reclaiming the machines of technology from the cultural elite, the bright and polished megastar DJs and superslick mnml producers, ensconced in their citadels of expensive outboard effects, to create a rural ritual evocation of a youth spent in northern England. Let’s look at that word: folk. As in, of the people. As in, opposed to academic or art-house music. […]
Sargent House Boris. Where does one start with Boris? Well, maybe with a water cannon to the face, the floppy-haired posh twat. Oh, not THAT Boris? OK, so which Boris, then? The sludgy stoner rock merchants of Absolutego fame? The spooky doom band behind that Sunn0))) collaboration? The magnificent rock band that gave us Heavy Rocks and Smile? Or the bizarre yet immaculate J-pop metal band behind New […]
Tompkins Square Right from its first publication in February 1911, the novel Fantômas was a phenomenon. In the words of post-modern New York über-poet John Ashberry it was “a work of fiction whose popularity cut across all social and cultural strata. Countesses and concierges; poets and proletarians; cubists, nascent Dadaists, soon-to-be Surrealists: Everyone who could read, and even those who could not, shivered at posters of a masked […]
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 […]
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 […]